Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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www.BLUEANDGOLD.com OCT. 10, 2020 5 P erhaps a blowout win that shoved the seven absent players from top of mind to the back cor- ner of it created a height- ened sense of confidence. Too high a sense. That confidence lasted only 48 hours from Notre Dame's 52-0 dismantling of South Florida, though. That's when the balloon popped. What happened next was a swerve off the ex- press lanes and into the traffic jam 29 other teams had already encountered. Director of athletics Jack Swarbrick may have been the only person who was not surprised. "We have to manage expectations," Swarbrick cautioned in a mid-Sep- tember appearance on the Packer and Durham podcast. "We're going to have games canceled, have interruptions." Two games into its 2020 season, Notre Dame encountered what it hopes is the only schedule tweak it faces. The change occurred for a rea- son even Swarbrick surely didn't ex- pect — COVID-19 issues within the Irish football team that had 39 of the 118 players in COVID-19 protocols as of Sept. 28. The Sept. 26 game at Wake Forest was pushed back due to the rise in cases. The postponement left Notre Dame with three weeks in between games and no road games until Oct. 24, a decidedly zany schedule no one would draw up in any other year. But this is not any other year. Welcome to the crazy 2020 college football season, one that appears hell-bent on getting to the finish line and now has conferences opting back in. (Hello again, Big Ten and Pac-12!) So far, the bumpy road has been navigable. No team in September canceled a season due to a spike in cases. Notre Dame, like a couple other teams, needed multiple weeks off to sort through and control its uptick. There seems to be a mutual un- derstanding between everyone who decided to give this season a try. Embrace the roadblocks, and don't try to drive right through them. Through four weeks, there were 22 postponed Football Bowl Subdi- vision games. Some have makeup dates. Others do not. It's hard not to think that number will keep growing. A hodge-podge, ever-changing schedule is one of the byproducts of attempting to play a season outside of a bubble. Schedules are essentially written in pencil. It'd be nice if this reporters' plane ticket purchases could be, too. Notre Dame scheduled the makeup date for the Wake Forest game on Dec. 12, one of two open dates on the schedule after the Irish determined the mutual off week Oct. 3 was not a feasible option. The Irish are also off on Nov. 21, but every other ACC team plays then. All ACC teams have Dec. 12 open because it was one of two possible dates for the conference championship game, which is now likely to be played on Dec. 19. College football continuing at the postponement pace it's currently on likely won't allow for everyone within a conference to play the same number of games. Notre Dame in particular would be hard-pressed to make up another postponement with the lack of other common open dates. We already know conferences aren't planning to play an equitable number of games. The ACC planned for 11. The SEC scheduled 10. The Big Ten is now going to try nine in nine weeks. The Pac-12 scheduled seven in as many weeks. Good luck playing all of them. And Godspeed to the College Football Playoff committee trying to decide between an undefeated team that played only eight games and a one-loss team that played 11 or 12 games. Fans already have enough reasons (fair or not) to un- leash streams of invective at the committee. As Yahoo! Sports na- tional college football re- porter Pete Thamel put it to me on a recent podcast: "It's not going to be clean, not going to be neat, not going to be tidy. The only thing you can guarantee is it's going to be controversial. It's literally throwing spaghetti against the wall. It's just going to be chaos for the College Football Playoff committee." What shouldn't be forgotten in all of this is the reason for chaos itself: the pandemic. COVID-19 is every- one's opponent, and all these post- ponements show the difficulty of warding it off. Just like schedules, in- dividual team's protocols for how to deal with it and keep it away should be changing as needed, too. Notre Dame ought to scrutinize its own to tighten any holes that might have allowed this outbreak a chance to enter and fester. But the plan is to resume, even if stemming the outbreak takes lon- ger than initially anticipated. We still don't know what caused Notre Dame's outbreak. It could be a lapse in preventative behavior. It could also be something no player of staff mem- ber could have controlled. It could be from some mundane everyday task. Whatever the cause, the layoff has made clear the true motto of the 2020 football season. Getting to game day is a win in itself. ✦ Expect The Unexpected ENGEL'S ANGLE PATRICK ENGEL Patrick Engel has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since March 2020. He can be reached at pengel@blueandgold.com With consecutive weekends off, Brian Kelly and Notre Dame can appreciate even more the simple victory in getting to game day in this ever-changing season. PHOTO BY MIKE MILLER