Love them or hate them, you have a feeling when you hear the three words “Notre Dame football”.
For some it’s love and admiration and memories of Ara Parseghian or Lou Holtz’s squads being an annual powerhouse.
For others it’s anger and a team that gets too much love from the national media and “is always overrated”.
Either way there is a feeling attached to Notre Dame football, even if they haven’t won a national title since 1988 and that feeling presented itself in a recent list put together by Berry Tramel of The Oklahoman.
Tramel ranked the non-conference schedules of the 64 Power Five teams based on how interesting they are. The grand takeaway?
If you schedule Notre Dame gets major points.
On Tramel’s list you’ll find USC first, Georgia Tech two, Wisconsin fourth and Stanford fifth. Meanwhile, Louisville and Clemson can both also be found in the top eight.
Navy and Western Michigan are the two Group of Five schools that Notre Dame will play in 2020.
The common theme of the list in terms of the Fighting Irish?
Those six teams all have an out of conference schedule that features Notre Dame.
Wake Forest (14) and Pitt (17) also make the top twenty. Arkansas (25) and Duke (29) round out Notre Dame’s Power Five opponents in 2020 as all ten of those teams appear in the top half of this list of intrigue.
Even without a national title to their name in decades, Notre Dame has again reached the point of national intrigue that had escaped it from the late-nineties until 2012, with the exception of 2005 and part of 2006.
Other thoughts on the list:
Georgia (13) is the only SEC program playing two Power Five programs out of conference (Virginia and Georgia Tech). I get the SEC is loaded but that’s a pretty sorry fact. I guess that’s what happens when so few are ever willing to travel out of conference.
Sorry case from the Land of Lincoln squads as Northwestern (63) and Illinois (64) check in as the last two on the list. A combined Tulane, Central Michigan, Morgan State, Illinois State, Connecticut and Bowling Green between the both of them? Keep it.
USC gets it. Along with Notre Dame and UCLA they’re the only other program who has never played an FCS school and with Alabama and Notre Dame on the schedule the Trojans deserve credit for doing it right.
The list makes me remember how much I dislike the neutral site games. Why can’t Notre Dame and Wisconsin play in each others home stadiums instead (they might, actually)? Alabama and USC opened against each other in 2016 and will again this year – why not do a home-and-home instead of neutral field it up? College campuses help make the great game of college football even greater and I’d never be opposed to the big-time OOC showdowns taking place in each others home fields.