Why Notre Dame is on board with a 24-team Playoff: What’s in it for the Irish?

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua believes a 24-team College Football Playoff is right for Notre Dame and the best path forward for the sport. He also believes CFP expansion is inevitable, admitting that he’s changed his mind about just how big the field should be.

And although the potential to double postseason access was not the most important item on Bevacqua’s agenda during ACC meetings at the Ritz-Carlton this week, where commissioner Jim Phillips said his league’s coaches and ADs supported the 24-team model, the subject is still important to where the Irish football program is headed.

“I think in this day and age with what universities are investing in football, it’s a very expensive sport. You need to give more teams hope,” Bevacqua told The Athletic. “The way things are structured now, everything points to the CFP. It’s a measure of success. It’s important in the tenure of a coach. We’ve seen firings when teams aren’t going to make it to the CFP. And my concern is that if more teams aren’t given hope, that universities over the course of the next five, 10 years will say, ‘Hey, is the investment worth it?’

“And I would hate to see a college football landscape where there’s only a handful of teams that can really give it a legitimate go year after year after year.”

No matter the size of the CFP field, Notre Dame is poised to be part of that handful of teams. The Irish made the four-team CFP twice under head coach Brian Kelly, then made the first 12-team field under Marcus Freeman, beating Indiana, Georgia and Penn State before losing to Ohio State in the national title game. The Irish were the first team left out last season, then declined a bowl bid. Now they’re a potential preseason No. 1 heading into this fall.

The system is working for Notre Dame. In the 2026 edition, the Irish will be guaranteed a bid if they finish in the top 12 of the final CFP rankings. And while the memorandum of understanding that includes that guarantee — signed by CFP leaders long before the Irish were excluded last December but brought back into public focus amid the fallout — caused some consternation among ACC coaches here, Bevacqua considers that old news.

Of course, that MOU was also cited among USC’s reasons for ending its series with Notre Dame. The schools had played annually for the past century, taking years off only for World War II and a global pandemic. Now they’ll take a multi-year break because of the Trojans’ strength of schedule concerns since moving to the Big Ten.

Bevacqua confirmed the two sides are engaged in conversations about resuming the series, although he declined to get into specifics about when it could resume. It’s expected that any restart would be for home-and-home games, although Notre Dame is more flexible on when the game is played in the calendar. A rule change allowing more Week 0 games could ease the pressure on playing the game before USC’s Big Ten slate begins.

“Do we want to play USC in the future? 100 percent, yeah,” Bevacqua said. “We think that’s great for Notre Dame. We think it’s great for USC, we think it is great for college football. And at this point, that’s really all I can say about that.”

CFP expansion would make the return of Notre Dame-USC easier, as Bevacqua sees it. And that’s another reason why he likes a 24-team field after being in the 16-team camp a year ago. Expansion could quiet college coaches’ saber-rattling about canceling marquee nonconference games.

That’s Bevacqua’s counterargument to the idea that CFP expansion would devalue the regular season. If expansion makes regular-season losses less punitive, Bevacqua believes more programs would be willing to take on bigger games. And for an independent football program that needs more than its guaranteed five ACC games to build a functional schedule, that willingness would be critical to maintaining a football schedule good enough to get the Irish into the CFP and interesting enough to satisfy the sport’s media partners, never mind the fans buying tickets.

“Big brands playing each other elevates the regular season,” Bevacqua said. “Look at the ratings, people love when Ohio State plays Michigan, when Notre Dame plays Ohio State … our Notre Dame-Miami game that’s going to be a ratings juggernaut. You need more of those types of games.”

Notre Dame has games scheduled with BYU, Auburn, Texas, Indiana and Alabama before the end of this decade. The Stanford series, played near-annually since the late 1980s and through the Cardinal’s move to the ACC, is expected to be extended beyond this season. Bevacqua said he’d like to see the BYU series be extended. A 12-year contract with Clemson, arranged outside of Notre Dame’s ACC opponent rotation, starts in 2027.

While Bevacqua pushed back on the idea that Notre Dame faces a scheduling crunch as the Power 4 leagues line up their nine-game conference schedules, he acknowledged expansion would be a release valve for the pressure to build adequate future slates.

Bevacqua believes a 24-team field would work best if it were built on at-large bids, with five slots reserved for the four Power 4 conference champions and the highest rated Group of 6 champion.

As for the drawbacks, Bevacqua acknowledged the revenue issues of dropping conference championship games to make room for the extra CFP games. He’s also aware that stumping for the end of conference championship games probably isn’t the Notre Dame athletic director’s argument to make.

“There are differing views on whether it would devalue the regular season. I happen to think it wouldn’t, putting on my Notre Dame hat, putting on my old NBC Sports hat, but not everybody agrees with me,” Bevacqua said. “And very smart, capable people have different beliefs here. So a lot to be considered, but there’s certainly undeniable momentum for expansion. I think expansion is inevitable. And it’s just a question now of what that means.

“I think 24 is not the only solution, but I think it’s the best solution.”

Bevacqua and the ACC don’t have the final say on when and how the postseason format changes. That will be up to the Big Ten and SEC. Bevacqua credited Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti for making the case, even while he counts SEC commissioner Greg Sankey as an ally and golf partner. Bevacqua believes expansion will help more teams in those conferences see football as worth the investment at a time when the costs to compete have never been higher, sometimes at the expense of other sports.

“Everything now, you wake up when you’re in the world of college football and you’re CFP, CFP CFP,” Bevacqua said. “That’s the brass ring.”