Josh Pate argued that rivalry games should be untouchable, full stop, and that the USC-Notre Dame series getting shelved for several years before its 2030 return is exactly the kind of scheduling drift college football needs to stop tolerating.

The series will not be played this year or next, but it is confirmed to resume in 2030. A viewer asked Pate how he should feel about that news — celebrate the return, or resent the wait. Pate's answer was immediate:

The argument

Pate placed rivalry games above even the sport's biggest showcase. "It's like the Pope meme, man. I'm holding Notre Dame USC here above and beyond the college football playoff logo cuz I grew up like that," he said. He went further, saying rivalries are "the very bedrock and foundation of college football" and that they "should be more secure than Fort Knox."

His proposed fix has no gray area. If he were commissioner, the terms of membership would be non-negotiable: "you sign up to be part of Notre Dame, you're signing up to play USC every year."

From there, Pate said, "Case closed." Any athletic director or coach unhappy with that obligation, in his framing, doesn't get to renegotiate the schedule — they get to go coach somewhere else.

The analysis underneath that stance is where Pate got specific. He tied the USC-Notre Dame scare to a broader trend he called playoff brain rot — the instinct to treat every scheduling decision as a playoff-optimization problem rather than a football tradition to be honored. He cited Texas and Sark's postseason math from a year ago as the clearest illustration: after finishing 9-3 and missing the playoff, the argument circulated that a soft week-one game instead of Ohio State would have kept Texas' record spotless and its playoff case intact. Pate didn't dismiss the logic. He called it "true and irrelevant, cuz that's not how a competitor should think." That's the film-room distinction worth sitting with — the math checks out, but it describes a program optimizing for a committee's spreadsheet instead of playing the schedule a proud program should want. Crediting the logic while rejecting the mindset is the whole argument in miniature.

The complication

Here's the honest tension in Pate's own case: he conceded the committee's incentive structure is part of what created this problem in the first place. He pointed to Indiana's out-of-conference approach — loading up on lighter competition while it protects its Big Ten record — as basically a bet that the committee won't punish a clean record regardless of who it came against. Pate said flatly, "you won't. Playoff committee won't," and noted the committee has said as much publicly. If he's right that the sport's own selection process rewards soft scheduling, then rivalry games aren't just vulnerable to bad-actor administrators — they're vulnerable to a system that currently has no mechanism to penalize the programs that duck them. Fort Knox security doesn't mean much if the guards at the vault are the ones writing the incentives to skip it.

Pate's own fix for that isn't emotional appeal, it's structural — he wants a rankings process built to let a battle-tested 9-3 team leapfrog a schedule-padded 11-1 team, so a program like Indiana can't treat cream-puff scheduling as, in his words, a way to say the committee "won't box us out of that playoff." Whether the committee ever adopts that kind of resume-weighting is a separate fight from whether USC-Notre Dame should be permanent, but the two arguments live in the same worldview: protect the things that make the sport what it is, and stop letting the chase for a playoff spot rewrite the rules around them.

The kicker

USC and Notre Dame will play again, eventually, and Pate is glad about that much. But by his own logic, the next threatened rivalry is already circling somewhere on some future athletic director's spreadsheet, and Fort Knox only works if somebody actually guards the door.