USC and Notre Dame are one of the sport's foundational rivalries, a series dating back to 1926 that's produced Heisman winners, national title implications, and some of the sport's best theater year after year. Notre Dame beat USC 34-24 last season, and afterward the annual matchup went dark with no future dates on the books. That changed Monday.
NEWS: USC and Notre Dame will renew their rivalry, with the series starting again in 2030. They’ll meet Week 1 in LA that year and play Week 1 in South Bend the next year.
Pete Thamel broke the news that the series is coming back for real: USC and Notre Dame will meet Week 1 in LA in 2030, then flip to Week 1 in South Bend the following year. Pete Nakos followed with the detail that matters most to purists — no neutral-site nonsense. This is a home-and-home, campus-to-campus deal, the way the rivalry has almost always been played.
The move away from the traditional late-November slot wasn't really about the rivalry losing steam — it was about USC's move to the Big Ten. Playing Notre Dame deep into the season had been eating into USC's College Football Playoff positioning against conference opponents, so the Trojans pushed to flip the game to the front of the schedule instead of scrapping it entirely. USC AD Jen Cohen and head coach Lincoln Riley both framed the early-season swap as a fix, not a farewell, with Riley saying the desire to keep playing Notre Dame "has never been questioned, never will."
The new agreement runs 4 games through 2033, with the 2030 and 2031 meetings anchored to the Saturday of Labor Day weekend before the later dates shift into the first 3 weeks of the season. It's a real commitment, not a one-off makeup game — both programs are betting that a marquee opener does more for them nationally than a mid-season Saturday buried under playoff math.
For a sport that's been shedding tradition by the year in the realignment era — permanent rivalries scrapped, series reduced to whatever fits a conference's TV package — getting USC-Notre Dame back on the calendar, and on campus sites instead of a neutral bowl, is a genuine win for anyone who cares about this stuff. 2030 is a long way off, but at least now there's a date to circle.