[82lsju]

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.

I would guess we have at least one of the reported issues USC does with the current series, preferring to play the games in South Bend before conference play starts (and for us hopefully before school starts).

Further complicating things is the 12 year deal ND signed to play Clemson every year starting in 2027

https://www.espn.com/college-football/st...-agreement

those games will apparently count as one of the five games a year ND plays against ACC teams.  If they signed a similar deal with us that would leave three games a year to rotate among all the other ACC teams which those teams may not like.

[82lsju]

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.

I would guess we have at least one of the reported issues USC does with the current series, preferring to play the games in South Bend before conference play starts (and for us hopefully before school starts).

Further complicating things is the 12 year deal ND signed to play Clemson every year starting in 2027

https://www.espn.com/college-football/st...-agreement

those games will apparently count as one of the five games a year ND plays against ACC teams.  If they signed a similar deal with us that would leave three games a year to rotate among all the other ACC teams which those teams may not like.