One of college football’s upcoming marquee nonconference games might not get played after all.
On Thursday during SEC media days, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was asked about the future of Longhorns scheduling as the league moves to a nine-game slate. As other teams pull back on nonconference games, Texas may follow the trend of programs looking to soften their slates to increase their chances of making the College Football Playoff field.
That could mean the scrapping of a home-and-home series with Notre Dame, scheduled to be played in South Bend in 2028 and back in Austin in 2029.
“I don’t know yet about Notre Dame,” Sarkisian said. “We’ll see, because I think the (CFP selection) committee has to show us what happens now and what’s the value that they’re placing on strength of schedule and are we going to let a 9-3 team in as an at-large? We’ll find out, and I think this year will be a great test to that of what that looks like.”
Sarkisian campaigned for Texas to make last year’s 12-team Playoff at 9-3, with an opening-week loss at Ohio State plus two SEC losses: a blowout at Georgia and a loss to a Florida team that finished 4-8 and fired its coaching staff. Texas also notched marquee wins against Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, finishing No. 13 in the CFP rankings, behind No. 11 Notre Dame — the first team left out — and No. 12 BYU. Texas was the highest ranked three-loss team after the regular season and finished ahead of two-loss Vanderbilt and Utah.
If the CFP doesn’t expand, the nonconference scheduling angst may persist in the SEC and Big Ten. Both conferences play nine conference games, and the SEC has taken it a step further by mandating teams play one Power 4 opponent in their nonconference slates. While that would seem to save the Notre Dame series — athletic director Pete Bevacqua told The Athletic at ACC spring meetings that the series with Texas would be played — Texas may see the degree of difficult being too high to keep it.
“So is the juice worth the squeeze or not?” Sarkisian said. “That’s what we’re all tasked with.”
After two years of the 12-team CFP, it’s almost impossible to know. Indiana won last year’s national championship after playing a nonconference schedule of Old Dominion, Kennesaw State and Indiana State. But runner-up Miami made the field almost entirely based on its win over Notre Dame to open the year.
Sarkisian can appreciate there’s no right answer here. Texas beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa three years ago to basically punch the Longhorns’ CFP ticket in September. When the Longhorns blew out Michigan in Ann Arbor a year later, their eventual 11-2 resume got a similar bump. It’s hard to know exactly what credit Texas got for playing at Ohio State and losing in 2025 because the first CFP rankings were still two months away; by the time they were released, the Longhorns had lost at Florida, followed by uninspiring wins against Kentucky and Mississippi State.
“So I’m torn because I have two thoughts on this,” Sarkisian said. “One is if we beat Ohio State last year, surely we’re in a much better position when it comes to the playoffs, but on the other side of it is, if I don’t play Ohio State and I play Jones Junior High, and we’re 10-2 and our two losses are to Georgia and Florida, we’re a playoff team.
“But like anything in this world, if you want to be really good at something, you got to take risk.”
The schedule saber-rattling may put Notre Dame at risk, assuming the CFP doesn’t expand by 2028. The Irish are already locked into their five-game agreement with the ACC, although a separate 12-game series with Clemson means sometimes Notre Dame could play seven ACC teams in a season. The Notre Dame-USC rivalry will not be played for at least the next four seasons.
If Texas walks away from the Notre Dame series, would future SEC opponents Alabama and Florida follow? Would future Big Ten opponents Michigan and Indiana do the same? Notre Dame has scheduled home-and-home series with all four of those programs in the next decade. And if those programs do drop the Irish, would Notre Dame have a schedule worthy of at-large selection?
Notre Dame was famously the first team left out of last year’s CFP, in part because it finished with just one win over a team ranked in the CFP’s final Top 25 (No. 16 USC). It played just three ranked teams in the final poll. This year’s schedule might feel much the same, with Miami, BYU and SMU likely ranked in the Top 25 but the rest of the schedule lacking in likely CFP contenders.
That “squeeze” may one of the reasons why Notre Dame has advocated for a 24-team CFP. It’s not that schedule strength would automatically be rewarded differently, it’s the theory that a 9-3 regular season wouldn’t mean automatic exclusion. If last year’s bracket included 24 teams, nine teams would have entered the postseason with three losses.
“So, yes, there’s risk involved in playing a high-level non-conference schedule, but there’s a lot of value in that win,” Sarkisian said. “There’s a lot of value in that win if you can get the win.”
Now it’s a matter of Texas deciding whether Notre Dame is a risk worth taking.
