Whining from Notre Dame’s AD might have screwed Irish football for a decade

Notre Dame’s almost week-long complaining about being excluded from the College Football Playoff could have mammoth ramifications to the football program. During the “bargaining” phase of his seven stages of grieving, Irish Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua boasted that a miscarriage of justice like 2025 would never happen again, because of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Notre Dame and the Playoff Committee which would offer the school preferential treatment to getting a guaranteed spot in the playoff, so long as they finish 13th or better in the rankings, assuming the playoff expands to 14 teams or more.

Other Athletic Directors are taking notice of this, and they’re not happy. A report from Yahoo Sports indicates that schools are threatening not to schedule Notre Dame due to the MOU, which could effectively destroy any chance at the playoffs, agreement or not, due to the Irish being forced to schedule horrible opponents, potentially missing out on the Strength of Schedule required to be ranked.

Right now it’s an idle threat, without any school publicly stating their intentions — but it shows that a lot of teams inside college football have had it with Notre Dame’s attempted saber rattling. In addition to claims about the MOU, Bevacqua threatened the ACC (with whom Notre Dame has an agreement), blaming them for being the reason his school didn’t make the playoffs due to their tiebreaker rules which led to Duke playing Virginia in the ACC Championship, but saw Miami make the playoffs as the conference’s highest-ranked team.

Bevacqua said the ACC did “permanent damage” to their relationship with Notre Dame, which includes agreements on football scheduling and the school’s involvement in ACC basketball, which is set to run through 2031. That was designed to be a symbiotic relationship, with the ACC providing quality opponents for Notre Dame to bolster their schedule, which the presence of the Irish as a staple of conference football would help the ACC in getting a larger TV deal.

That could all fall apart now, but it’s a background part to this story now. Essentially Notre Dame spent a week telling the world that the rest of college football needed it, more than it needed everyone else — and there’s a chance schools could call them on that bluff. As it stands the 2026 Notre Dame schedule is a bit of a joke, with Wisconsin and USC being the only real opponents outside the ACC that the Irish are set to face. This comes after their 2025 schedule, which was ranked 44th in the nation, was a large factor in them not making the playoff.

This means that if Notre Dame follows through and seeks to terminate their ACC agreement early they will be forced to fill more than half their schedule, and if we see Power Conferences band together and refuse to schedule Notre Dame it would be disastrous to their playoff chances, MOU or not.

We all know that money talks. When the dust settles there’s a chasm between threatening Notre Dame, and actually following though by pulling them off the schedule and losing out on the revenue they bring to the table. Still, it’s a shot across to bow to Bevacqua and Notre Dame to pull their heads in and stop playing the hubris game, because whether the Irish agree or not: They need the rest of football more than everyone else needs Notre Dame. Nobody is too big to fail in the world of college football.