Notre Dame Football 2019: A Season of Unfamiliar Foes

The 2019 Notre Dame football schedule features a slate chock full of teams the Irish have only played a handful of times.

The Notre Dame football program has a rich history of rivalries with several prestigious programs. There’s the historic rivalry with Navy, rooted in war-time lore. There’s the Holy War with Boston College — a battle of the only two Catholic schools in FBS. You also have the history with Michigan and Stanford, and of course let’s not forget the battle for The Jeweled Shillelagh with Southern Cal.

Irish fans are quite familiar with the history of those rivalries and subsequently the history of those programs. The 2019 schedule, however, features seven games against teams that are about as close to strangers to Notre Dame fans as you can get.

Notre Dame has played Louisville, Georgia, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Duke a grand total of 12 times combined — and five of those game were against Duke. In the long history of Notre Dame football, the Irish have never faced New Mexico or Bowling Green.

Notre Dame is 0-1 all-time against Louisville. That one meeting was in 2014, when Bobby Petrino’s Cardinals took down the Irish 31-28.

The Irish are 0-2 all-time against Georgia. Before the meeting in South Bend two years ago, the only other meeting between the two programs took place in 1981, when Vince Dooley’s Bulldogs took out a Notre Dame team coached by Gerry Faust 17-10 in the Sugar Bowl. That win gave Georgia the national championship.

Notre Dame is 2-0 all-time against Virginia, with the most recent win coming by way of a 34-27 thriller in 2015.

Notre Dame and Virginia Tech are split 1-1. The Irish took down the Hokies in Blacksburg last season, but fell to Justin Fuente’s club in South Bend during the 2016 season, 34-31.

The Irish and Duke, as mentioned, have met five times dating all the way back to 1958. Notre Dame has a 3-2 advantage in the series, but Duke has “scoreboard” by way of a 38-35 win in 2016 in South Bend.

With the still relatively new relationship between Notre Dame and the ACC, there is a chance for new rivalries to form with some of these programs. For 2019, however, fans should embrace some of the newfound variety that this season’s slate provides.