Notre Dame has spent generations getting the kind of treatment other programs can only dream about, and now BYU finally gets its turn on Saturday night.
The Irish enter the matchup in Provo unbeaten in five games and sitting at No. 2 in the country. Even if BYU finds a way to knock them off, Notre Dame still looks positioned to land in the College Football Playoff. That’s the reality of a system that has long given the Irish a smoother road than everybody else.
There’s nothing new about Notre Dame being handled differently. The program’s reputation was built a long time ago - back when Rockne, win-one-for-the-Gipper, Rudy, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Johnny Lujack, Paul Hornung, the Joes (Montana and Theismann), seven Heisman winners and 11 national championships made the Irish one of the sport’s defining brands. That mythology took root in the 1920s, and Hollywood helped keep it alive.
A big part of that rise came from Knute Rockne himself. In the 1920s and ’30s, he turned Notre Dame football into a national road show, taking the team on train tours and staging games across the country. He built the trip into an event, complete with a traveling press box, top writers riding along in first-class accommodations, media-friendly practices at each stop and newsreel footage shown later in movie theaters nationwide.
The result was a national following that still lingers, especially among millions of Catholics across the country. Notre Dame won championships in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and the school’s place in the sport became untouchable.
That special status carried over into the postseason structures that followed. The Bowl Coalition from 1992-94 and the Bowl Alliance from 1995-97 both included Notre Dame-specific provisions that gave the Irish an easier route to the big bowls used to determine national champions.
Then the BCS era brought another unique rule: if Notre Dame finished in the top eight of the final standings, it automatically earned a BCS bowl bid. No other school had that built in.
Now there’s another layer. In the spring of 2025, Notre Dame got a new arrangement - the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, effective in 2026 - that says the Irish need only finish in the top 12 of the final rankings to automatically qualify for the playoff. Everyone else has to earn in through one of the four power conference titles, the top Group of Five spot, or one of six at-large berths decided by factors like strength of schedule and head-to-head results.
And unlike everyone else, Notre Dame still doesn’t have to deal with a conference schedule or a conference championship game. The CFP accepts that setup, and accommodates it.
That flexibility helps explain how the Irish can line up a slate of opponents they choose themselves. This season, they’ve gone through 4-1 Wisconsin, 1-5 Rice, 2-4 Michigan State, 3-3 Purdue, 3-2 North Carolina and 2-4 Stanford, while outscoring those teams 272-66.
That works out to an average margin of 33 points per game. Notre Dame has also won 16 straight games by double digits going back to last season, and the 2024 team reached the national championship game before losing to Ohio State.
The only thing missing from all that history is a recent title. Notre Dame hasn’t won a national championship since 1988.
That makes last year’s playoff omission even more interesting. Without the benefit of the 2025 Memorandum of Understanding, the Irish were left out and responded by refusing to play in the bowl game that had been arranged for them against BYU.
Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua called out the playoff process afterward, saying, “We feel like the (2025) playoff was stolen from our student-athletes.”
He also dismissed the rankings as “a farce and total waste of time.”
On this point, he has a case. The system has tilted Notre Dame’s way for years.
Now BYU gets the game that should have been played 10 months ago.
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Scheduling friction has been part of the backdrop all along, from Notre Dame previously backing out of a planned trip to Provo to the schools working through a neutral-site meeting in Las Vegas in 2022. Recently, Notre Dame reached out about a two-game series, a move tied in part to the Irish needing a game that could help strengthen their playoff resume after USC backed out of their rivalry, giving BYU another high-profile opening in a series that has not always been easy to pin down. [Read more 🡒]