Plenty of teams enter the 2026 season with College Football Playoff aspirations, but two programs separate themselves from the pack in a way that points toward a head-to-head game in Las Vegas on Jan. 25: Notre Dame and Oregon.
ESPN analyst Bill Connelly’s preseason SP+ rankings placed Oregon second in the country, behind just Ohio State, with Notre Dame sitting at third. That gap is thin enough that either program projects as a top-three team nationally before a game has been played yet, and it puts both ahead of every other potential contender outside Columbus.
Why Notre Dame and Oregon have a great chance to make national title game
Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman returns quarterback CJ Carr, who is expected to take a big step forward after his first full season as a starter, behind what is regarded as the deepest roster South Bend has assembled in years.
Oregon head coach Dan Lanning convinced Dante Moore to return for a fifth-year season instead of entering the NFL Draft. This gives the Ducks one of the more battle-tested passers in the country to pair with a defense that returns its entire starting line.
Both coaches share a notable distinction: neither has won a national championship. A Notre Dame-Oregon final would pit two coaches who are chasing the same milestone against each other on the sport’s biggest stage.
The programs’ trajectories have been crossing each other’s paths for several seasons. Oregon has advanced further in the College Football Playoff in the past couple of seasons, from missing the field entirely in 2023 to a semifinal appearance in 2025.
Notre Dame was left out of last season’s playoff despite a resume that much of the national media saw as good enough to include; that snub has fueled the team to become the subject of unusually high preseason expectations for a team that isn’t the reigning champion.
Neither of these teams is a guarantee for the title game. Oregon’s schedule includes Ohio State on Nov. 7, while Notre Dame’s ceiling depends heavily on Carr’s development and a defense that struggled against its best opponents.
But of the handful of teams with a realistic chance at going to Las Vegas, Notre Dame and Oregon are the two whose rosters point most directly at each other.
