Notre Dame Football: New ACC schedule shapes up well for Irish

There wasn’t a lot of question of who the Notre Dame football team would be playing, but now the Irish know when the games will take place.

The Atlantic Coast Conference did Notre Dame football a pretty solid service by including them in their 2020 conference schedule, thus giving the Irish 10 opponents with which to play. On Thursday, the conference revealed the full details of the schedule with dates and kickoff times for all its teams.

Notre Dame’s schedule shapes up as follows:

9/12: Duke
9/19: Western Michigan
9/26: at Wake Forest
10/10: Florida State
10/17: Louisville
10/24: at Pittsburgh
10/31: at Georgia Tech
11/7: Clemson
11/14: at Boston College
11/27: at North Carolina
12/5: Syracuse

And while this schedule could be analyzed for days, there are a few very obvious takeaways from the schedule.

The first is the omission of Navy. One might speculate why the Midshipmen weren’t the one out-of-conference game Notre Dame could play in 2020. The bottom line, though, is that the Irish will not be seeing the Midshipmen on the gridiron this season. Instead, they will keep Western Michigan on the schedule, which surely will help the Irish in terms of logistics.

The second is that the Irish will play Clemson at home on November 7th, which is the original date that the Tigers were scheduled to come to South Bend. This put to bed some speculation that the date of the game would be moved when the new schedule was announced. The Tigers will have to come to South Bend to play in some chilly weather in 2020.

Finally, another major part of the schedule in 2020 is that Notre Dame has open weeks prior to hosting Florida State on October 10th and before heading to North Carolina on Friday, November 27th. Both Florida State and North Carolina are teams on the rise that could provide some problems for the Irish.

Oh, and one last observation: Syracuse and Notre Dame playing a game on December 5th in South Bend? Brrrrr.

Overall, the schedule shapes up fairly well for the Irish. The stretch of games of leading up to the marquee matchup with Clemson (at Pittsburgh and at Georgia Tech) could prove to be a tricky stretch for the Irish, but Notre Dame is likely just happy to have a schedule to play this season.