Penn State’s James Franklin sat at the podium next to Marcus Freeman, the coach he’d face the next day in the national semifinals. And Franklin decided he wanted to make a point — at Freeman’s expense.
“This is no knock at Coach Freeman or Notre Dame, but I think everybody should be in a conference,” Franklin said. “I think everybody should play in a conference championship game or no one should play in a conference championship game.”
Notre Dame is famously one of the last remaining independents in the Football Bowl Subdivision. There’s no other school that Franklin could have been referring to, certainly not one that would regularly be in the mix for College Football Playoff contention.
And he wasn’t alone in fixating on it, as plenty of pundits and fans of other teams have done the same over the past month as the Fighting Irish have advanced round after round all the way to the national championship game in the first edition of the 12-team CFP. Even after a September loss to Northern Illinois, the worst loss by far of any CFP contender this season, there was never a real question whether an 11-1 Notre Dame team would make the 12-team field. The Irish were even ranked high enough to host a first-round game; teams seeded fifth through eighth earn that honor.
“We need to know there’s access to the national championship,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told NBC Sports this week. “Thankfully, that’s always been the case for Notre Dame over the course of our long football history. … And when we are talking about the CFP, we keep going back to those three key tenants of it, which for me are: Access, governance, and then obviously the revenue possibilities that come with making the CFP.”
It’s clear, just one season into the 12-team Playoff era, that Notre Dame feels no pressure to join a conference. Nor should it. The new format bodes well for its continued football independence, which has been an integral part of the Notre Dame experience for decades. (Its Olympic sports are housed in the ACC; men’s hockey plays in the Big Ten.)
“Independence was thrust upon us when we were boycotted by a conference, and that’s when it became part of our identity,” former athletic director Jack Swarbrick said this week. “People don’t understand how much a part of the identity of the university and the football program it is. It’s often talked about and written about as some sort of competitive or business choice. First of all, it has no competitive advantage to us. And second, it has not been advantageous financially for us. Those are just facts. But it’s who we are. It’s part of our identity.
“I’ve always said that as long as we have a home for our Olympic sports, as long as we have a media partner who’s committed to us, and as long as we have a fair path to the championship, we’re going to stay independent. And those three things are in place. The 12-team Playoff reinforced for us that there was a fair path. If anything, it has made us more secure in independence.”
Consider the team’s path to the precipice of a national title: An 11-1 regular-season record; no conference championship game; and wins over Indiana (at home), Georgia (at the Sugar Bowl) and Penn State (at the Orange Bowl). Each season will include a maximum of 16 possible games for the Irish, as opposed to a potential maximum of 17 games for teams that make (but lose) conference championship games and then go on a run to the title game. The Irish are ineligible to receive a top four seed — those spots are currently required to go to conference champions — but everything else about the format works to Notre Dame’s advantage. There are seven at-large spots in the field each year; the Irish no longer have to go unbeaten to have a good shot to get into the CFP.
And, because of the current CFP revenue distribution policy, the Irish will pocket $20 million for reaching the title game this year. Each school that makes the CFP earns $4 million for its conference. Each school that advances to the quarters makes $4 million, then it’s $6 million per school that makes the semifinals and $6 million per school that reaches the title game. Performance-based revenue goes to the conferences for everyone else, and then it’s up to each league to determine how it will distribute that money to its members. Or, in Notre Dame’s case, there’s no question of where the money goes. All money earned by advancing through the tournament goes directly to the Irish.
When the new CFP contract with ESPN begins in 2026, the revenue distribution changes. According to multiple sources briefed on the arrangement, Notre Dame will receive approximately $12.5 million annually from the CFP. It will have the opportunity to make an additional $6 million in years in which its football team makes the CFP field. Beginning in 2026, Big Ten and SEC schools will make about $21 million each, while Big 12 and ACC schools each will earn $12 and 13 million, respectively.
The CFP revenue supplements the school’s media rights deal with NBC, which runs through 2029. Though the terms were not announced when the deal was extended in Nov. 2023, the involved parties have said that Notre Dame’s annual payout from NBC is less than what schools in the Big Ten or SEC make from their media deals. But the financial part is just one piece of the puzzle to remain independent. It’s kind of like an independence tax; as long as the money is close enough to the richest schools to allow the Irish to compete nationally at the highest level, it’s worth it.
“We view being independent as a positive thing, and we sell it to our recruits and our players as a positive thing,” Freeman said. “We’ll continue to look at it that way until and unless something changes. We get to play coast to coast. We play multiple different teams from multiple different conferences. We started off the season in College Station, we ended the season in LA, and we’re in New York twice.
“We get to really view our program as a global in terms of a national program, in terms of how we play, and the audience we play in front of.”
That’s worth the handwringing. It’s also worth the unpredictability that comes along with doing something differently than everyone else in power conferences.
Because it continues to work for the Irish. And in a 12-team CFP world, it maybe works better than ever before.
