Matt Hayes spent his USA Today column blaming Notre Dame for a scam Notre Dame didn't write. The free pass is real. Someone else printed it.
Beginning in 2026, Notre Dame is guaranteed an at-large spot in the College Football Playoff if it finishes anywhere inside the top 12 of the final CFP rankings. It's an agreement the SEC and Big Ten signed off on, because they wanted Notre Dame's brand inside the tent badly enough to hand it a door no conference team gets to open.
So when the anonymous SEC coach Hayes quotes calls the arrangement "laughable… The season begins, and you're already in the CFP," understand what that coach is actually griping about: a rule his own conference agreed to. The complaint is legitimate. The anger is pointed at the wrong address.
Hayes oversells the part he leads with, the "sham schedule." He sneers at Notre Dame's ACC opponents as "gimme putts" and acts like the slate proves the crime. It doesn't. Notre Dame plays 10 power-conference teams, the same credit Big Ten and SEC members get automatically for scheduling nine or ten of their own. Through Week 6 this season, FPI and Sagarin both have the Irish ranked No. 1, and the Associated Press has them No. 2. Those are the rankings of a legitimate top team playing a real schedule. And the game Hayes was timing his column to, Notre Dame at BYU on October 17, is a top-10 matchup he decided doesn't count because he didn't like the conference logo on the other sideline.
The deal itself matters more than any one week's opponents. Notre Dame's strength of schedule was the top reason it missed the 2025 playoff despite a 10-2 record and an 11th-place final ranking. Under the 2026 rules, that same 11th-place finish puts the Irish in the field. The guarantee is the whole ballgame. The schedule is a distraction Hayes turned into the main event.
Independence still lets the Irish reach the CFP off a softer path than conference teams forced to grind through nine league games. Joel Klatt made the honest version of this point: "It does not behoove anybody… to schedule Notre Dame because they have such an advantage over these teams that are playing in the Big Ten and SEC [who have] much more difficult schedules." Klatt also noted that 9-3 SEC teams have been left out in back-to-back years. That's a real grievance from people who had to beat each other up all fall while a team with a lighter calendar sat on a written promise.
Dropping the guaranteed on-ramp that no one else gets would fix that problem. The SEC and Big Ten created the exact thing their coaches now resent. They looked at Notre Dame's brand, its ratings pull, its future media value, and decided one program's name was worth a backdoor into a playoff everyone else has to earn through the front. The athletic directors who built the system own this.
Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua is playing the long game here, and Hayes is right that the horizon is about money. There's a home-and-home with Auburn coming, with Arkansas and Texas after that. The schedule is getting heavier. The guarantee stays the same either way.
Hayes went looking for a villain and settled on the easiest one in college football, the program everyone already loves to hate. The real culprits are the two superconferences that wrote the rule and signed it, then pretended to be scandalized by it.
