Texas vs. Notre Dame Series Could Be in Danger After Controversial Rule Change

The Texas Longhorns and Notre Dame Fighting Irish have been among the two top public enemies for college football fans over the last two weeks.

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman celebrates after a touchdown in the first half of a NCAA football game against Syracuse at Notre Dame Stadium. | MICHAEL CLUBB/SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The Texas Longhorns and Notre Dame Fighting Irish are set to begin a home-and-home series before the end of the decade.

Texas and Notre Dame will meet in the 2028 and 2029 season, as the Longhorns will head to South Bend in 2028 before returning back to Austin to play the Fighting Irish the following season.

However, a highly controversial rule set in place by the College Football Playoff committee could give Notre Dame an unfair right of passage into the bracket as early as next season.

CFP Committee Has Absurd Ruling in Place for Notre Dame

Notre Dame Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman leads the team onto the field to play the Pittsburgh Panthers at Acrisure Stadium. | Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, CFP officials signed off on a ruling last spring that would guarantee Notre Dame gets into the playoff if it is ranked in the Top 12 of the final rankings. If that ruling had been in place for this year, No. 10 Miami would have been automatically bumped out in favor of the Irish, regardless of what the committee thinks.

As a result, Yahoo's Dan Wolken reports that athletic directors are "threatening to freeze [Notre Dame] out of future schedules" as a form of protest against this.

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian already confirmed during Early Signing Day that the Longhorns will keep Ohio State (2026) and Michigan (2027) on the non-conference schedule for the next two seasons but said anything else is "up for discussion."

Could the rule change be the final straw in Texas' decision to cancel the series with Notre Dame?

"I think anything beyond that is up for discussion," Sarkisian said. "CDC and I've already had that discussion, we need to take a good, hard look at what our non-conference schedule looks like beyond the next two years."

The rule change is certainly ironic considering recent comments made by Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua that compared this year's controversial rankings to "musical chairs at some fifth grade birthday party."

If he's making that comparison, than Notre Dame immediately getting into the CFP as an at-large No. 12 team without a conference title is like the misbehaved five-year-old still getting to celebrate at the end-of-year pizza party after causing nothing but trouble in class the entire year.

"We take this seriously, as do other universities, and the rankings can't just be musical chairs at some fifth grade birthday party," Bevacqua said. "They have to mean something, and to me, what happened to us really was kind of alarming."

Time will tell how things play out for the Texas vs. Notre Dame series.