Notre Dame football opts for actual bowling with local fundraising effort

Notre Dame football chose to sit out bowl season after being snubbed from the College Football Playoff. Now the Irish are embracing the other kind of bowling for a local fundraiser event.

The program announced Wednesday evening that it will be accepting donations for 24 hours that will given to organizations in the South Bend, Ind., community.

Notre Dame will be holding a private bowling event with groups from the team competing against each other in bowling and fundraising. The bowling teams can gain a competitive advantage by raising the most amount of money.

The program is accepting donations online through 5 p.m. EST on Thursday (linked here). Donations can be designated for a specific player to help that player’s bowling team.

The football program did not specify which local organizations will receive the donated money. It also didn’t share when the private bowling event will occur.

The program’s attention will likely be on New York City on Saturday when junior running back Jeremiyah Love will learn if he’s won the 2025 Heisman Trophy. He was named Monday as one of four finalists for college football’s most prestigious individual award.

Notre Dame learned Sunday that it wasn’t selected to play in this year’s College Football Playoff. The playoff committee dropped Notre Dame down to No. 11 following its 10-2 season. Miami, who the Irish lost to on Aug. 31, jumped ahead of the Irish with its 10-2 record after being ranked at No. 12 earlier in the week. BYU (10-2), which was previously ranked No. 11, dropped down to No. 12 after a 34-7 loss to No. 4 Texas Tech (12-1) on Saturday in the Big 12 Championship. No. 9 Alabama (10-3) didn’t drop at all following Saturday’s 28-7 loss to No. 3 Georgia (12-1).

The Irish opted to not participate in a postseason bowl after consulting players on the team. Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua expressed his displeasure with the way Notre Dame dropped in the rankings in the final two releases and how the ACC put social media might behind Miami’s push to be ranked ahead of Notre Dame. Bevacqua held a press conference Tuesday in which he explained the team’s decision to not play in a bowl game.

“The team making the decision not to play in this year’s bowl was a decision solely isolated to this year,” Bevacqua said. “We can’t speak for future years. We can’t speak for what the captains on the team feel like, the nature of the season. Maybe you started the season strong and then fell off, and here’s a way to turn the corner and reignite momentum and springboard you into the next year. Maybe one year you have an unbelievably young team, and you wanna kind of start that maturation process for the next year.

“But this year, this was a team that had national championship aspirations. This was a team that was unbelievably close-knit. And in the crazy world of major college football emotions, you find out you’re not in the CFP, and you’re shocked. And then you get a call, ‘Hey, do you wanna go play in this bowl game?’

“And so [head coach] Marcus [Freeman] places a ton of emphasis on the roles of the captains of the team. You saw that if you’re watching the Peacock documentary. These aren’t just the letter C pasted onto a jersey, kind of a pat on the back. They have a real role in our team and in the decisions the team makes.

“Week in and week out, he relies on those captains and really treats them as a key element of the decision-making process. Bounces things off of them. How’s the team feeling? What are we thinking? I think his relationship with the team, but particularly with the captains, is magical.

“So what he did is he reached out to the captains and said, ‘Hey, listen, yeah, this is rough, but let’s not make an emotional decision. Let’s make a smart decision. Let’s take a deep breath. Now, granted, you don’t have a week to take a deep breath. You don’t have 24 hours to take a deep breath. You have a couple of hours. But settle down, reload — as he says — and let’s think about this. Talk about it with each other. Get a sense of how the team feels.’

“And the unanimous message that came back was, we are such a close team, those guys in that locker room, that they wanted to make sure that the last team that took the field as part of the 2025 Notre Dame team was the same team that took the field when we got off the plane to Miami.

“They didn’t feel it was right for this team to make the decision to go out there and not be that full team that has been so close together, that’s gonna have a great event here in town just to kind of let their hair down tomorrow. That was the decision.

“And it was a decision that I applaud. I think it was a hard decision. I think they knew it was gonna be a hard decision. I think they knew it was gonna be a decision that not everybody was gonna love. But it was the right decision for this team at this moment. I’m positive of that.

“And does that mean that if we’re in this situation again in the future that the same decision would be made? No. It’s year by year, case by case. It was the right decision for this team at this moment.”