Sherman Oaks Notre Dame confirmed on Wednesday that 6-foot-7 Tyran Stokes, considered the No. 1 high school basketball player from the class of 2026, has withdrawn from school.
Stokes arrived last season from a Northern California prep school and helped the Knights reach the Southern Section Open Division championship game and the Southern California Regional final.
His departure could produce changes in national TV game plans for Notre Dame. The Knights are still expected to be one of the top teams in Southern California with San Diego State commit Zachary White and top junior NaVorro Bowman.
Stokes leaving Notre Dame makes Sierra Canyon the Mission League preseason favorite.
USC had lost four of five, its season already all but lost, when Lincoln Riley made a bold move early last November that would have lasting ripple effects. He benched starting quarterback Miller Moss, in favor of backup Jayden Maiava, whose big arm and mobility gave the Trojans’ offense a different, more dynamic look.
The sudden switch made for a tense two weeks leading up to last season’s meeting with Nebraska. Not everyone in the locker room, you see, was thrilled with Moss’ removal.
But the move paid dividends in the end. Maiava injected life into the offense, USC returned from its bye and won three of its last four to finish the season. More critically, Riley found his quarterback of the future.
“The way that Jayden handled both when he wasn’t the starter, then when he was, I think set the stage for the player he has started to become and what he means to this program and this team right now,” Riley said this week. “He handled it with class both ways, and that makes a huge difference.”
USC starting quarterback Jayden Maiava throws a pass against Notre Dame at Notre Dame Stadium on Oct. 18.
(Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
A season later, USC is once again searching for answers coming out of its second bye, with Nebraska looming in November. Though, none of the questions this time concern the quarterback, who has been one of the best in the Big Ten. Nor are they as easy to solve as plugging in one player.
USC’s defensive front was just steamrolled for over 300 yards by Notre Dame’s run game. The offensive line is still dealing with nagging injuries. And the Trojans own rushing attack left a lot to be desired in their last outing.
Nevertheless, USC is 5-2, still within conceivable reach of the College Football Playoff conversation. The Trojans should be favored in four of their final five games, the lone exception being a trip to Eugene in late November. You don’t have to squint too hard to see a potential path to the Playoff … assuming USC can iron out its issues, first. That’s more encouraging than the circumstances were at this time last year.
“We’re still in a good place,” tight end Walker Lyons said. “We still control our destiny where we’re at right now.”
That’s been the message since USC left South Bend in bitter defeat. But control could slip through their hands in a hurry if Riley can’t right the ship this week on the road at Nebraska. A single loss, especially one outside of Oregon, would all but sink those hopes.
“I think we’ve learned a lot about ourselves with some of these really good matchups we’ve had as of late,” Riley said. “We know what we’ve gotta do. It’s very clear to us. Now we’ve just got to do a great job of it.”
That part hasn’t been so easy for USC as it unraveled down the stretch in each of its last three seasons. The Trojans are 6-11 in October and November since winning seven of eight during that stretch of Riley’s first campaign.
Adding a hostile road environment to that equation this week only makes matters more complicated. The Trojans haven’t won a true road game in October or November outside of Los Angeles since Oct. 28, 2023.
Nor do they seem to have pinned down precisely what’s ailing their defense at the moment. A week after one of USC’s best defensive performances of the season in a win over Michigan, the Trojans suddenly had major errors in execution, leading the Irish to rack up 306 rushing yards, the most allowed by a D’Anton Lynn-led defense. Lynn, the Trojans’ second-year coordinator, called the mistakes “extremely” frustrating.
But like Riley, he’s confident a week away will have done USC’s defense well.
“At the end of the day, when we’re on the same page, we know we can be a good defense,” Lynn said. “But we have to be on the same page and trust that the guy next to us is going to do his job, and we don’t have to overcompensate for anything.”
Notre Dame’s Jadarian Price (24) carries the ball and pulls away from USC’s Bishop Fitzgerald (19) on Oct. 18 in South Bend, Ind.
(Paul Beaty / Associated Press)
That trust comes much easier now for Maiava, after a full year as USC’s starting quarterback. Though, Nebraska and its top-rated pass defense won’t make it easy, per se. The Huskers are giving up a mere 127 yards passing per game through seven games.
It all makes for a test that the Trojans can’t afford to fail, one where its quarterback will be critical.
“Keep your head down, keep fighting,” Maiava said. “Just stay in it no matter what. We had this bye and we got to rest up a little bit which is great. But we need to be that beast every single day.”
Injury update
Left tackle Elijah Paige and center Kilian O’Connor both dressed for practice on Tuesday, but Riley expressed some doubt that USC would have its full starting offensive line available in time for Saturday’s game.
“We’re better,” Riley said, “but we’re not at a point where I’m like, ‘Yeah those guys are ready to go.’ We’re just not to that point yet.”
Welcome back to the Times of Troy newsletter, where after one last rain-soaked showdown in South Bend, we pour one out for one of the great rivalries in the history of college football. After a century of meeting on the football field, USC and Notre Dame are not currently scheduled to meet again. This, by all accounts, is a terrible shame.
Outside of L.A., the college football world has placed the blame for the rivalry’s demise squarely on USC’s shoulders. Notre Dame made sure that was the case when its athletic director, Pete Bevacqua, ran to Sports Illustrated last spring, immediately after USC made an offer to renew the series for one year.
Fight on! Are you a true Trojans fan?
As PR moves go, it was a smart one: By firing the first missive, Bevacqua knew that Notre Dame could shape the narrative around negotiations. And ever since, as Bevacqua hoped, Notre Dame has been cast by much of the national media as valiantly attempting to save the rivalry at any cost, while USC looks like its running scared away from it.
Which is really quite ironic, if you know the recent history of how Notre Dame has handled its rivalries.
Thirteen years ago, minutes before the two schools were set to face off in South Bend, former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick famously handed then-Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon a letter as notice that Notre Dame intended to cancel the remainder of their rivalry series. It was as passive aggressive as scheduling changes get. Brandon didn’t even read the letter until after the game.
These two teams went way back, before USC even first fielded a football team. The two Midwest rivals first faced off back in 1887, when Michigan literally taught Notre Dame how to play football. (Not kidding.) Not to mention it was actually a Detroit Free Press columnist who first called Notre Dame the “Fighting Irish.” (Imagine the royalties!)
But in 2012, Notre Dame declared without any further conversation that it was backing out of the game. The reason? As part of its move to the Atlantic Coast Conference in every other sport, the Irish football program agreed to play five games against ACC schools every year.
No one at Notre Dame seemed all that concerned about history and tradition then. Swarbrick, at the time, called canceling the series “a necessary precaution,” given the future uncertainty surrounding its schedule.
Sound familiar?
Except, in this case, Notre Dame kept Purdue on its future schedule. And Michigan State. It chose to maintain its series with Navy, which had beaten the Irish just three times in the previous half-century, as well as Stanford. I wonder why.
Months later, then-Michigan coach Brady Hoke told a crowd at a booster luncheon that Notre Dame was “chickening out” of the rivalry. And he was right.
A dozen years later, Notre Dame is floating the same accusations about USC.
Except, in this case, USC has made efforts to maintain the series after moving to a much less flexible and more difficult schedule in the Big Ten. It has tried to keep the game going despite being locked into nine conference games — and with far less incentive to add strong non-conference opponents than there was in 2012. USC even amended its initial offer to extend the rivalry for multiple years, instead of just one, as a compromise.
Look, USC isn’t blameless in all of this. But no one seems to have acknowledged yet that Notre Dame hasn’t exactly helped negotiations along. It doesn’t want to move the game from October or November to September, as USC has asked — not because of tradition, as has been suggested, but purely because it’s much more convenient to Notre Dame to keep USC later in the season, when no other top programs want a team such as Notre Dame smack dab in the middle of its conference slate.
Who cares about the tradition of when the game is played, if the other option is it’s not played at all? If the Irish are so concerned about maintaining the USC rivalry, why didn’t they insist that Clemson — a team it has much less history with — play their newly signed 12-season series in mid-October?
Because Notre Dame is used to dictating the terms of engagement and getting its way. It has the flexibility of being without a conference. And it also knows it has the narrative firmly on its side. So why bother budging when the pitchforks are already pointed toward USC?
I don’t expect that to change any time soon, even as both athletic directors say they’re “optimistic” an agreement can be reached. Not unless USC is ready to capitulate. Until then, the public pressure will remain on the Trojans alone, while Notre Dame points across the bargaining table and cries chicken. Irony, be damned.
Yes … technically.
If USC wins each of its next five games to finish 10-2, you can count on the Trojans being in the 12-team field. But anything less than that, and they’re going to have a tough time making a case.
Let’s say USC only loses on the road to No. 6 Oregon from this point on. That would put the Trojans at 9-3, with just two Big Ten losses — and three overall. That’s a good season! But no team with three losses has ever made it into the Playoff, and while there’s a legitimate argument that this year will be the first, USC presumably wouldn’t have enough marquee wins to move the needle with the committee.
Michigan is currently USC’s only win over a team above .500. Nebraska, Iowa and Northwestern are all 5-2, but only one of the three has a top 25 win this season — the Huskers won their opener against No. 21 Cincinnati. The toughest test left aside from Oregon could very well be UCLA, which has won three in a row after starting 0-4.
Perhaps there’s a world where USC, with one conference loss, could end up in the Big Ten title game. But in addition to beating the Ducks, that would also require moving past either Ohio State or Indiana, neither of which have looked particularly vulnerable of late.
However you try to spin it, getting USC into the Playoff requires serious finesse. By losing to Notre Dame, the Trojans closed off the easiest path to a postseason run.
More than likely, USC’s hopes now hinge on running the table. But nothing I’ve seen recently suggests that’s a likely option. Instead, with each passing week, my 8-4 prediction is feeling just about right.
Jayden Maiava throws a pass under pressure in the second quarter against Notre Dame.
(Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
—Stop asking if Lincoln Riley is going to give up playcalling. It ain’t happening. It wasn’t that long ago that Riley’s playcalling was the main reason for his historic rise through the coaching ranks. That felt like ancient history on Saturday night, as Riley dialed up a failed trick play to star wideout Makai Lemon that ended in a game-altering fumble. Riley admitted after the game that it was “a stupid call,” which is the closest he’s come to accountability in that department. He added later that his two failed fourth-and-short calls weren’t very good either. “I’ve gotta be way better for our guys,” he said after. It’s good that he recognizes his shortcomings in this situation, but how we’ve gotten to this point, with Riley’s playcalling having a clear negative affect, I can’t quite explain. Riley has had impressive moments calling plays this season, which are easy to forget after such a bad performance. But the fact that he seems to be at his worst in the biggest moments is not the best sign for turning things around in the future. All that said, it would presumably take an intervention from one of his bosses to hand off those duties to Luke Huard. The ego hit would simply be too significant for Riley to initiate that change otherwise.
—USC struggled to protect Jayden Maiava, and it paid the price. The Trojans’ front allowed a season-high 17 pressures to Notre Dame, and Maiava completed a meager 31% of his passes and threw both of his interceptions when under pressure Saturday. The good news is that reinforcements are on the way. Starting left tackle Elijah Paige dressed for Saturday’s game, but was only available in case of emergency. Center Kilian O’Connor, meanwhile, was surprisingly listed as questionable against Notre Dame. Both should be good to go when USC takes on Nebraska in two weeks.
—USC has lost 11 straight on the road to top 25 teams, six of which came under Riley. The last win USC had against a ranked opponent on the road came in November … of 2016! And USC’s last chance this season to rectify this terrible streak will likely be in Eugene next month — a game the Trojans are, as of now, unlikely to win. That means we’re staring down the barrel of an entire decade without a win over a ranked team on the road, which is totally unacceptable for a team that sees itself as a blue blood of college football.
—After having zero rim protection a year ago, USC might have one of the best rim protectors in the Big Ten this season. Just take a look at the statline for new 7-foot-5 center Gabe Dynes from USC’s exhibition against Loyola Marymount. Dynes had six blocks, three of which came in his first 10 minutes of the game. Dynes also had nine points, eight rebounds and even three assists, as the USC took care of business in a 60-51 win. The Trojans shot just 33%, but showed that their defense can be a strength by holding Loyola Marymount to just 28% from the field. Dynes will be an important part of that equation and if he can contribute on offense, well … the sky could be the limit for the 7-footer.
Olympic sports spotlight
After losing four of six to start its Big Ten slate, USC’s women’s volleyball team bounced back in a big way over the past weekend, winning two critical matches on the road. The highlight of the weekend was a 3-1 win over No. 9 Wisconsin, USC’s best win yet of this season.
Redshirt freshman outside hitter London Wijay had a career performance in the win over Wisconsin, tying a career-high with 24 kills, while freshman libero Taylor Deckert tallied back-to-back 20-dig performances over the weekend. USC also handled Iowa in four sets, to bring its Big Ten record to 4-4 on the season.
Jason Bateman as Vince, Jude Law as Jake in “Black Rabbit.”
(Courtesy of Netflix)
The last time Jason Bateman got in with the wrong crowd on a Netflix show, one of the best shows of the last decade was born. I didn’t want to place “Ozark”-level expectations on “Black Rabbit,” Bateman’s new show on Netflix with Jude Law, but after watching the first two episodes, I can say with confidence that it’s off to just as strong of a start.
Law stars as a New York restaurateur whose life is upended when his estranged brother, played by Bateman, suddenly comes back into his life and drags him unwillingly into New York’s criminal underworld. The show’s tone is about as tense as it gets — think “The Bear” meets “Uncut Gems” — but if you’re in the mood for a thrill ride, then this show is worth your time.
Until next time …
That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected], and follow me on X at @Ryan_Kartje. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — It was an ominous bit of imagery at what could be the bitter end of a century-long series. Dark clouds descending over Touchdown Jesus, and a heavy downpour soaking every soul in Notre Dame Stadium, as if Mother Nature herself was lashing out at the prospect of one of college football’s defining rivalries dying in vain.
Both USC and Notre Dame have suggested they want the rivalry to continue if they can come to an agreement in the coming months. But if this was indeed the end, 99 years since USC and Notre Dame first met on a football field, it would be a particularly crushing finale for the Trojans, who fell 34-24 and now find their hopes of a College Football Playoff bid hanging by a thread.
Saturday seemed well on its way to a different sort of conclusion, when the Irish shanked a 31-yard field goal in the fourth quarter. Three plays later, USC quarterback Jayden Maiava found wideout Makai Lemon downfield for a 42-yard gain.
All the game’s momentum was suddenly in the hands of USC coach Lincoln Riley and his offense. That’s when Riley dialed up a hair-brained trick play that he’d surely regret later.
Sprinting right on an end-around, Lemon took the handoff from Maiava and immediately found himself trapped by the Notre Dame defense. Lemon cocked the ball as if he were going to throw, only to have the ball stripped away.
It was a rare misstep from the Trojans star, but an especially costly one. It took seven plays for Notre Dame to find the end zone after that, as quarterback C.J. Carr punched it in from one yard out to put the game away.
He stood taller than any other player on the field. His wingspan likely stretches far beyond any other wideout in the Mission League or, possibly, the Southern Section.
Tyran Stokes appeared as a man among men as he stretched and worked his way through pregame drills, cameras lined up along the sideline aimed at the senior as if he was back on the AAU basketball circuit — and for good reason.
The comparison was hard not to make during Sherman Oaks Notre Dame’s 57-14 victory over Culver City (3-2) on Friday night.
Is this what LeBron James looked like on the football field?
James, who played at St. Vincent–St. Mary High in Akron, Ohio, during his sophomore and junior yearsin 2000 and 2001, used his 6-foot-7 frame to earn all-state honors, the future four-time NBA most valuable player even garnering attention from Notre Dame and Urban Meyer, then a wide receivers coach for the Fighting Irish, according to ESPN. At 6-foot-8 and 250 pounds, Stokes is larger — and already plays for Notre Dame; well, the Knights of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame (3-2).
The No. 1 high school senior in the nation — according to multiple college basketball recruiting sites — wanted more. Stokes jostled his love of a second sport, football, becoming a wide receiver and defensive end on the football team earlier in September, just months before his final season of basketball at begins.
Basketball standout Tyran Stokes of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame comes up short an attempt to make his first catch Friday against Culver City.
(Craig Weston)
“He improves our practice atmosphere, he improves our game atmosphere, he improves our mindset and our competitive spirit in the room,” Notre Dame coach Evan Yabu said, noting Stokes has been a “pleasure” to have on the team.
Towering over defensive backs, Stokes was a go-to target for senior quarterback Wyatt Brown — who put the game out of reach in the first half with a three-touchdown effort — anytime he appeared on the field. Brown finished 21-for-33 passing with 301 yards and five touchdowns. On the ground, he tallied 79 yards and one touchdown.
His final pass was the one that Notre Dame will remember.
Matched up on 5-foot-8 Culver City defensive back Derrick Huezo Jr., Stokes burst forward and created 15 yards of separation. Huezo could only shrug as he trailed Stokes.
The now-two=sport star took the ball 45 yards to the house to cement the final score.
On Stokes’ first play, in Notre Dame’s second drive of the first quarter, Brown caught Stokes across the middle of the field.
The ball slipped through Stokes’ hands.
He wouldn’t let that happen when it mattered most, the clock ticking on his first game. Stokes finishes with two receptions for 57 yards (he was targeted eight times).
“I know he’s a big-time hooper,” Brown said. “But when he came over here, he was very humble and open about learning — which is a testament to him.”
Stokes politely declined all interview requests following the game — so it goes being the most-sought-after basketball recruit in the nation.
But any kid — or fan — who asked for a picture, he waited and obliged.
The moment wasn’t just big for him, but for the whole school — Stokes, one of the last to trot to the locker room to get ready for a bus ride back to Sherman Oaks.
A Sherman Oaks Notre Dame football player had heard the rumors of a new student joining the football team on Monday at practice.
Sure enough, 6-foot-8 Tyran Stokes, the No. 1 high school basketball player in the country from the class of 2026, showed up wearing practice jersey No. 67. He’ll need 10 days of practices before he can play in a football game, but coach Evan Yabu was excited to have him.
Tyran Stokes at his first football practice. 6-8, 245 pounds. USC basketball coach Eric Musselman was there after learning Stokes wasn’t at basketball practice. pic.twitter.com/2h9Z2FyVIN
He’s supposed to play receiver and Yabu observed, “We don’t have anyone 6-8, 245 pounds.”
Notre Dame’s Tyran Stokes celebrates after a slam dunk in the closing seconds of a 68-61 victory at Harvard-Westlake last season.
( Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)
Stokes could use a break from basketball after a busy offseason of traveling and games. Notre Dame basketball coach Matt Sargeant is fine with Stokes trying football. He has three other players on the football team.
USC basketball coach Eric Musselman looked like a genius when he went out to the football field to watch Stokes. He had come to Notre Dame to watch basketball practice, then heard about Stokes missing basketball practice.
Basketball player Zach White said of Stokes trying football, “He’ll do great if he puts his mind to it.”
For all the push-ups completed, for all the running drills endured and for all the yelling received during his days playing high school football at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High in the 1990s, Dan Keeler is getting the last laugh later this month when he takes command of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in Coronado.
“Now I’m going to have to salute him,” former Notre Dame coach Kevin Rooney quipped.
Keeler, who graduated from high school in 1994 and went on to the Naval Academy, is taking command of one of the Navy’s most prominent ships.
The USS Abraham Lincoln arrives San Diego in 2020.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)
“It is incredible that he has earned this responsibility,” Rooney said.
Keeler was a defensive back and track athlete for the Knights and is one of five siblings who attended Notre Dame. Track coach Joe McNab, who just won his 11th Southern Section championship, was his defensive backs coach.
“Good kid,” McNab said.
“He’s a guy who fit all the boxes in terms of being a great kid and doing things right,” Rooney said.
Rooney, McNab and former football assistant Jeff Kraemer will make the trip to the San Diego area for the change-of-command ceremony. For some reason, Keeler invited his former high school coaches after all those days of sweat and tears in Sherman Oaks.
“If I had known he was going to be so powerful, I wouldn’t have made him run so much,” Kraemer said.
Keeler isn’t the first Notre Dame graduate to rise in the Navy ranks. Retired Adm. Mike Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011 and graduated from Notre Dame in 1964. Mullen once came back to his alma mater to address the student body.
Rooney, who retired in 2019 after 40 years as football coach, said his goal was always to “help kids become great people and do things right.”
Coaches know that the best day of all is when a graduate comes back to campus and tells them how they are doing and explains how lessons learned as teenagers really made a difference in their life.
As summer begins and graduates move on with their lives and the class of 2029 arrives, it’s a good reminder to everyone that it’s not wins and losses that matter most in high school. It’s teaching life lessons and preparing students to become adults, good people and good community members.
To see a former Los Angeles-area high school football player take charge of an aircraft carrier is proof that all that running to gain stamina, all that preaching to work together as a team, all those lectures that practice makes perfect … it’s true.
You only need to listen, learn and dedicate yourself to reaching a goal.
A salute to all the coaches and teachers who understand their real job is to create opportunities for their students to succeed through wisdom and inspiration.
Capt. Keeler, Bravo Zulu and Anchors Aweigh. Be safe.
With the bases loaded and her team down by one run in the seventh inning, JuJu Brower stood in the batter’s box for El Modena in a Southern Section Division 1 quarterfinal playoff game Wednesday. Her team was trying to rally against one of the hottest softball teams, Sherman Oaks Notre Dame.
Brower hadn’t been fully cleared by her doctors to play catcher because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament in August suffered while playing flag football. She had been cleared to hit, something she was doing for four weeks. Then came her most important at-bat of the season. She delivered a two-run single up the middle to help El Modena come away with a 6-4 victory and advance to Saturday’s semifinals against Temescal Canyon.
“It means a lot,” Brower said of her hit and the comeback. She had to go through months of rehab just to get back on the field, from stretching to leg exercises.
El Modena started the game with consecutive home runs by Kaitlyn Galasso and Kylie Tafua. After that, Notre Dame pitcher Aliyah Garcia threw five consecutive scoreless innings to help the Knights take a 4-2 lead going into the seventh. Charley Tapia had a home run and triple.
But the fifth inning was the key moment for the Knights. They had the bases loaded and none out against No. 2 pitcher Ashley Driskill. She got a 1-2-3 double play, then a flyout to end the threat.
Then El Modena scored four runs in the top of the seventh to take the lead and eliminate the Knights, Monica Garcia had a run-scoring single to support Brower’s hit. Notre Dame had been hitting home runs in bunches during playoff wins over Orange Lutheran and El Segundo.
El Modena coach Bobby Calderon praised Brower. for her dedication to make it back to the field this season. “For her to come through at that moment shows how much she believes in our team,” he said.
Norco 9, Chino Hills 1: Ashley Duran had three hits for the top-seeded Cougars, who will play Ayala on Saturday in the other Division 1 semifinal.
JSerra 7, Palos Verdes 1: Melia Munoz had a two-run home run and Annabel Raftery had four hits to lead JSerra in Division 2. JSerra will play Great Oak in the semifinals.
Santa Margarita 2, Ganesha 1: Sawyer Denser pitched the Eagles into the Division 2 semifinals. She struck out eight. Sofia Zavarella had a solo home run. Santa Margarita will play Los Alamitos, a 7-1 winner over La Serna.
Baseball
Carson 4, Taft 2: Xavier Allen hit a walk-off two-run home run in the bottom of the 11th inning to enable the Colts to advance to Saturday’s 10 a.m. City Section Division I championship game at Dodger Stadium.
With the contract between USC and Notre Dame set to expire and one of college football’s most storied rivalries in serious danger of ending, officials at USC extended an offer to Notre Dame earlier this month in hopes of continuing the historic series for at least one more season — through the fall of 2026 — a person familiar with the negotiations not authorized to discuss them publicly told The Times.
The future of the rivalry beyond that, in the eyes of USC’s leaders, hinges in large part on what happens with the format of the College Football Playoff — namely, the number of automatic qualifiers guaranteed to the Big Ten in future playoff fields. And until those questions are answered, USC leaders agree the best course forward for its century-old rivalry with Notre Dame would be to continue their arrangement one season at a time.
Anything else would be “a strategically bad decision,” a USC source said.
That timeline is where the two rivals find themselves at an impasse. Notre Dame is seeking a long-term extension of the series, and in an interview with Sports Illustrated earlier this week, Irish athletic director Pete Bevacqua not so subtly suggested that it was USC putting the rivalry at risk.
“I think Southern Cal and Notre Dame should play every year for as long as college football is played,” he told SI’s Pat Forde, “and SC knows that’s how we feel.”
The two blueblood programs have played 95 times since 1924, when the story goes that the wife of legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne convinced her husband to schedule the series so she could visit Southern California every other year. In the century since, only World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic have stood in the way of USC and Notre Dame meeting on the football field. Between them, the two rivals boast 16 national titles, more than any other teams that play an annual college football series.
They’re scheduled to meet again in October in South Bend. What happens to the historic series after that matchup may come down to who blinks in a high-stakes game of chicken between the two schools.
USC has no plans to budge on its position without clarity over whether the Big Ten will have four automatic qualifiers in any future playoff format, a source told The Times. With nine conference games already built into the schedule and the possibility of an annual crossover matchup with the Southeastern Conference still on their radar, USC officials see no reason to commit long term to the Notre Dame matchup without assurances they wouldn’t be punished for scheduling such a marquee nonconference matchup.
The demands of Big Ten travel have also been a part of the conversation at USC, to the point officials broached the potential with Notre Dame of moving the game to the first month of the season. The hope was to better balance its future slate of travel to the Midwest and East Coast. Last season, in their Big Ten debut, the Trojans lost all four of their Big Ten road trips.
But Notre Dame was not receptive to the idea of moving the game, which traditionally has been played in the latter half of the football season.
The Irish agreed earlier this month to a 12-year home-and-home scheduling agreement with Clemson. But while that deal seemed like a precursor to moving on from the USC series, Sports Illustrated reported this week that it was not expected to stand in the way of continuing with the Trojans.
Uncertainty has loomed over the rivalry since last summer when USC coach Lincoln Riley was first asked about its future at Big Ten media days.
“I know it means a lot to a lot of people,” Riley said. “The purist in you [says] no doubt. Now if you get in a position where you got to make a decision on what’s best for SC to help us win a national championship vs. keep that [game], shoot, then you got to look at it.
“And listen, we’re not the first example of that. Look all the way across the country. There have been a lot of other teams sacrificing rivalry games. And I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen. But as we get into this playoff structure, and if it changes or not, we’re in this new conference, we’re going to learn something about this as we go and what the right and the best track is to winning a national championship, that’s going to evolve.”
Those comments led many to point fingers at Riley for laying the groundwork for the rivalry’s possible demise. But as the two sides now stand at an impasse, a person familiar with the discussion at USC insisted that any decision on the series and its future would come from athletic director Jennifer Cohen.
She’ll have plenty to weigh on that front in the coming months, with both schools likely to dig in their heels for the long haul, slinging mud at one another in the meantime.
Nick Garcia, the throws coach at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, calls shotputter and discus thrower Aja Johnson “the dragon slayer.”
She’s only 5 feet 3 but slays taller girls competing in those events.
Last weekend, she won the Southern Section Division 3 shotput and discus titles. This weekend she will try to qualify for the state championships when competing at the Masters Meet at Moorpark High. She won the state discus title last year. She was state champion in the shotput in 2023.
Aja Johnson of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame.
(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)
Under Garcia’s guidance, Johnson uses technique, athleticism, agility and explosiveness to excel in the two events. She has committed to Louisville. Notre Dame athletes have won every Division 3 shotput or discus title since 2021. …
The City Section Division I baseball semifinals will be held Wednesday at Stengel Field in Glendale with a trip to Dodger Stadium on Saturday at stake. Carson will play Taft at 3 p.m., followed by Banning taking on Verdugo Hills at 6 p.m.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High was supposed to be a year or two away from softball prominence with its collection of six talented freshmen.
Well, the Knights have already arrived after a 9-7 victory over Trinity League champion Orange Lutheran on Thursday in an opening game of the Southern Section Division 1 playoffs in which freshman Jackie Morales hit three home runs.
Notre Dame, the Mission League champion, was leading most of the game until Orange Lutheran scored three runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to take a 7-6 lead. Morales tied the score with a home run in the top of the seventh. Then the Knights scored two more runs on an RBI single from freshman Keira Luderer and an RBI single from junior Ellayne Tellez-Perez.
Orange Lutheran was the Division 1 runner-up last season. For Notre Dame to go on the road and win is quite an accomplishment for coach Justin Siegel and the Knights.
“Big players show up in big situations and Jackie Morales has been a big player for us all season,” Siegel said.
Huntington Beach 8, Charter Oak 7: The Oilers hung on for the Division 1 win. Tea Gutierrez and Maleah Humble each had three hits.
