Kirk Herbstreit did not wait for Notre Dame to play BYU. The ESPN analyst accused the Fighting Irish of cruising toward the playoffs on a soft schedule and called it downright embarrassing. But the argument has not held up the way he expected. Fans and analysts are pushing back, and the question now is which part of Herbstreit’s case they are picking apart first.
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Appearing on ESPN’s “Get Up” on Friday morning, Herbstreit took a blowtorch to Notre Dame’s regular-season schedule, branding it embarrassing and incredibly unfair to other major teams across college football.
“Notre Dame plays two games where they’re gonna be challenged. This one and Miami at home,” Herbstreit said. “Think about what Alabama and Georgia and Ohio State and these teams, what they’re dealing with. That cannot continue. That’s an embarrassment and incredibly unfair.”
His comments didn’t go unnoticed. CBS Sports’ Danny Kanell wasted no time calling out what he viewed as hypocrisy, firing back with a pointed comparison that put Georgia’s schedule under the same microscope.
“Notre Dame’s schedule has 3 games vs. teams currently ranked in the Top 25. That’s the same as Georgia,” wrote Kanell on X.
While Kirk Herbstreit may have a point about Notre Dame’s schedule, calling it an “embarrassment” felt a bit much. The Fighting Irish may not have assembled a murderers’ row, and their strength-of-schedule rankings leave room for scrutiny, but the bigger picture is far more complicated than Herbstreit’s Friday morning takedown suggests.
In short, the Fighting Irish can’t simply overhaul their schedule instantly at will. Why? Because Notre Dame’s slate is partly dictated by its longstanding agreement with the ACC, which requires the program to play five conference opponents each season through 2037.
Notre Dame must also preserve its historic rivalry with Navy while making room for Big Ten opponents and other non-conference games.
Well, that doesn’t excuse every scheduling decision, but it certainly undermines the claim that Notre Dame refuses to test itself against tougher opponents. The Fighting Irish have three ranked teams on their 2026 schedule: No. 8 BYU, No. 3 Miami, and No. 24 SMU.
And here’s the kicker: two of those opponents come from the ACC, while the other hails from the Big 12, making it difficult to paint Notre Dame’s schedule as a deliberate attempt to dodge quality competition.
Kirk Herbstreit argued that the Fighting Irish’s schedule is disrespectful to Ohio State, Georgia, and Alabama. Well, he has a point, but the numbers tell a more complicated story.
Ohio State is set to face five ranked opponents, while Alabama will face four. Meanwhile, Georgia, much like Notre Dame, has just three ranked opponents on its schedule.
The Bulldogs have already faced the Crimson Tide and still have the Ole Miss Rebels and Missouri Tigers looming on their schedule.
So, for Kirk Herbstreit to suggest that Notre Dame’s schedule is unfair to Alabama and Georgia is a bit of a stretch, especially when the Bulldogs themselves will play three ranked opponents this season.
Of course, the Bulldogs did defeat the Oklahoma Sooners 41-13 in late September. However, Oklahoma, which entered the season ranked No. 10 in the preseason AP Poll, had already fallen out of the rankings by the time the two teams met.
Notre Dame remains independent in football, and navigating the scheduling landscape without conference membership is no easy task. The Fighting Irish have taken on formidable opponents in the past, and their independent status hasn’t stopped them from doing so this year.
But Kirk Herbstreit has a different solution to the scheduling debate: instead of leaving the responsibility to individual conferences, he wants a national scheduling office to oversee matchups and ensure teams face tougher competition.
“Instead of each conference doing the scheduling, I think we need a national scheduling office that is in charge of getting games set,” Herbstreit added. “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.”
That said, the ESPN analyst isn’t entirely wrong about Notre Dame, but calling the Fighting Irish’s schedule watered down may not have been very right either.