Dec. 20, 2013

On Friday morning, Notre Dame announced each of its next three years’ worth of football schedules, providing fans with a road map to follow their Fighting Irish around the nation. Along with the schedules itself, here are some additional interesting notes about the 2014-16 football schedules compiled by a series of morning tweets, mainly from our @NDFootball account.

Here is a collection of those notes, highlighting a series of three ambitious slates ripe with matchups against prominent, winning programs to be played in fabled venues across America.

• Ten different teams that are found in the 2014-16 Notre Dame football schedules have finished No. 1 in the AP Top 25, doing so a combined total of 24 times. Miami and USC have done this the most often at five times apiece.
• From 2014-16, Notre Dame will play four different teams that have won a national championship in the BCS era alone (since 1998).
• Schools on Notre Dame’s 2014-16 schedules have won a total of 25 Heisman Trophies. The Irish have of course won seven of their own, tied for the most of any school in the country. This sum does not include one vacated trophy.
• Over the 2014-16 seasons, Notre Dame will play at least seven games in professional sports stadiums (Lucas Oil Stadium, MetLife Stadium-twice, FedEx Field, Lincoln Financial Field, Heinz Field and Fenway Park). The site of the 2016 Navy game is to be determined and that game is often held in an NFL facility.
• The 2014 schedule alone features games in five current or former NFL Stadiums, Lucas Oil Stadium (Colts), MetLife Stadium (Giants and Jets), FedEx Field (Redskins), Sun Devil Stadium (Cardinals) and the LA Coliseum (Rams and Raiders).
• Notre Dame will play at least seven games during the 2014-16 campaigns in stadiums that will have hosted the Super Bowl, including Lucas Oil Stadium, MetLife Stadium (twice), Sun Devil Stadium, Stanford Stadium and Los Angeles Coliseum (twice).
• Between 2014 and 2016, Notre Dame will play in five different stadiums that have (or will) host a Super Bowl game (Lucas Oil Stadium, MetLife Stadium twice, Stanford Stadium, Sun Devil Stadium and the Los Angeles Coliseum twice).
• Once again, there are no teams from the Football Championship Subdivision. Notre Dame, UCLA and USC continue to be the only three FBS teams to never faced an FCS foe since the 1978 divisional split.
• Notre Dame will play a total of seven games during the 2014-16 campaigns against teams who are in the Top 10 for most all-time NFL Draft picks. Notre Dame is second all-time with 477. Joining ND in the Top 10 and on our schedules are USC (three games), Texas (two games), Miami (one) and Michigan (one).
• During the 2014-16 seasons, Notre Dame will play games in 12 different states and all four of the continental United States’ time zones.
• When Louisville comes to South Bend on Nov. 22, 2014, Kentucky will mark the 39th different state to provide a football opponent for Notre Dame. What are the 11 that are we missing? Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming.
• Of the 2014-16 opponents, nine of them will be opponents that the Irish have not faced in at least 10 years. Three of them (Louisville, Massachusetts and Virginia Tech) are first-time Notre Dame opponents.
• Notre Dame’s 2014 opponents were a combined 92-52 (.639) during the 2013 season.
• Of Notre Dame’s 12 opponents next fall, 10 will play in a bowl game this year (all but Purdue and Northwestern).
• The 2014 schedule features three outright conference champions (Florida State-ACC, Stanford-Pac-12 and Rice-C-USA) along with a fourth team that shared its 2013 conference championship (Louisville-American).
• When Notre Dame plays at Temple (Oct. 31, 2015) and Pittsburgh (Nov. 7, 2015), it will mark the first time that the Irish have played consecutive games in a state other than Indiana since ending the 1989 season with a road game at Miami and then facing Colorado in the 1990 Orange Bowl.
• Notre Dame has played 10 bowl games against teams on its 2014-16 schedules, going 5-5 in those games.
• Over a five-year span from 2012-16, Notre Dame will have played games in 10 of the Top 12 TV markets in the nation (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Phoenix).
• From 2012-16, The Irish will have 29 regular season games against 13 different teams that appeared in the BCS Top 25 at some point during the 2013 season.
• With the 2015 Shamrock Series game, Notre Dame will return to Fenway Park for the first time since beating Dartmouth, 64-0, on Oct. 14, 1944.
• It will mark the first football game in the shadow of the Green Monster since Dec. 1, 1968 when the AFL’s Boston Patriots beat the Cincinnati Bengals, 33-14.
• It will mark the second Shamrock Series game in an active Major League Baseball park, joining the 2010 win over Army at Yankee Stadium.

— ND —