Notre Dame series, future Texas non-conference games in limbo due to CFP unknowns

Chris Del Conte and Steve Sarkisian have been in lockstep regarding Texas’ non-conference football schedule.

The Longhorns will honor their home-and-home agreements with Ohio State and Michigan, with the Buckeyes coming to Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium on Sept. 12 and the Wolverines heading to town on Sept. 11, 2027. Beyond those two return bouts from marquee non-conference games played during the 2024 (a resounding 31-12 victory over the reigning national champions at the Big House) and 2025 (a 14-7 loss in the Horseshoe) seasons, nothing is set in stone.

That includes a scheduled home-and-home with Notre Dame.

Texas is scheduled to travel to South Bend in 2028, while the Fighting Irish are scheduled to travel to Austin in 2029. At the SEC spring meetings in Destin on Wednesday, Del Conte indicated the Longhorns aren’t locked into what would be the 13th and 14th all-time meetings between two of college football’s most iconic brands.

“They’re tentatively on the schedule right now,” Del Conte said.

Given the uncertainty surrounding the future format and access into the College Football Playoff, Texas is in a tough spot regarding the two scheduled games with the Irish.

The school’s television partners (ESPN and NBC) wouldn’t hesitate to put the Longhorns and Notre Dame in primetime. The 2015 meeting — a 38-3 loss for Texas during a Saturday night season opener in South Bend — was seen by 4.1 million viewers on NBC. The 2016 game in Austin — a memorable 50-47 double-overtime triumph played on Sunday night during Labor Day weekend — drew more than 10.9 million viewers on ABC, making it the fourth most-watched college football game of the season.

Still, if CFP expansion doesn’t appropriately reward teams willing to schedule tough non-conference games, there’s no incentive for Texas to schedule Notre Dame or another high-level power conference opponent.

CFP executive director Rich Clark went through the CFP selection process on Tuesday. The exercise didn’t significantly clear things up for Del Conte, who saw the Longhorns rewarded for scheduling Alabama and Michigan in 2023 and 2024, only to be excluded from the 12-team field last season due, in large part, to suffering a season-opening road loss at the hands of Ohio State.

“It's hard to determine what the metrics are as a 9-3 and 10-2 schedule to say, these guys [won] 10 games, but they lost to these two teams. [Are they] better than a team that lost three games and didn't just schedule who they played?” Del Conte said. “I need more clarity on that.

“It's part of the criteria,” he added. “It's hard to determine how it's being considered because you also have human nature in the room.”

Del Conte didn’t make any not-so-thinly-veiled references to Texas Tech, like the one Sarkisian made last Thursday in Houston. What was missed amid Red Raider nation taking umbrage with Sarkisian’s comments to an audience of staunch Longhorn supporters, however, is what Del Conte echoed on Tuesday: the reality that the lack of equitable scheduling in college football eliminates the incentive to play non-conference games against the Big Ten and SEC opponents Texas has had on the schedule in each of Sarkisian’s five seasons as head coach.

“One of the things that makes college football great is your non-conference schedule and what your regular season is,” Del Conte said. “When you play in games of that nature, you should get rewarded for that. When you have a really watered-down schedule — and the thing that gets college football so different is not every schedule is the same. In the NFL, you know exactly what it is — there's 32 teams, they play it all out correctly. In our sport, it's hard to judge one league from the next in terms of their strength of schedule and who you play. It was great for us to have our coaches hear what they look for, but you also left there murky as hell, too.”

Although Greg Sankey said on Wednesday that a 16-team CFP is the format the SEC prefers, schools will continue to cancel future games against Power Four opponents until a new format is agreed upon. To that end, Del Conte didn’t commit to preferring the 12-team format, but he indicated he doesn’t want the powers that be to expand for the sake of expanding.

“It’s changed so quickly,” Del Conte said, noting college football went from using the BCS to crown a national champion to a four-team playoff to the current 12-team format in the span of 12 seasons (2013-24). “We’re in our second year of that opportunity. I do think there needs to be some time to see how this plays out, but in the NFL, there’s 32 teams — 14 make it. In Major League Baseball, there’s 30 teams and 17 make it. The percentages — you look at the NBA (16 of 30 teams make the playoffs, with the last four spots in each conference determined by a series of play-in games).

“I think it’s right for people to ask what the right number is, but at the end of the day, I’m also looking at it that we have young kids that, if you’re not playing in the playoff, they’re not playing in the bowl game,” he added. “They’re looking for different opportunities with how the transfer portal works now. We’ve had so much change in such a short amount of time that I do think we need a little bit of time to evaluate that. It’s not just, ‘Hey! Let’s jump to this!’”