Notre Dame AD ‘100 percent committed' to USC series, opposed to Big Ten's CFP model

New York Times

3 days ago

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said he will do what it takes to continue the school's long-running football series with USC but rejected the Big Ten's plan to reserve multiple automatic qualifiers in the College Football Playoff for each power conference as a means to that end.
'We make no secret about it. We want to play USC every year,' Bevacqua said. 'I think it 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.
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'We're having conversations to try to put something together. We are 100 percent committed to doing everything we can to keep that series going. Whether it's the beginning of the year, end of the year, middle of the year, we want to keep that series going. Whether it's working in a neutral site every once in a while, we want to keep that series going.'
Bevacqua met with a small group of reporters Tuesday after returning to campus with the Fighting Irish less than 48 hours away from the start of preseason camp. Notre Dame's athletic director spent part of his summer golfing with President Donald Trump and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, as part of the lobbying work that helped craft the recent executive order from the White House on student-athlete compensation. In the coming days, Bevacqua will meet with Notre Dame's head coaches for a status report on their programs ahead of the new academic year.
Bevacqua has largely sat out 'talking season' when it comes to the College Football Playoff, while arguments to different expansion formats flew during SEC and Big Ten media days. The SEC has moved away from the idea of multiple automatic bids for the power conferences and toward the 5+11 model, which looks more like the current 12-team format in concept. The Big Ten has pushed four automatic bids for itself and SEC while the Big 12 and ACC get two each, plus one for the Group of 5's highest-ranked conference champion and the remaining going to at-large bids.
One school of thought argues the Big Ten's plan could be better for Notre Dame if there's language that guarantees the independent program an at-large berth if it meets certain rankings criteria. USC head coach Lincoln Riley has dangled the Big Ten's favored format as a solution to extending the Notre Dame series.
'There's a million reasons why we as a college football community should adopt the automatic qualifying in terms of the College Football Playoff,' Riley said last week at Big Ten media days. 'And this might be the most important one.'
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Bevacqua's accommodation of Notre Dame's rival stopped short of that change to the CFP format. That put him in line with the ACC and Big 12, along with the movement within the SEC for a 5+11 model.
'I happen to think that there should be automatic qualifiers for the Power 4 conference champions, and there should an automatic qualifier for the highest-rated G5 champion.' Bevacqua said. 'But then, whether it's 12, 14, or 16 (teams), I think you have to earn it on the field. And those should be at-large berths.
'I think that's the best way, the most repeatable way, to get the very best teams to compete for a national championship year-in and year-out. And I think most people agree with that. Both the decision makers, the general public, football fans, I think that's what people want to see.'
If a new format cannot be agreed upon by the end of this year, the CFP will remain at 12 teams in its current format in 2026. While Bevacqua, the former chairman of NBC Sports, understands that not expanding the field would likely leave money from CFP broadcast partners on the table, he also endorsed last year's postseason as a success. And not just because Notre Dame made the national championship game and pocketed nearly $20 million in revenue that it didn't have to split with conference membership.
'I think college football right now is really healthy,' Bevacqua said. 'And I think with this House settlement and with the cap and with some regulations around collectives, I think we could be entering into a period of stability. I think conference realignment has seemed to stabilize a bit with the changes that have been made over the course of the last few years. There's tremendous media interest in college football. I personally think it's the second strongest media product in sports behind the NFL. And we gotta keep it going.'
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Bevacqua doesn't think the sport is headed toward an inevitable super league format, where the top teams break away and take their media rights with them. While Notre Dame would almost certainly be one of those teams, Bevacqua believes that outcome would be a death knell for the sport. He's a believer in college football's idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies being more of a feature than a bug for the entire enterprise.
For example, Bevacqua doesn't believe every program should play the same number of conference games. He doesn't see the standardization of schedules as inherently positive, regardless of how often it was trumpeted as such at conference media days. Imbalance is not inherently bad for a sport, in contrast to the structural parity of the NFL.
'College football is different,' Bevacqua said. 'Like we're never going to play the same exact schedule. We're never gonna, unless you create some super league. Where you get the 30 best teams, put them together, create two divisions and have them have at it, but that to me spells the end of college football as we know it.
'There's always going to be arguments, it's always part of the narrative. I think the selection committee, those individuals put their heart and soul into this, they're humans, right? They're gonna have different opinions, different perspectives, but I think that's part of the process, and we're working as a group to make the selection process better and better and stronger and factoring in things like strength of schedule.'