Matt Johnson
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish have poured tens of millions of dollars into their football program, trying to keep pace with other premier schools in the NIL era. Unfortunately, in a growing trend, that’s going to come at the cost of other Fighting Irish athletic programs.
On a recent episode of the Irish Illustrated Insider, that 17 Notre Dame sports will have their budgets cut in future years and that includes reducing the number of scholarships.
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Among the reported cuts, the Fighting Irish baseball team’s scholarships would be reduced to 10.2 in future years. The cuts will largely be felt across the board, except for a select few programs.
The only nine Notre Dame sports teams that aren’t getting cut are reportedly football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, hockey, men’s and women’s soccer, and men’s and women’s lacrosse. Every sport outside of that is either getting budgets frozen or reduced, with a cutdown in scholarships a part of that equation.
Notre Dame’s baseball program reached the College World Series in Omaha as recently as 2022. Now the program has lost 20-plus games in four consecutive seasons and it will finish 2026 with a losing record in conference for the third consecutive year.
Unfortunately, Notre Dame is only following a similar path as other major schools have taken. Arkansas announced in April that it was dropping its men’s and women’s tennis programs for financial reasons. In future years, this will mean there are fewer scholarships available and no sports to play for hundreds of student-athletes around the country.
Meanwhile, the Fighting Irish are projected to spend $30-plus million on their football roster this season, and that’s believed to be well under what some other schools are spending on their football teams.
It’s reflective of the direction collegiate sports is headed, with universities pouring money into the revenue-generating sports and slashing budgets for or outright eliminating the sports programs that don’t make money.
