Nbc Sports has lined up 11 Big Ten and Notre Dame football games across NBC and Peacock in the first four weeks of the 2026 college football season, starting with USC’s home opener against San Jose State on Aug. 29 and running through Notre Dame’s Sept. 19 matchup with Michigan State. The package gives the network an early-season run of rivalry games, ranked-program stages and a national champion’s home opener that will land on two platforms.
The schedule is the reason viewers are looking now: it puts the opening month of 2026 on the board in advance, with games spread between NBC and Peacock from late August through Sept. 19. Among the featured dates are Minnesota against Eastern Illinois on Sept. 3, Michigan hosting Western Michigan on Sept. 5, Washington against Washington State on Sept. 6, Iowa against Iowa State on Sept. 12, and Indiana’s home game against Western Kentucky on Sept. 19. The early slate also includes Eastern Michigan at Wisconsin and Southern Illinois at Illinois on Peacock that same day.
Michigan is the biggest early draw in the group. Kyle Whittingham is taking over the Wolverines after 22 years at the University of Utah, and the opener against Western Michigan comes with questions attached after Michigan went 9-4 last season and lost 41-27 to Texas in the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl. That kind of setting gives Nbc Sports a familiar name with a fresh storyline, and it puts one of the sport’s most watched programs back on national TV in the first weekend of September.
Indiana brings a different kind of weight to the schedule. The Hoosiers enter 2026 as the defending national champion after finishing 16-0 and beating Miami 27-21 in the College Football Playoff National Championship, which makes their Sept. 19 game against Western Kentucky one of the first chances for viewers to see how the title defense begins to take shape. Notre Dame also lands prominently, with a Sept. 6 visit from Wisconsin in the Shamrock Series at Lambeau Field and a Sept. 19 home game against Michigan State that will be the 80th matchup in the rivalry; Notre Dame leads the series 49-29-1 and will be playing at Lambeau for the first time.
Nbc Sports has not yet filled in the rest of its 2026 early-season college football picture, and that leaves six of the 11 games outside the first month still to be spelled out. What is already clear is that the network is using the opening weeks to stack marquee brands, regional rivalries and a title holder into a compact run that should keep both NBC and Peacock in the college football conversation from the season’s first Saturday through mid-September.
