Lincoln Riley: ‘Got to make a decision on what’s best for SC’ with Notre Dame-USC football

On Wednesday, Lincoln Riley stood behind a dais and spoke to a group of assembled media in Indianapolis at Big Ten Media Days.

It was a long trek for the USC coach, one he’ll have to get used to now with the Trojans set to begin play in the Big Ten for the 2024 college football season.

According to Riley, though, there’s a possibility his team could be eliminating a trip to Indiana once every two years.

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When asked Wednesday if he would like to keep USC’s annual rivalry game with Notre Dame with the Trojans now in a new conference, Riley alluded to the chance that the storied matchup could disappear if it is suddenly at odds with USC’s larger pursuit of a national championship.

“If you get in a position where you’ve got to make a decision on what’s best for SC to help us win a national championship versus keeping that, shoot, then you got to look at it,” Riley said, according to Matt Fortuna of The Inside Zone.

Riley began his answer by saying that he would “love to” continue the series and understands that it “means a lot to a lot of people” before pivoting.

“Bama was ahead of the curve for years, I thought, on how they scheduled in the nonconference, right?” Riley said. “They would occasionally hit the marquee nonconference game, they played two other not very good teams, they’d play one late so that they got essentially a little bit of a bye week right there late in the season when your season’s been going on and you’re a little beat up.

“They didn’t schedule for the fans. They scheduled to win championships. And so my hope is we can do the best thing, schedule to win championships — and that includes a rivalry game for all that comes with that and all that it means. But if you get in those positions, you’ve got to make a decision on what the priority is. It’s not an easy answer.”

USC and Notre Dame share one of college football’s most storied and longest-standing rivalries. The hallowed programs have squared off 91 times since their first meeting in 1926, with the only interruption in the series coming from 1943-45 while the United States was engaged in World War II.

During that time, the Fighting Irish have gone 49-37-5 against the Trojans, including a 9-4 record since 2010.

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USC’s move to the Big Ten, seismic and once-unthinkable as it is, doesn’t restrict its scheduling opportunities, as the Pac-12, like the Big Ten, had a nine-game conference schedule, allowing its members to arrange three non-conference matchups.

Any questions around the future viability of the Trojans-Irish rivalry are rooted in a couple of factors in a changing college football landscape.

For one, USC now faces increased travel demands and costs as a west coast school playing in a largely midwestern conference, which would make a biennial trip to northern Indiana a little less appealing. Additionally, with the 12-team College Football Playoff debuting for the 2024 season, programs with championship aspirations will look to see what non-conference scheduling philosophies best position them to make the playoff field. Is it fattening your record by loading up on Group of Five or FCS opponents? Or will the playoff committee reward teams that challenged themselves before conference play began, even if it resulted in a loss or two along the way?

While it has ultimately restored some of them — Texas’ move to the SEC reunites it with Texas A&M, which it hasn’t played since 2011 — conference realignment has made some rivalry games more sporadic while killing others entirely. Games like Nebraska-Oklahoma, Kansas-Missouri and Pitt-West Virginia that were once annual fixtures of the college football calendar have either disappeared or are played infrequently as the teams moved to different conferences.

“Listen, we’re not the first example of that,” Riley said. “Look all the way across the country. There has been a lot of other teams sacrifice rivalry games. And I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen. But as we get into this Playoff structure, and if it changes or not, we’re in this new conference, we’re going to learn something about this as we go and what the right and the best track is to winning a national championship, that’s going to evolve.”

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Lincoln Riley on Notre Dame rivalry: ‘Got to make a decision on what’s best for SC’