10-24-2025, 11:35 AM
(10-23-2025, 10:41 PM)chrisk Wrote: The future of Notre Dame's annual games with Stanford and USC still has not been announced. Currently, Stanford has not P4 games on its schedule 2026, 2028, 2029, and 2030. In years Stanford does not play ND, it will be scrambling to meet the requirement of at least one P4 non-conference game.
I can see USC-ND going away, but ND has an affiliation with the ACC, so maybe that will impact their decision to keep the Stanford series? Or is it Stanford who wants to discontinue the series?
In any case you are, of course, correct that w/o ND Stanford will be scrambling to meet the one P4 nonconference game requirement. In that case, I would encourage Stanford to drop Vanderbilt and schedule a mountain or west coast P4 team. Unfortunately, there aren't that many of them: 4 in the B1G (Oregon, UW, USC, UCLA), 5 in the Big 12 (UA, ASU, Utah, BYU, Colorado). I think that's all of them.
If there's one thing people have learned in Berkeley, it's that you can't put "Cal football" and "Rose Bowl" in the same sentence. The words just don't fit. You'd be better off linking "covered wagons" with "Mars travel." (Bruce Jenkins, Cal '70, SF Chronicle, Nov. 11, 2017)