While the Notre Dame football team is quickly approaching the 2026 season, the college sports world is still dealing with the fallout from last season. To that end, CBS Sports recently compiled an all-encompassing tally of how each Power 4 program fared. This list isn't just about how the Fighting Irish did in football, but about how they did across all the major sports. It probably should surprise no one that when taking into account sports like men's basketball and baseball, a school considered among the best in the nation is ranked rather low.
Cody Nagel explained that CBS Sports developed a formula that it applied to every program in the major conferences. "Each school received a score in six sports: football, men's basketball, women's basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball," Nagel wrote. "Each sport was scored using the following formula: (0.3 × (regular-season win percentage × 100)) + (0.7 × postseason score). That means 30% of a team's score came from regular-season success, while 70% came from postseason performance."
Nagel added that conference tournament results didn't factor in because they varied too much. Obviously, for Notre Dame football, those variations would include not getting credit for a conference title no matter how many games they won, so that's a plus.
CBS Sports then tallied postseason accomplishments with the following scores:
- Bowl eligible/NCAA Tournament appearance -- 20 points
- Bowl win/Round of 32/Regional Finals -- 30 points
- CFP appearance/Sweet 16/Super Regionals -- 45 points
- CFP quarterfinals/Elite Eight/CWS -- 60 points
- CFP semifinals/Final Four/CWS semifinals -- 75 points
- National runner-up -- 90 points
- National champion -- 100 points
CBS Sports ranking shows Notre Dame athletics needs more than football success
The school's final score was the average of all the sports that qualified among the six included in the calculations. So where did Notre Dame end up ranking? A very disappointing 47th in the nation.
Thanks to struggles in women's volleyball, men's basketball, softball, and baseball, the Fighting Irish amassed only 26.63 points for the 2025-26 athletic season. To put that ranking into context, they ranked behind schools like Pitt and UCF.
Normally, that would be unthinkable if one were only looking at Notre Dame football. Instead, when looking at how little success the school had in other sports, it's a sign that perhaps Pete Bevacqua and Co. need to pay more attention to what goes on beyond the football team.
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