SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Welcome to the Year of Notre Dame.

You’re going to hate it. Or love it.

That sort of depends on how it ends. The outcomes range from coach Marcus Freeman lifting the national championship trophy on Jan. 25 in Las Vegas to another opt-out of an exhibition bowl game. And it depends on how you viewed it at the start, too: whether you see Notre Dame as an exemplar of college football tradition or as a modern football factory with better branding.

Either way, Notre Dame will be a team that launches 1,000 takes this fall. Maybe Freeman was trying to get ahead of that discourse when he invited human blowtorch Stephen A. Smith to address the team during preseason camp. A party of one in a sport dominated by superconferences, Notre Dame is a program that commands an opinion. Any opinion. The Irish are the center of a debate as perpetual as LeBron vs. Jordan. It drives attention and traffic like college celebrities Bill Belichick and Deion Sanders, but if they were winning.

Even Indiana coach Curt Cignetti got involved after the defending national champions walked away from their scheduled home-and-home series with Notre Dame. Cignetti said Notre Dame would play in Bloomington twice in return for Indiana heading to South Bend once because the Irish aren’t in a conference. That Cignetti’s crack made no sense wasn’t the point. The fact he chose to wade into the Notre Dame discourse was.

Win or lose, the Irish will be a main character of this college football season. When Notre Dame kicks off against Wisconsin on Sunday night at Lambeau Field, Freeman’s program will be watched. It’s just not entirely clear what everyone will see.

It’s time to refamiliarize yourself with all the familiar Notre Dame debates before their inevitable return this fall.

Why Notre Dame is the staff’s prediction to win the national title

David Ubben

‘Join a conference!’

Independence has worked for Notre Dame football for a century, though it hasn’t always been perfect. Yes, the Irish would have been better off as full ACC members last season, instead of partners in a long-term scheduling arrangement with the league, because they probably could have played their way into the College Football Playoff by winning the conference. Instead, they watched Miami pass them for the last at-large spot in the selection committee’s final rankings. Still, that’s a steep price for Notre Dame to pay for what’s essentially an odds boost. And, yes, Notre Dame did benefit from the ACC welcoming it into the league to play a full schedule during the pandemic-altered 2020 season.

But that’s not really the point of the “join a conference” jab that comes up every offseason — and sometimes during opposing coaches’ news conferences. College football thrives on seemingly ad hoc approaches to program building. The sport is great because it is weird, and being weird means being different. What works for Alabama doesn’t work for USC. What works for Texas doesn’t work for Miami. So why should what works for everybody else work for Notre Dame?

And considering how much in-fighting there is within conferences — see LSU fighting with the rest of the SEC over bringing in players just cut from NFL rosters, or Clemson and Florida State suing the ACC over the league’s media rights, or Michigan and USC standing in the way of the Big Ten’s private equity deal — how much do programs love being in their conferences?

Notre Dame is supposed to join one of those?

“That’s far and away the most exhausting Notre Dame take,” said Mike Golic Jr., a former Irish offensive lineman and current radio host/television analyst. “In the face of any explanation, it just boils down to no one likes that Notre Dame is allowed to be different. And you just can’t argue with those people.”

Notre Dame made the BCS National Championship Game once. It made the four-team CFP twice. It made the first 12-team CFP and barely missed the second. Whatever the Irish are doing with their independence, it generally seems to be working compared with the rest of the sport.

“What are conferences anymore? They’re scheduling alignments,” said Ty Hildenbrandt, a co-host of “The Solid Verbal” podcast and Notre Dame fan. “At some point the money will matter, but for the time being, independence doesn’t hold Notre Dame back from winning a national championship, having a good team, getting good players.”

‘The schedule stinks. Notre Dame should be punished.’

Notre Dame’s 2025 schedule was front-loaded, with two marquee clashes with Miami and Texas A&M followed by a generally boring slate after mid-September. Beat the Hurricanes or the Aggies last season, and Notre Dame would have made the College Football Playoff. But after starting 0-2, the Irish needed modest help, only to get hit with an inside straight of results working against them. And the same thing might happen again this season if Notre Dame drops both of its marquee games: a home date with Miami (Nov. 7) and a road trip to BYU (Oct. 17).

With just three preseason AP Top 25 teams on the schedule, Notre Dame has a smaller margin for error than most title contenders. That doesn’t mean the Irish are the only program short on resume-building Saturdays. Miami and Texas Tech each face one preseason Top 25 team all season. At least the Hurricanes get a no-doubter in the Irish. The Red Raiders’ only preseason Top 25 opponent is No. 23 Houston. USC, Indiana and Penn State won’t play a Power 4 opponent outside their Big Ten schedules.

There’s an argument to be made that Notre Dame should get some benefit of the doubt because the 2026 games against Wisconsin and Michigan State were agreed upon years ago, when the Badgers and Spartans were much better. This Sunday’s game against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in Green Bay was actually supposed to be played in 2020 but was postponed because of the pandemic’s disruption of nonconference schedules. But strength of schedule rankings don’t take that nuance into account. Texas and Ohio State should be rewarded for playing a game with national stakes. Neither should lose the benefit of the doubt to Notre Dame in a comparison of close resumes because the Badgers and Spartans were supposed to be good.

But does the schedule matter as much as people think?

“I’ve just noticed the people who are less informed about Notre Dame’s roster tend to be the ones who gravitate more towards the lazier stance of, ‘Well, that’s a soft schedule. They don’t play anyone,’” national podcast host Josh Pate said. “By the way, that’s very counterintuitive because that just means it’s more likely they’re in the Playoff. And so what are you saying? Are you saying they’re going to get to the Playoff and then because they didn’t play five top-10 teams, they’re gonna lose? Like, what’s the logic there? I never really follow that.”

‘Notre Dame can’t win the big one.’

Until two years ago, this was mostly true.

Notre Dame had not won a major bowl game in 31 years before it won two of them in less than two weeks during the 2024-25 CFP, taking out Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and Penn State in the Orange Bowl to advance to the national title game, where it lost to Ohio State. Still, Notre Dame’s 38-year wait for a national championship is the longest drought in school history. There is no higher-profile championship gap in college football.

“A lot of people believe something can’t happen right up until it happens,” Pate said. “That group thought (Ohio State coach) Ryan Day was overrated right up until he won a title two years ago and thought (Georgia coach Kirby Smart) couldn’t win the big one and still thinks (Oregon coach) Dan Lanning and (Texas coach Steve) Sarkisian can’t win a big one.

“I really think it takes Notre Dame winning a national title to, like, slap people in the face and say, ‘Hey, man, there’s a third rail here.’ And it was here the whole time. You just refuse to acknowledge it until the confetti rains down on us.”

Notre Dame is 5-6 under Freeman against opponents ranked in the AP top 10 at kickoff and 16-7 against AP Top 25 opponents, the latter of which is the second-best record nationally the past four seasons, behind only Smart at Georgia. Freeman is also the last coach to beat Cignetti and college football’s defending champs.

The Irish have not won the biggest one (or beaten Ohio State), but they have won plenty of games with gravitas.

‘Notre Dame gets special treatment from the CFP!’

Long before last season kicked off, the Power 4 conferences had agreed to tweak the College Football Playoff selection process to avoid a situation exactly like the one that played out last December.

The four Power 4 conference champions are now guaranteed berths, as part of a new CFP contract conference executives agreed to in the spring of 2024. That change should limit the chances of two Group of 6 conference champions making the field. As part of the same negotiations, starting this year, Notre Dame gets an automatic bid to the 12-team field if it finishes in the CFP selection committee’s top 12. The Irish finished 11th last season but were jumped by Tulane and James Madison, the fourth- and fifth-highest ranked conference champions.

If this year’s rules were in place last December, Notre Dame would have made the field over Miami, and Duke would have grabbed an automatic bid instead of James Madison.

All of the Power 4 programs agreed on this rule before it went into effect. It’s not like Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, who shed light on the impending top-12 clause last December in the aftermath of the Irish’s CFP snub, railroaded this language into the CFP contract on his own.

Notre Dame has to win enough games to qualify for the CFP, just like everybody else.

“I don’t know that anyone looks at that roster and knows a thing about this sport and doesn’t say that’s a prime playoff or national title contender,” Pate said. “There is a second category that I still think is pretty sizable nationally. That is making the mistake of judging a team by schedule. It happens every year. Notre Dame is the poster child for that this year.

“If Notre Dame played in the Southeastern Conference, I’d pick them to win the league. I couldn’t be higher on them. But if we took 100 percent of the Southern audience, there’d be a sizable chunk that would go back to the whole, ‘Well, what have they really proven?’”

Starting Sunday night, Notre Dame can begin to win hearts and minds. The Irish probably can’t convince everyone of their title credentials this season, even if they win the whole thing. But beating Wisconsin would at least be a start. And rest assured, the conversation will continue.