Easily the biggest drawback of the expansion era of college football is that it has pushed too many historical rivalries to the side. That’s especially true for Notre Dame, which used to have its schedule jam-packed with teams it played almost every year.
Some of those rivalries mattered because they lasted so long and because those games were often important. Others were fun to watch because even when the Irish were obviously the better team, the heavy underdog tended to rise and give the school all it could handle.
With the super conferences and teams worried they won’t make the College Football Playoff, only Stanford and Navy now stand on the Notre Dame schedule as the last of the great annual rivalries of the Fighting Irish. The history of those series is still fun and worth watching, but it’s no coincidence that both are extremely one-sided and that neither the Midshipmen nor the Cardinal needs to consider dumping it because their chances of a playoff are already almost non-existent.
Notre Dame football rivalries Irish fans would love to see return annually
USC
This rivalry is the latest victim of the 12-team College Football Playoff and the 18-team superconferences. Granted, it just died in 2026, so there isn’t a ton of hope that it will ever return to a situation where the USC Trojans and Notre Dame Fighting Irish play every single year.
The series dates back to 1926, and the two teams have met a whopping 96 times. Notre Dame leads the series 51–37–5 and won the final three games before the rivalry ended, which is just a couple of the reasons why Irish fans would love to see this one come back.
Michigan
The Irish rivalry with Michigan has always been a weird one. They played their first game in 1887 and have had years of breaks in between rivalries. Still, it was one of the most celebrated rivalries around from 2002 to 2019; it was played every single year with the two teams trading punches.
Notre Dame would love to see this come back the way it did in the 2000s, in no small part because the last time the two teams met, the Wolverines destroyed the Fighting Irish 45-14. The two programs will face off again in 2033, though it will only be a home-and-home, and that’s not nearly soon enough.
Michigan State
In recent years, the USC rivalry with Notre Dame gets more headlines, but the rivalry between the Irish and the Michigan State Spartans is almost as old and as storied. Notre Dame leads the all-time series 48–28–1, which started back in the 1890s and, like Michigan, has had a break here or there, but the rivalry as fans knew it ended in 2017.
The two teams will meet in 2026 and 2027, but this series isn’t going back to a year-by-year situation, and that’s a shame for everyone in the college football world. Notre Dame fans would love to have this one back, especially if Michigan State can ever take the next step and become a good program again.
Add us as a preferred source on Google