Making room for Notre Dame reportedly costs Michigan $2 million

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The Michigan-Notre Dame series is back on, but it didn’t come cheap for the Wolverines.

Thursday, the Wolverines and Fighting Irish announced a home-and-home series with games during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. In order to fit those games onto the now-constricted non-conference portion of their schedule, however, the Wolverines had to cancel previously scheduled games with Arkansas in the same seasons.

According to multiple reports, Michigan had to pay to cancel that series with Arkansas, buying the games out to the tune of $2 million.

That’s an awful lot of cash to not play games. But it’s not like it doesn’t make financial sense. Surely the bouts between Michigan and Notre Dame will yield far more than two games between Michigan and Arkansas ever would have.

Additionally, the insertion of the Notre Dame games forced a date change for a 2019 conference game against Rutgers.

"While it’s never easy to change football schedules, I appreciate Arkansas’ Jeff Long understanding of the need for this change, as well as Rutgers athletics director Pat Hobbs and coach (Chris) Ash for agreeing to change the date of our conference game so we could bring this Notre Dame rivalry back to the field," Michigan athletics director Warde Manuel said in Thursday's announcement.

Michigan’s swapping out of Arkansas for Notre Dame also takes away two of the few scheduled games between Big Ten and SEC teams. With those games off the Wolverines’ future schedules, the lone games between the conferences are Wisconsin-LSU (2016), Michigan-Florida (2017), Purdue-Missouri (2017, 2018), Purdue-Vanderbilt (2019, 2029) and Nebraska-Tennessee (2026, 2027).

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