Brian Kelly is in his 12th season as the head coach at Notre Dame and this Saturday’s game will be just the third regular season contest his Irish have hosted as a top-10 team against another top-10 squad. The previous was a 38-17 win over No. 8 Stanford as Ian Book made his first Notre Dame Stadium start in 2018 while the other was last year’s double-overtime thriller that ended with an upset of No. 1 Clemson.
I’m not sure the odds you could have gotten when Kelly was hired that he’d win more games than any coach in program history, but the odds that he’d be taking on his former program in a 2021 top-10 matchup would have been even that much greater.
So what ultimately happens in this Saturday showdown between a pair of top-10 teams? Here’s what the Fighting Irish Wire staff sees: