Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1482392
32 OCT. 29, 2022 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY TYLER HORKA W hen Notre Dame fans pon- dered the importance of each game on the 2022 Fighting Irish football schedule, their process probably went a little some- thing like this … The season opener is against a top- five team in the country, on the road, against our new head coach's alma ma- ter? Sign me up. It's only Marshall (little did they know …), but it's also Marcus Freeman's first home game. Got to be there. Top-25 BYU in Las Vegas for the Shamrock Series? Time to make a week- end out of that! Clemson, almost assuredly a top-10 team, coming to South Bend the first weekend of November? Almost exactly two years to the day of when Notre Dame took down the Trevor Lawrence- less No. 1 Tigers in 2020's double-over- time thriller? That's a must. So is a trip to sunny Los Angeles over Thanksgiving weekend to see if the Irish can hang with Lincoln Riley, Caleb Wil- liams and the new-look USC Trojans. There. A handful of must-see games against quality opponents on a Notre Dame schedule that ranked No. 1 in the country through Week 5 per SportsRef- erence.com's strength-of-schedule metric. There are always bound to be some matchups that slip through the cracks. The first-ever game between Notre Dame and UNLV this past weekend is an example of one. There wasn't much juice tied to the California game in Week 3 outside of the Irish wearing green jer- seys, Notre Dame still seeking its first ORANGE CRUSH Syracuse went 6-17 in the last two seasons but started the 2022 campaign with six victories in a row