Notre Dame Football: What could attendance look like at Notre Dame Stadium?

Notre Dame football may have some sort of a season in 2020, but the question remains, how many will have the chance to watch it live?

It is my opinion that Notre Dame football will be playing games at some point this fall. It seems as if the power five conferences are trending toward at least starting a college football season — whether or not they are able to finish a season maybe is the better question.

Regardless of what happens, Notre Dame’s campus certainly won’t have the same type of game day allure it typically has. When all is right with the world, there is nothing quite like a Notre Dame football game day.

But in 2020, it is certainly fair to say that all is not right with the world. Because of the pandemic, there have been many questions surrounding college athletics in general. For Notre Dame, much of the question revolves around attendance of sporting events.

Yesterday, Ohio State may have set the precedence of what college football stadiums might look like, if and when the college football season takes off. The University announced that Ohio Stadium would cap attendance at 20% of stadium capacity for the 2020 football season. That number may actually be on the decline.

If Notre Dame were to follow suit, that would Notre Dame would cap attendance at about 16,000 fans per game.

Certainly COVID-19 will throw a wrench in all these numbers, but Notre Dame’s overall enrollment — counting both graduate and undergraduate students — is between 11,000 and 12,000 students. Obviously, not every student is going to come to a Notre Dame home game, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that Notre Dame is going to offer attendance to anyone besides students, immediate family of players from both teams, and other game day personnel.

It really is a shame, given that Notre Dame has carved itself out as a premier college football destination.