There was a time not all that long ago when Notre Dame was involved in some of the most historic rivalries in college football. However, with the Irish vs USC annual rivalry over and the only remaining annual games being ones that are decidedly one-sided, it feels like those kinds of rivalries won’t be a part of the sport anymore, anywhere.
Count Rich Eisen among those who think the latest trend of all the big games falling by the wayside since the reshuffling of power conferences is bad for fans and bad for college football. He used the end of the Notre Dame vs Michigan series as an example of a bigger program on one of his latest radio appearances.
“And you are like, ‘We shouldn't want to play Notre Dame.’ I do want a piece of them,” Eisen said on his show. “And you know who should want a piece of them? The entirety of college football should want Michigan and Notre Dame having a piece of each other.”
“And I think what we're going to start to see if we expand the college football playoffs even more is that we're going to start to see less and fewer relevant regular season games in the mind's eye of national interest. I think there is always going to be rivalry games, and we're going to see a Michigan-Ohio State game. Folks, at some point players will rest because Michigan might play Ohio State three weeks hence in round two. There's going to be a Michigan-Ohio State game in the College Football Playoff that will dwarf anything that we've seen.”
Rich Eisen says Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry belongs on the annual schedule
The worst-case scenario offered by Eisen isn’t a standalone theory. Plenty of people have noticed that the conference championship games don’t carry the same cachet as they once did. Last year, Indiana vs. Ohio State was 1 vs. 2, and yet it felt like just another week.
Even if Michigan and Ohio State is still a big game to the two schools’ fanbases, it’s going to lose a lot of the punch it used to have, even if the two teams aren’t competing for the playoffs. Eisen is right that if too much focus is put on the playoffs, especially in the way that USC treated the Notre Dame rivalry, then rivalries will die off because they’ll simply become unimportant.
Notre Dame and Michigan’s rivalry series is long dead, and it might be dead because the Irish didn't realize how important it was to keep it going. The two teams won’t face each other again until 2033. The men currently coaching both schools will almost certainly be gone. There isn’t a single player on either team who will be there when the two programs finally renew the series.
And of course, once the two teams start the series again, it won’t be for good. It will be a couple of games and then a decade will go by at least until they play again. Notre Dame and Michigan should play each other. Not just to decide who is the better program on the field, but because it’s good for sport in general.
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