SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Consider this USC coach Lincoln Riley’s first victory over Notre Dame that didn’t involve a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback.
It’s a battle won in a war where everyone lost.
The Notre Dame-USC football rivalry is back on; the schools on Monday announced an agreement to resume a series that defined multiple eras of the sport. Knute Rockne made Notre Dame football a national brand a century ago by taking his teams to the West Coast to face USC. The Irish and Trojans combined for half the national titles won in the 1970s. The Bush Push remains the defining Notre Dame memory for a generation of Irish fans.
After a four-year break that begins this fall, Notre Dame will travel to USC to open the 2030 season, doing so on the Trojans’ timeline. The 2030 and 2031 games will be a Week 1 home-and-home; the final two games of the contract have not been set but will be played in the first month of the season, before USC opens Big Ten play — a demand on which the Trojans wouldn’t compromise. There will be no USC trips to South Bend as the leaves turn, nor Notre Dame flights to LAX on Thanksgiving weekend.
The Notre Dame-USC series you remember is done. Riley killed it.
The back-and-forth stretched for almost two years and devolved into he-said, he-said sniping before talks collapsed late last season despite plenty of public optimism coming from Notre Dame.
The public posturing started with Riley’s complaints about balancing the difficulty of USC’s nine-game Big Ten schedule. It continued with a comment from Freeman about his desire to play “anytime, anywhere,” which USC weaponized when Notre Dame refused a proposal to play the game in Week 0. But to say the series is returning just how USC wanted it isn’t quite right, though. Because despite his protests to the contrary, it’s hard to believe that Riley wanted this series to resume at all.
Every time Riley talks about the Notre Dame-USC series, he sounds like Brian Kelly, Notre Dame’s head coach before Freeman — I can hear the words you’re saying, there’s just little reason to believe them.
“We want to play the game. I want to play the game,” Riley said last month at Big Ten media days. “We would be playing the game had some things come true that were said.”
OK.
The same coach who left Oklahoma before the Sooners joined the SEC nixed one of college football’s greatest traditions because it made reaching the College Football Playoff slightly more difficult. USC, which lost to Maryland, Minnesota and Illinois in the past two seasons, was more interested in gaming the system to make the CFP than proving it was good enough to do damage if it got there.
Yes, the return of this series is worth celebrating. No, it doesn’t make the next four seasons without it any more forgivable.
This break remains an unforced error, a decision made by stakeholders with little right to their stake. For everything amazing about college football on Saturdays, those running the sport put revenues before the traditions that create them. Athletic directors, coaches and administrators would be better off if they saw themselves as stewards first. Instead, we have a world where the Pac-12 collapsed and Texas and Oklahoma are playing in the SEC.
So when the Notre Dame-USC series returns, Lincoln Riley’s role in taking it away shouldn’t be forgotten. The head coach who removed appointment viewing from our college football calendar shouldn’t get the chance to celebrate the Irish coming back to Los Angeles four years from now. The vandal doesn’t get to celebrate the masterpiece’s restoration.
Ironically, college football’s defending national champions helped make way for the return of Notre Dame-USC. Indiana signaled that it didn’t want to keep its home-and-home series with the Irish in 2030-31, which opened up a spot in the schedule.
It might look like Indiana coach Curt Cignetti is running from a challenge himself by dropping Notre Dame after dropping Virginia and Louisville … but keep in mind, he took the Indiana job.
There are no such outs at USC, a program with eight Heisman Trophy winners, 11 claimed national championships and 87 first-round NFL Draft picks. The Trojans didn’t just duck the Irish by setting in motion the sequence of events that led to a four-year break; they turned their back on the history that made them one of the sport’s signature programs.
There’s no forgiving that. No matter what Riley says.
“Obviously we want it to happen,” Riley said last week. “I know our fan base wants it to happen. College football wants it to happen. Hopefully I’m up here next year talking about that game here on the future schedule.”
Maybe Riley, who is entering a pivotal season dealing with CFP expectations and rising fan impatience, will make it to next year and get to talk about the Notre Dame series returning at 2027 Big Ten media days. But when the Irish do return to the West Coast four years from now, it wouldn’t feel right for him to celebrate the rivalry’s resumption.
A series defined by excellence deserves better than a coach who has shown his priorities lie elsewhere.
