One Foot Down has turned Matt Hayes’s Notre Dame schedule commentary into a direct accusation: that his piece was built to provoke outrage, chase clicks and borrow from a playbook first made famous by Rick Reilly. The site went even further, saying Hayes should send Reilly a royalty check after the article reportedly generated $643.
The latest dispute lands in a familiar corner of college football media, where Notre Dame criticism about scheduling reliably draws attention. Here, though, the reaction is aimed not at Notre Dame itself but at Hayes, whose line that Indiana is doing fine with “every cupcake in the bakery” while Notre Dame gets a “holy war” over its slate became the hook for the backlash.
One Foot Down framed that comparison as more than a throwaway jab. It said Reilly wrote one of the most infamous Notre Dame hit pieces in August of 2012 and argued that plenty of writers have spent the past decade and a half trying to copy that blueprint. In its view, Hayes was not breaking new ground. He was reaching for the same reaction, only with a newer target and a price tag attached.
The sharpest part of the criticism is that the article was not treated as a serious football argument but as a piece of rage bait. One Foot Down called Hayes a total tool and a complete bullshit artist, then pointed to the money it made as proof of how the formula works: stir up Notre Dame fans, create a fight, and let the traffic do the rest. By that standard, the $643 matters less as income than as evidence that the tactic still pays.
That does not erase the football context around Notre Dame right now. The school’s offensive line is drawing positive attention, Marcus Freeman is in the running for another Dodd Trophy, and Notre Dame is traveling to the mountains in Provo, Utah, to face No. 8 BYU under some nice skies. The schedule debate, in other words, is landing while the team itself is in the middle of a season that is still producing real on-field conversation.
What makes the exchange awkward is that Hayes’s own criticism leaned on a contrast between Notre Dame and Indiana, which is exactly the sort of comparison that gives the whole argument its bite. If the goal was to provoke a reaction, it worked. If the goal was to settle the scheduling debate, the result is the opposite: the argument has shifted from football to motive, and the most memorable number attached to it is $643.
