Notre Dame Fighting Irish football rivalries

Notre Dame Fighting Irish football rivalries refers to rivalries of the University of Notre Dame in the sport of college football. Because the Fighting Irish are independent of a football conference, they play a national schedule, which annually includes historic rivals University of Southern California and Navy, more recent rival Stanford, and five games with ACC teams. Scheduling with historic rivals Purdue and Michigan State University and historically intermittent rival University of Michigan has been reduced by Notre Dame's transition to the ACC alliance and the Big Ten's transition to a nine-game conference schedule.

Notre Dame's main rival is the University of Southern California. The Notre Dame–USC football rivalry has been played annually since 1926, except from 1943–45, and is regarded as the greatest intersectional series in college football. The winner of the annual rivalry game is awarded the coveted Jeweled Shillelagh, a war club adorned with emerald-emblazoned clovers signifying Fighting Irish victories and Ruby-emblazoned Trojan warrior heads for Trojan wins. When the original shillelagh ran out of space for the Trojan heads and shamrocks after the 1989 game, it was retired and is permanently displayed at Notre Dame. A new shillelagh was introduced for the 1997 season. Through the 2015 season, Notre Dame leads the series 46–36–5.

The origin of the series is quite often recounted as a "conversation between wives" of Notre Dame head coach Knute Rockne and USC athletic director Gywnn Wilson. In fact, many sports writers often cite this popular story as the main reason the two schools decided to play one another. As the story goes, the rivalry began with USC looking for a national rival. USC dispatched Wilson and his wife to Lincoln, Nebraska, where Notre Dame was playing Nebraska on Thanksgiving Day. On that day (Nebraska 17, Notre Dame 0) Knute Rockne resisted the idea of a home-and-home series with USC because of the travel involved, but Mrs. Wilson was able to persuade Mrs. Rockne that a trip every two years to sunny Southern California was better than one to snowy, hostile Nebraska. Mrs. Rockne spoke to her husband and on December 4, 1926, USC became an annual fixture on Notre Dame’s schedule.

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