USC and Notre Dame are about to spend four years doing what no one who cares about college football wants them to do: not play each other.
The next meeting in the Jeweled Shillelagh series is set for Week 1 in 2030, a gap that turns one of the sport’s most recognizable rivalries into a waiting game. Since 1926, the two schools have faced off 95 times, with only World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic interrupting the run. Now, for reasons both programs helped create, the rivalry is on pause again.
That pause lands especially hard because this game has always been bigger than one season or one schedule release. It has mattered to students, alumni and fans for generations.
It still matters now, which is exactly why the delay feels so jarring. Current students at USC and Notre Dame won’t see the matchup before they graduate, and the Class of 2030 will go through college without seeing the teams meet once.
The Class of 2031 will be in its final year by the time the series resumes, and most of those students will still be in high school.
There’s blame to go around. USC wanted the game played before Big Ten conference play during negotiations in fall 2025 and would not move off that position.
Athletic Director Jennifer Cohen also said in the November State of Troy newsletter that football would play at least one Power Four school during the first three weeks of the 2026 season, but that did not happen. The Trojans wound up without Notre Dame on the schedule and without a Power Four opponent secured for those seasons.
Notre Dame had its own hard line. The Fighting Irish did not want to move the game earlier in the season against USC, even with the freedom that comes with being independent. Their preference was to keep the traditional October or November timing.
After another failed round of talks in December, Notre Dame quickly added a two-game series against BYU for the next two seasons, effectively stepping away from the rivalry for now.
That’s what makes the public talk from Lincoln Riley and Marcus Freeman ring so hollow. Both head coaches have said over the past couple of years that they wanted the game. But wanting it and making it happen turned out to be very different things.
The result is a four-year break in a series that has long been treated as one of college football’s crown jewels. However the schools justify it, the rivalry will sit idle until 2030.
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