Yesterday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish announced a future football series with the Georgia Bulldogs for the 2017 and 2019 seasons.
The series is a good one for two reasons. First, an SEC team is traveling north to take on a big-time program in their own stadium. Second, the Fighting Irish get to play in the Southeast, in this case the recruiting rich state of Georgia.
But the addition of the Georgia game in 2019 has caused a problem with Notre Dame’s previously scheduled four-game series with the Texas Longhorns.
In the third game of the series, Notre Dame is scheduled to play in Austin on August 31, 2019. But since they are now playing at Georgia the same season, the Irish want to postpone the 2019 and 2020 games to later seasons.
Notre Dame senior associate athletic director for media and broadcast relations John Heisler told the South Bend Tribune yesterday that they have informed Texas of their desire to move the games.
“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.”
With Notre Dame scheduled to play five ACC teams per season, plus Navy, Stanford, and USC, they only have four other games to schedule in any given season. And they also have several future games to play against Michigan State and Purdue and four more games contracted against BYU.
That doesn’t leave a lot of variety in their scheduling, so it’s easy to see why the Irish want to space out the series with Texas.
If the two games are moved rather than canceled, look for them to fall somewhere between 2021 and 2025 or 2028-29.
On a side note, ESPN reported yesterday that one of the Notre Dame-Texas games was set for 2017. There’s likely some miscommunication there or one of the games was moved without an announcement. We’ve reached out to both schools for clarification.