ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit used an appearance on “Get Up” Friday to blast Notre Dame’s 2025 football schedule, calling it an “embarrassment” as the sport debates expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams next season.
“Notre Dame plays two games where they’re going to be challenged. This one (against BYU on Saturday), where they’re favored, and Miami at home,” Herbstreit said. “Think about what Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State and these teams with what they’re dealing with. That cannot continue. That’s an embarrassment and incredibly unfair.”
The discussion arose from reports that the NCAA is weighing a 24-team playoff field. Herbstreit argued that if Notre Dame wants a postseason berth, it needs to earn it against legitimate competition rather than a soft slate.
“Your ass better be playing real games against real teams to give fans and players games to get excited about,” Herbstreit said. “The idea of going the Indiana way or some of these teams that play nobody in the non-conference has got to be over.”
Rather than leave scheduling to individual conferences, Herbstreit proposed creating a centralized authority to oversee matchups across the sport.
“Instead of each conference doing the scheduling, I think we need a national scheduling office that is in charge of getting games set,” Herbstreit said. “So we have not only somebody that’s looking at each conference, but looking at the totality of the conference scheduling, and we gotta have better non-conference games.”
Herbstreit added that the problem isn’t limited to Notre Dame, saying scheduling needs to improve for “a lot of teams.”
Notre Dame does not belong to a conference and was left out of last season’s 12-team playoff field, a snub the program answered by declining to accept a bid to a non-playoff bowl game. For the rest of this season, the Fighting Irish face just three currently ranked opponents: No. 8 BYU, No. 3 Miami, and No. 24 SMU.
Herbstreit’s proposal would mark a significant shift in how college football operates, replacing the current system of conference-driven, market-based scheduling decisions with a single national body dictating matchups across the sport. Whether such centralization would actually produce better games, or simply shift the power over which teams play whom into fewer hands, remains an open question as the playoff expansion debate continues.
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