Bill ConnellyOct 15, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
On Saturday evening in South Bend, the Trojans and Fighting Irish will meet for the 96th time. Notre Dame holds a 52-38-5 edge, though the momentum has swayed back and forth pretty severely through the years — Notre Dame went 15-3-1 from 1940-61, USC went 12-2-2 from 1967-82, Notre Dame went 12-0-1 from 1983-95, USC went 11-3 from 1996-2009. The Irish have won nine of the last 12 and are favored to make it 10 in 13 this year.
There is a feeling of foreboding surrounding this game, however, as there aren’t any more Trojans-Irish games scheduled moving forward. The only time these rivals haven’t met since their first game in 1926 was because of either war (1943-45) or a pandemic (2020), but the series is now in danger because of … well … I don’t really know, actually.
Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has certainly said he and the school want the series to continue, and USC head coach Lincoln Riley said, “Do I want to play the game? Hell yeah, I want to play the game,” at Big Ten media days in July before equivocating. “My allegiance is to USC, and I’m going to do everything in my power to help USC.”
Apparently USC and/or the Big Ten think the only way the USC-Notre Dame series can continue is if it has no impact on who makes the CFP? If the series ends, it will end for utterly embarrassing reasons. Just schedule the damn game and keep playing it.
For the last century, this has been one of the sport’s defining rivalries, both because of its impact on college football’s balance of power (especially in the 1960s and 1970s) and the unbelievable moments it has produced.
The 1920s were the decade in which the sport fully infected America. The Big Ten and Ivy League remained awesome at it, and the Rose Bowl only gained in gravitas when the Rose Bowl stadium opened in 1922. But schools from everywhere increasingly wanted a piece of the action. Alabama won the 1926 Rose Bowl, proving that the South could more than hold its own, and with its 1925 Rose Bowl trouncing of Pop Warner’s Stanford, Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame announced itself as a national power.
USC had already won the Rose Bowl in 1923, but the Trojans’ notoriety as an up-and-comer hit hyperdrive when, having attempted to pluck Rockne away from Notre Dame in 1925, they agreed to trade annual cross-country trips with the Irish. Three of the first four games in the series, alternating between enormous crowds in Chicago and Los Angeles, resulted in one-point Notre Dame wins, all with gut-wrenching missed kicks involved. The country was hooked.
The Trojans arrived a few days later to a mobbed train station with over 100,000 revelers. They were paraded through town. And after blowouts of Washington and Georgia and a Rose Bowl victory over Tulane, they were unbeaten national champions.
USC enjoyed back-to-back top-10 finishes in 1938-39, but when legendary coach Howard Jones died in 1941, the Trojans grew inconsistent. Notre Dame, however, thrived through and after the war years and won four national titles between 1943-49.
In 1947, USC started the season 7-0-1 and rose to third in the country. Unfortunately, Notre Dame fielded the best team ever, according to legendary opinion-haver Beano Cook. USC made the Irish work for this one, but behind the string-pulling work of Heisman-winner Johnny Lujack and the devastating rushing of Emil Sitko and Bob Livingstone, Notre Dame eventually had too much.
The 1950s were a tough decade for a number of blue-blood programs, and neither of these teams escaped down years. USC had as many one-win seasons as top-10 finishes (one each) between 1948-61, and Notre Dame had more two-win seasons (two) than top-10s (one) between 1956-63. But they found the men who would bring them back to prominence when USC hired John McKay in 1960, and Notre Dame landed Ara Parseghian in 1964.
The Irish would get revenge soon enough, humiliating USC 51-0 in Los Angeles two years later and winning their first national title under Parseghian. But the Trojans still made them wait a while.
These programs have met as top-10 teams 18 times, and half of those games happened between 1965-79. While this rivalry has swayed back and forth with one team rising and the other falling, this period saw both thriving rather consistently.
In 1967, top-ranked USC upended the fifth-ranked Irish 24-7 in South Bend on the way to McKay’s second title, and behind soon-to-be Heisman winner O.J. Simpson, the Trojans won their first nine games of 1968 as well. But after a couple of early losses, Notre Dame came to the Coliseum having won its last three games by a combined 135-27. The Irish gave the Trojans and their fans a surprise.
By the 1970s, these programs were humming. USC won the 1972 title thanks in part to a 45-23 thumping of Notre Dame that featured six Anthony Davis touchdowns, two on kick returns. In 1973, it was Notre Dame’s turn, taking down the defending champs 23-14 and eventually stunning top-ranked Alabama in the Sugar Bowl to win the title. In 1974, in the last McKay-Parseghian battle, USC flipped the game like few have ever been flipped. And Davis was behind it once again.
Notre Dame and quarterback Tom Clements stunned the crowd of 83,552 early, gaining 257 first-half yards and bolting to a 24-0 lead. But Davis scored on a short touchdown pass from Pat Haden to make it 24-6 before the break, then took the opening kick of the second half 100 yards for another score. USC forced a punt, and Davis scored again. Then Notre Dame fumbled, and Davis scored again and added the 2-point conversion.
Suddenly it was 27-24, and USC kept landing blows. Haden threw touchdown passes to J.K. McKay (twice) and Shelton Diggs, then Charles Phillips picked off his third pass of the day and took it to the house. In just under 17 minutes USC had gone on a 55-0 run. 55-0! The Trojans rode the momentum to a Rose Bowl upset of Ohio State, too.
Dan Devine’s tenure as Notre Dame head coach began with two three-loss seasons and an early-1977 loss to unranked Ole Miss. Devine was awfully close to hot-seat status. The Irish had won three in a row when USC came to town, but they’d beaten the Trojans just once in their last 10 tries, and they just weren’t looking the part. So they changed their look.
The magic of the green jerseys continued even when they moved back to the regular kits. They won their last seven games by an average of 45-11, including a 38-10 stomping of top-ranked Texas in the Cotton Bowl, and Devine, Montana & Co. were surprise national champs.
Top to bottom, the 1980s weren’t great for either program. Head coach John Robinson followed McKay to the NFL, and USC stumbled under Ted Tollner, while Notre Dame made either one of the boldest or most arrogant and reckless hires of all time following Dan Devine’s retirement: High school coaching legend Gerry Faust came aboard and went just 30-26-1 over five years.
USC rebounded under Larry Smith, however, and Notre Dame surged under Lou Holtz. And in 1988, the series saw a glorious first: a No. 1 vs. No. 2 battle to end the regular season.
While Notre Dame remained elite for a few years into the 1990s, USC lost its edge a bit. Between 1991-2001, the Trojans only made one top-five appearance, and it ended unceremoniously in South Bend.
Notre Dame came into this one having gone just 6-5-1 the year before and suffered a pair of early-1995 losses, including an all-time shocker against Rose Bowl-bound Northwestern. Holtz had recently undergone spinal surgery and coached from the press box, and despite a 12-year unbeaten streak in the rivalry, the Irish were underdogs against the No. 5 Trojans. But USC played like a desperate team that hasn’t beaten its rival in 12 years.
USC would finally take back control of the rivalry the next year, winning three in a row against first Holtz and then Bob Davie.
Despite a brilliant 195 yards from scrimmage and three touchdowns from soon-to-be Heisman winner Reggie Bush, USC simply couldn’t shake the Irish. A 32-yard Brady Quinn-to-Jeff Samardzija touchdown pass and a 60-yard Tom Zbikowski punt return gave Notre Dame a 21-14 halftime lead, and Quinn’s 5-yard touchdown gave the Irish a 31-28 lead with just 2:04 left. But you probably already know what happened next.
Bush shoved Matt Leinart into the end zone on a make-or-break play with four seconds left — that would be legal with today’s rules, but it wasn’t in 2005 — and somehow USC survived.
We’re due a USC-Notre Dame classic on Saturday. It’s been a little while, and unless sanity prevails, it might be a long while until we get another chance.
It’s not really an overstatement to say that the Notre Dame-USC rivalry nationalized football. Sure, we already had plenty of heated rivalries when the two schools began playing each other in the mid-1920s, but rivals were neighbors. Harvard vs. Yale. Auburn vs. Georgia. Michigan vs. Ohio State. Missouri vs. Kansas. Notre Dame-USC, on the other hand, required many days on a train at first; it dropped teams off in a completely different part of the world, where they usually had to beat one of the best teams on the planet. It is the Granddaddy of intersectional rivalries (with apologies to Keith Jackson), and it was a massive game right from its origin.
Notre Dame welcomed USC to South Bend for the first time in 1931 — and for the first time without Rockne, who had died in a plane crash the previous March. The Irish hadn’t lost a game since a defeat to the Trojans to end the 1928 season, and they took a 14-0 lead heading into the fourth quarter. Gus Shaver scored to make it 14-6 early in the fourth, but the Irish blocked the PAT, and since 2-point conversions weren’t a thing yet, it was still a two-score game. No worries! They scored again to make it 14-13, and in the dying seconds, Orville Mohler completed a couple of huge passes to bring USC into field goal range, and Johnny Baker hit the game winner.