The Notre Dame football team has taken heat for as long as anyone can remember about how easy most of the program's schedules are. In the last few years, Marcus Freeman and Co. have managed to tamp down that talk against non-conference opponents like Texas A&M and ACC rivals like Miami and Clemson. However, with the near-complete release of the 2027 schedule, those complaints are likely to return in force soon.
The Irish have already taken some heat for the 2026 slate being much easier than the last few schedules. However, some of that has been out of their control. They didn't want USC to drop off the schedule, and when they scheduled Wisconsin, the Badgers were at least a solid Big Ten team.
In 2027, Notre Dame still has one spot left on the schedule, but the rest of it has been filled. As it starts to circulate, analysts and critics will blast Freeman's program with their whole throats. There won't be much of an argument either that the 2027 schedule is the weakest since Freeman arrived in South Bend.
Marcus Freeman has Notre Dame football staring at a schedule with little room for mistakes
Granted, things could change this year, but for now, the addition of Kent State, a program ND has never played, only waters down a schedule that was already going to be hard to defend:
- Purdue
- at Michigan State
- Auburn
- Kent State
- Georgia Tech
- at Wake Forest (in Charlotte)
- at Clemson
- Virginia Tech
- Navy
- BYU
- at Stanford
Notre Dame’s rivalry with Stanford was thought to be in jeopardy in the future for some of the same reasons the Irish are no longer playing the USC Trojans annually. The Cardinals are in a conference that requires them to travel long distances for ACC games. Making a trek to South Bend every other year is a lot to ask, but it appears that the Trojans do not understand the importance of keeping longstanding rivalries going.
While the Irish have never faced Kent State, and the team is usually one of the worst in the MAC, there is at least some reason this could be a very interesting matchup. The late, great, legendary former Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz graduated from Kent State. But that's not the only connection: current Irish head coach Marcus Freeman was an assistant for the Golden Flashes from 2011-12.
It is, of course, possible that teams like BYU, Virginia Tech, Clemson, and Auburn could all be much better than they have been in the past few years. That would immediately give the Golden Domers a boost as people discuss their 2027 slate. However, at the moment, it looks like the layout will put the same kind of pressure on Freeman's crew that's been on them the last few seasons.
With the weakest schedule yet for Notre Dame in the current era, the program won't have much of a margin for error. Unless the Big Ten gets its way and the CFP field grows to 24, the Irish will have to treat the entire season as one long playoff.
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