Lincoln Riley expressed a strong desire to maintain the USC-Notre Dame football rivalry, emphasizing his commitment to USC's success. Riley acknowledged challenges related to the College Football Playoff format, with uncertainty surrounding nonconference games and automatic qualifiers. Big Ten coaches support a format that would provide four automatic qualifiers but may disregard historic rivalries. The SEC’s differing playoff proposal creates a stalemate between the two conferences, potentially stalling any changes to the playoff structure for the foreseeable future.
"Do I want to play the game? Hell yeah, I want to play the game," Riley said. "It's one of the reasons I came here. But also, my allegiance and my loyalty is not to Notre Dame and not to anyone else. I'm the head coach of USC."
Riley added that there are "a million reasons" why the conference's preferred format should be adopted, but maintaining historic rivalries like USC-Notre Dame "might be the most important."
We give every reason for college football to preserve nonconference games that mean a lot to the history of the game, the fanbases and the former players and everyone.
But that format would also take nonconference scheduling almost completely out of the equation when it came to determining who deserves to be in the playoff.
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