The Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Texas Longhorns have canceled their football games in 2019 and 2020, FBSchedules.com has learned through an open records request.
Per an invoice dated July 10, 2014 from The University of Texas at Austin to the Notre Dame Athletic Department, games in 2019 and 2020 were canceled and Notre Dame owes Texas a cancellation fee of $150,000.
Back in 2010, Notre Dame and Texas announced a four-game, home-and-home series. The two were scheduled to meet in South Bend on Sept. 5, 2015 and Sept. 12, 2020 and in Austin on Sept. 3, 2016 and Aug. 31, 2019.
According to a copy of the original four-game series contract, the cancellation fee is $150,000 if “notice of cancellation is received two years or more before the scheduled date of the cancelled game.” That fee goes up to $500,000 if the notice of cancellation is received “more than one year but less than two years” and $1 million if received “one year or less” from the date of the canceled game.
After we tweeted the Notre Dame-Texas 2019-20 cancellation earlier today, Notre Dame Insider confirmed the news.
The two schools still plan to meet in 2015 and 2016 on the aforementioned dates.
The cancellation of these two games stems from Notre Dame adding Georgia to their football schedule in 2019. With five ACC games, USC and Navy, plus Georgia and Stanford on the road, the Irish no longer had room on their slate to play a road game at Texas.
Notre Dame senior associate athletic director for media and broadcast relations John Heisler told the South Bend Tribune in June that the Irish were attempting to move the games rather than cancel.
“We’re hopeful that we can move those games somewhere down the road into the next decade,” Heisler said. “We’re trying to create as much variety as we possibly can and let our fans see as many teams as they can.”
Obviously Texas didn’t want to move the games out into the future leaving Notre Dame no option but to go ahead and cancel.
Steve Patterson, the athletic director at Texas, is no stranger to contract issues with Notre Dame. When he was A.D. at Arizona State, he reached a settlement with the Irish to save their 2014 game in Tempe but agreed to cancel the return game in South Bend in 2017.
The cancellation of these games leaves Texas with no announced non-conference opponents in 2019 and 2020. Guess who else doesn’t have a game scheduled yet for 2020? Texas A&M.
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