Best case, worst case scenarios for Notre Dame football in 2019

Notre Dame football has a clear floor and ceiling in terms of possible win-loss outcomes in 2019.

We’re less than a month and a half away from the 2019 Notre Dame football season. As the opening game at Louisville inches closer, we start to take a deeper dive into how this Irish team could finish the season from a wins and losses standpoint.

In terms of best case and worst case scenarios, you want to look at the teams on the schedule who you know Notre Dame could beat on their best day, as well as the teams they could lose to on their worst day. Figure out those two numbers and the actual final record is somewhere in between.

Not every program in the country can look up and down the schedule and see a scenario where they could win all 12 games, but this year’s Notre Dame team can. As we’ve discussed, if the games were played right now, the Irish would be favored in ten of them. They would be underdogs at Michigan and at Georgia. If Notre Dame went to Ann Arbor and beat Michigan, nobody would bat an eye.

If the Irish beat Georgia in Athens, it would shock some people, but it wouldn’t be a massive upset. If anything, fans and media members around the country may sit up in their seats and take a closer look at the 2019 Notre Dame football team.

As a result, the best case scenario for Notre Dame in 2019 is a 12-0 season.

In terms of worst case, this is where the make-up and strength of the Notre Dame football schedule shows it true colors. Any realistic Irish fan should be able to look at the 2019 slate and spot eight games that could be losses. And that’s part of what gives a lot of Notre Dame fans anxiety about the upcoming season.

Some of these might be upsets, but there are a variety of ways you could see the Irish dropping games to Georgia, Virginia, Southern Cal, Michigan, Virginia Tech, Duke, Boston College and Stanford. The chances of dropping all eight are slim-to-none. That would mean the wheels would have fallen completely off the wagon, and Brian Kelly’s job would be in serious jeopardy. That said, tensions will be high heading into all of these games, and losing any of them would not be close to some of the worst upset losses in Notre Dame history.

As a result, the worst case scenario for Notre Dame is a 4-8 record.

I just don’t see any way the 2019 Notre Dame football team loses games to Louisville, New Mexico, Bowling Green or Navy. Drop any of those — regardless of what happens the rest of the season — and we are having some interesting and uncomfortable conversations about the future of the program.