:: Notre Dame Football ::
Notre Dame Football 2009 schedule promises exciting nation-wide match-ups
Feb. 13, 2009
Later updates:
:: Notre Dame Football Game Day 2009 (ongoing updates)
:: Notre Dame Football Schedule 2009
:: and check back under the "Game Day" category especially for ongoing game-by-game updates of TV coverage
Notre Dame looks forward to an exciting 2009 national schedule with kick-off against Nevada just a little more than eight months away (with off-season training, spring football, more off-season training, and fall camp in between). 2009 ushers in the new format of seven Notre Dame home games, one Notre Dame-hosted quasi-mid-season bowl game, and five away games.
Here's the upcoming slate for the Fighting Irish:
2009 Notre Dame Football Schedule
Sept. 5 - Nevada (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Sept. 12 - at Michigan (Ann Arbor, ABC/ESPN or blacked out)
Sept. 19 - Michigan State (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Sept. 26 - at Purdue (West Lafayette, ABC/ESPN or blacked out)
Oct. 3 - Washington (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Oct. 10 - Bye Week
Oct. 17 - Southern Cal (Los Angeles, ABC/ESPN or blacked out)
Oct. 24 - Boston College (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Oct. 31 - vs. Washington State (at San Antonio's Alamo Dome, NBC prime time)
Nov. 7 - Navy (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Nov. 14 - at Pittsburgh (ABC/ESPN or blacked out)
Nov. 21 - Connecticut (Notre Dame Stadium, NBC)
Nov. 28 - at Stanford (Palo Alto, ABC/ESPN or blacked out)
Notre Dame begins its practice of hosting an eighth quasi-home game at a neutral site, in this case playing Washington State at the Alamo Dome in San Antonio. Time will tell whether Notre Dame will take the logical next step of hosting a ninth game that is a true mid-season bowl game, at a neutral site dividing the tickets equally, broadcast nationally in prime time on NBC. For example, Notre Dame might host a Florida or an Alabama at an NFL Stadium near Washington, or in Baltimore. Or the Irish might host a Texas or Oklahoma in Memphis (the SEC would balk at a St. Louis game). Or, perhaps the Irish could host a Vanderbilt near New York City.
In 2009 Notre Dame plays teams from five different conferences, plus a service academy independent:
Pacific-10: Washington, Southern Cal, Washington State, Stanford
Big 10/11: Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue
Big East: Pitt, UConn
ACC: Boston College
Western Athletic Conference: Nevada
Independent, service academy: Navy
As can be seen, the Notre Dame schedule is dominated by a spread of 7 teams from the PAC-10 and Big 10/11.
Note that Notre Dame continues its pairing of the Southern Cal and Stanford match-ups, where the Irish play a home game against one California team in October and an away game against the other at the end of November, and alternate which is which from year to year.
In the past, Notre Dame customarily played Southern Cal in the final game of the year, every year, for quite some time, which meant the Trojans had to play in cold weather when the game was at Notre Dame. Eventually the understanding Irish accommodated warm-weather sensibilities by scheduling the lads from Los Angeles in October when the game was at Notre Dame.
The Notre Dame-Southern Cal matchup has produced the biggest crowds ever to attend a college football game, including one crowd of roughly 120,000 at the old configuration at Soldier Field in Chicago. (Note that, when Michigan tries to claim large crowds for its stadium, there usually is a subtle effort to list the "record" as being for "NCAA" football -- failing to mention that the NCAA has only been around for about half of college football's existence, and that larger crowds have attended games at other times.)
Not long ago, when Notre Dame had dominated Southern Cal for the better part of a decade, a college football yearbook observed that, while USC had made some gains, if glory was to return to Troy, they were going to have to beat the Irish. The same is true of Notre Dame Football. The Fighting Irish are going to have to beat the Trojans if they want to see another Sports Illustrated cover saying "Notre Dame is back!" like the one after the win over Miami in 1988.
Southern Cal has the best program in college football, and had a better season than Florida in 2007. Notre Dame has had a much bigger issue with depth than has been discussed by observers, an issue compounded playing the Trojans at the end of the year when injuries have kicked in. In 2009, Notre Dame gets Southern Cal at home, in mid-season, with two weeks to prepare, with almost a full slate on the roster, albeit still not fully experienced at key positions. The team is going to have to step up, and quite frankly the crowd is going to have to step up.
Plans to play more Big East teams, with Notre Dame a member of the Big East in most sports except football and hockey (which has its own set of conferences), are not quite materializing yet, but the Irish do play two, Pittsburgh and Connecticut.
Pitt, of course, is a classic opponent from eras before the Big East even had a football conference, and before the Big East even started in basketball.
The Connecticut game is interesting because of efforts, controversial for some in the Connecticut statehouse, to create a 10-year series in which games at Connecticut are moved to NFL stadiums in different states, either New Jersey or Massachusetts. A shorter series begins with this Notre Dame home game, but there were hopes to paste together a ten-year deal in the end. UConn has a new stadium, but truthfully it is not very big by big-time college football standards.
Missing from the schedule are any teams from the SEC, although Notre Dame certainly has slated its share of SEC opponents over the years.
The lone ACC opponent this time is Boston College, one of the pack of teams that bolted from the Big East several years back, only for the Big East to then reload and eclipse the ACC anyhow. It is not clear whether Notre Dame would be scheduling Boston College if they were not the only other Catholic institution in the FBS (formerly known as Div. I-A). There are some big issues here with institutional memory that Notre Dame needs to address, especially given that Boston College apparently thinks of itself as the Little Engine that Could when playing Notre Dame, and -- reminiscent of Michigan in the early1990's when the Big 10 was a doormat -- apparently thinks of this game as a much bigger rivalry than Notre Dame does. As an aside, Boston College just fired its head coach for inquiring about a position with the NFL.
With Navy, Notre Dame continues the longest continuous intersectional rivalry in college football.
For the Nevada game, the home-opener, recall this game's genesis. Nevada's appearance on the schedule has nothing to do with lightening the schedule, and in fact Nevada's conference, the WAC, is now a powerhouse with Nevada itself one of the top rushing teams in the land.
In Tyrone Willingham's final year as Notre Dame head coach, Notre Dame reportedly decided it wanted to rearrange its schedule at the last minute to have a supposedly slightly easier game before the Michigan game, and so asked BYU to move up a Notre Dame game at BYU to be the opener. BYU agreed, but this meant imposing upon no fewer than three other teams to change their schedules -- nemesis Southern Cal, San Diego State, and Nevada-Reno. The latter two agreed only if Notre Dame would schedule them. The Irish played the Aztecs last year -- and nearly lost -- and now Notre Dame pays the piper with Nevada this year -- right when Nevada is coming off being the #2 rushing team in the nation (behind only Navy, who also almost beat Notre Dame this past year in Baltimore).
(As an aside, BYU, with a proud history that includes a national championship and multiple Heisman winners, has never been an easy opener, let alone on the road. As Notre Dame fans with good memories will recall, the Irish got stuck in a road construction-related traffic jam on the way to the stadium, the local police refused to provide an escort, and the Irish lost a close one in a night game with the Cougars, inexplicably not playing freshman phenom Darius Walker a single down. The following week, of course, after a Notre Dame priest reportedly quietly said some prayers of memorial and sprinkled what somebody claimed was bits of turf from George Gipp's Upper Peninsula gravesite in one of the end zones, and Willingham played Walker, the Irish did beat Michigan. So that part worked out. But the loss to BYU was still the beginning of the end for Willingham.)
The trio of Michigan, Michigan State, and Purdue spell a soap opera each week.
Michigan had a 3-9 season in 2008, with growing pains adapting to the hire of Rich Rodriguez, who left a stronger, more successful program at West Virginia to head to Ann Arbor.
Michigan State is a rivalry with a proud tradition dating back a century, where Notre Dame needs to reassert some institutional memory, with this game going back and forth over the past decade or more. Purdue breaks in a new head coach, who was hired a year ahead of time and overlapped with the legendary Joe Tiller by a year, joining as an assistant for a losing campaign before taking the helm. The game is on the road, making a traditionally tough match-up even tougher, and with some of the vaunted Purdue offense having a bit more experience than last year.
The Washington game features a new head coach for the Huskies, Steve Sarkisian, who stepped down as offensive coordinator at Southern Cal. The game is at Notre Dame. Washington has a proud, national championship-winning history, albeit one also marred by NCAA sanctions. One of the more interesting twists, however, was when Miami's bad boys era coincided with Washington had to share the national title spotlight with the Hurricanes. The two started scheduling each other, and Washington man-handled the Hurricanes a bit to prove a point.
But the Washington question raises an interesting line of thought, which is, how many top programs can actually exist, even with a seemingly broader pool of well-developed talent. When Washington was a top program in the early 1990's, other PAC-10 giants were having a downturn. Can Washington get back on top, while Southern Cal, Cal, Oregon, and Oregon State are doing well, Stanford is becoming solid, and UCLA is rebuilding? And can the PAC-10 be as strong on the West Coast as the SEC is in the South, while the WAC and Mountain West are, quite frankly, as good as they are, with Utah being de facto national champions? These are some interersting institutional questions for college football, but ones that, in an age of relative parity, promise some great games for fans of the sport.
As has become the custom, NBC will offer a true national television broadcast (i.e., broadcast through the air waves to homes with a television and antennae) for all seven Notre Dame home games, plus a prime-time true national broadcast of the Notre Dame-hosted neutral site game against Washington State in San Antonio.
The five away games are against conferences with contracts with ABC, which means either (1) an ABC national broadcast (2) and ESPN broadcast (3) ABC in some regions and ESPN in others or (4) theoretically no access at all, meaning the net effect of ABC having the rights is to deny competitors the ability to show the game.
Recall that the anticipation of this type of chaos and the anticompetitive blackouts were reportedly part of what motivated Notre Dame to sign the NBC contract to begin with back in the day.
Minimal television unpredictability aside, it should be a great year for college football and the Fighting Irish particularly.
The Fighting Irish still will not have a fully rebuilt roster until 2010, but after having the program gutted by the Bob Davie-Ty Willingham decade of malaise, the intrepid Charlie Weis, enduring through multiple knee injuries, a broken leg, surgeries, who-knows-what prescription medications, and unending four-hours-of-sleep days, finally has four full class years of top recruits plus at least a minimal crop of fifth-year players optimized by good coaching. Check back for more forecasts and analysis on this website, accompanied by links to leading developments and stories from other stories.
Later updates:
:: Notre Dame Football Game Day 2009 (ongoing updates)
:: Notre Dame Football Schedule 2009
:: and check back under the "Game Day" category especially for ongoing game-by-game updates of TV coverage
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