While the focus for Marcus Freeman and his Notre Dame football team is about to be getting ready for the season more than anything else, it appears that there are those in South Bend working behind the scenes to keep an annual rivalry game with USC alive.
Whether or not the series will go beyond 2026 has been a hot topic for most of the summer. Officials with Notre Dame, including Freeman, have made it clear that they want to keep the longest rivalry game in college football going indefinitely. USC, including head coach Lincoln Riley, has paid lip service to wanting to keep it alive, while simultaneously sounding indifferent to the situation.
What Pete Bevacqua said about the future of Notre Dame football-USC rivalry
On Tuesday, the Notre Dame football program renewed the push to get USC to agree to keep the rivalry going for the forseeable future. AD Pete Bevacqua was the latest to make it clear that they are open to formalizing the series for a long time, but pointing out that the ball is very much in USC's court at the moment.
"I’ve said it. [Notre Dame head football coach] Marcus [Freeman] has said it," Bevacqua said during a scrum with local media. "And we make no secret about it. We want to play USC every year. As I’ve said in the past, I just think that would be a horrible thing if we don’t. I think it would be bad for us. I think it would be bad for college football."
"And USC knows that."
"We’re going back, we’re having conversations to try to put something together. You have to ask them specifically, but we are 100 percent committed. A HUNDRED percent committed to doing everything we can to keep that series going.”
The series started in 1926 and over the years, evolved into one of college football’s great rivalries. The two teams have played every season since ‘26, except for 1943-45 (because of WWII) and 2020 (because of the COVID pandemic). Notre Dame leads the series 52-38-5, with wins in six of the past seven meetings.
In recent years, USC has talked about ending the series because it believes that it's too difficult a non-conference tilt when taking the Big Ten into account for college football playoff purposes.
With next year's game potentially the last in the annual game, Notre Dame football officials have ramped up talk of finding a way to extend it.