It was supposed to be a season opener like very few before it. Notre Dame and Navy were (and technically still are) scheduled to start the 2020 college football season in Dublin, Ireland with ESPN’s College Gameday on location. The game technically still could happen we suppose but news it out Tuesday says that at best, fans likely won’t be included. At least not very many of them.
Ireland is set to announce the banning of all events with 5000 or more people with authorities being told not to grant licenses for large events in this period due to the coronavirus crisis.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the rest of this out.
Notre Dame and Navy aren’t going to be flying across the pond to play a football game in front of fewer than 5000 fans, especially with the fears of flying and doing unnecessary travel right now. You can go to a local high school and play in front of a crowd that size, why in the world would you fly teams and staffs to Ireland to play a game that pretty much nobody is allowed to attend as fans?
There may not have been a statement made by the Naval Academy yet, it is their home game after all, or Notre Dame’s but that’s just the period at the end of the sentence at this point. With this news out today it tells us what we all expected but hoped against for a while, that is that there will be no season opener in Ireland this year.
Now we hope for the best case scenario, however unlikely, to be that the game can be played on the same date in the United States. Brian Kelly and Jack Swarbrick have been open about alternate plans already being discussed about that, now will come the next steps which will include the official cancellation of the Ireland game which could come in days, if not hours. Also to come is the decided location of the game and date, which could already be known but is being withheld in event it’s never necessary to actually announce.
Let’s hope against that and instead the game gets moved to the mainland and is actually played the last weekend in August. I think we’d all be thrilled at this point if football at all is played the last week of August whether it be in Indianapolis, Washington D.C., Orlando or at a high school field.