Following public uproar over the potential end of their 100-year old football rivalry, USC has made an amended offer to Notre Dame that would extend their annual series for multiple years beyond this season, USC athletic director Jennifer Cohen told The Times.
Negotiations remain ongoing between the two schools, but Cohen said she is “really hopeful” that USC’s new offer, which better accommodates Notre Dame’s preference for a long-term deal, would lead to an agreement “very soon.”
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“We’re trying to extend the series,” Cohen said. “This is an important series for us and for our fans and for our program, and hopefully we get to a resolution that supports that and is in the best interest of our program.”
USC leaders were previously reluctant to commit to a long-term extension of the rivalry with Notre Dame, given the uncertainty of the College Football Playoff and the new demands of a Big Ten travel schedule. With the contract between the two schools set to expire, USC initially offered to extend the series through 2026 and revisit its future beyond that at a later date.
But Notre Dame made clear at the time that it preferred a long-term extension, one that locked in the game for years to come. In May, discussions over the future of the historic rivalry, which has been played 95 times since 1924, boiled over into public view as Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua suggested to Sports Illustrated that the Trojans were endangering the future of the series by not agreeing to extend it long term.
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“I think Southern Cal and Notre Dame should play every year for as long as college football is played,” Bevacqua told SI, “and SC knows that’s how we feel.”
At the time, USC was holding out hope for clarity on the College Football Playoff format — specifically the number of automatic qualifiers that would be afforded to the Big Ten. But momentum for that model has slowed considerably since, after Southeastern Conference officials threw their support behind a different format with 11 at-large bids and five total automatic invites..
USC had also broached the possibility with Notre Dame of moving the game to the first month of the season, in order to better balance its future slate of Big Ten travel. Last season, the Trojans lost all four of their Big Ten road trips. This season, they’re slated to play on the road four times in a six-week stretch, with a trip to South Bend right in the middle of that gauntlet.
Cohen told The Times that the date the game played is currently “the biggest issue” for USC at the negotiating table.
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“It’s not very typical that a P4 school would travel back and forth across the country for a nonconference game in the middle of October,” Cohen said. “Show me who else is doing that and doing the kind of travel we’re doing. It’s a cool tradition to play at the end of the year, but then those are back-to-back rivalry games with a conference championship — and our opponent doesn’t play in a conference championship.”
Moving the game to September could still be a sticking point with Notre Dame, which has little incentive to move the annual matchup to September, when it could simply hand-pick a Power Four opponent every year that would bring in a significant payday.
“They have a lot more flexibility in scheduling than we do,” Cohen said. “We’re in a bigger conference that doesn’t have the same level of ability to protect us in the way they schedule us for that type of game.”
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Concerns over the future of the rivalry date to Big Ten media day in 2024, when USC coach Lincoln Riley suggested that USC would “do what’s best to help us win a national championship” even if that meant saying goodbye to its annual series with Notre Dame.
The comments caused an uproar at the time. A year later, Riley would strike a more hopeful tone as he reflected on the value of rivalries to college football.
“All these rivalries mean a great deal to me,” he said.
But USC’s best interests, he reiterated, came first.
“Do I want to play the game?” Riley said in July. “Hell yeah, I want to play the game. Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons I came here. But also, my allegiance and my loyalty is not to Notre Dame. It’s not to anybody else. I’m the head football coach at USC, and I’m going to back USC, and I’m going to do everything possible that I can, in my power, to make us as good as I can.
“I’m not going to let anything stand in between that.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
