Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM SEPT. 26, 2026 5 FAN FORUM BE HEARD! Send your letters to: steve.downey@on3.com or mail to: Blue & Gold Illustrated, P. O. Box 2331, Durham, NC 27702 During the week leading up to Notre Dame's matchup with Michigan State Sept. 19 — the first since 2017 — Spartans head coach Pat Fitzgerald noted that he would like to play the Irish every year. Irish fans chimed in with their thoughts on that on our message board at BlueandGold.com. SpaddyND: I couldn't agree with him any more. I think ND should schedule MSU, Purdue, Navy and USC every year. Plus 5 ACC schools (Miami Fl, Clemson and FSU being on the schedule more than the other ACC teams) and then sched- ule an SEC team, a Big 12 team and another G5 team. Get rid of Stanford please. I wouldn't mind seeing the ND-MSU game being the Thanksgiving game every year. Xray93: Absolutely not. I'm not wasting a schedule spot on another "rival" that let their program become garbage. We need that spot open for teams that actually have some quality. If Fitzgerald can bring them back to that level then we can talk. o_fedman: I can remember, when for years, the first three games on the ND schedule were always Michigan, Purdue and Michigan State. I would love for ND to bring that troika back to start the season again on an annual basis. et1513: Absolutely hate Stanford on our schedule. They are closer to a G5 school now. Couldn't agree more with adding MSU permanently. Java65: I would rather MSU than Rice or BC. Hell, I'd take them over Clemson at this point. Chicirish: Of course Fitzgerald wants to play us every year. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose. He's trying to get eyeballs on MSU and make them relevant again. Bigteve79: State has had 2 10-win-or-better seasons in the last 10, so it's been a while. I thought Tucker was going to bring them back, but things went sideways for him off the field and they've gone back to mediocre bordering on terrible. Playing mid-grade Big 10-ish teams early in the season isn't a bad idea because it could be a heavier intra-squad game and not like playing potential playoff teams right out of the box. Vonteego: I'll take Stanford over Michigan State every year. Elite academic school, gets the Irish to California every other year. Michigan State gives us nothing other than short travel. Give me Northwestern instead. TPirish: Stanford and Boston College need to be kicked to the curb. Play each of them maybe once a decade. They bring nothing. Michigan State should be an annual game. Purdue should rotate with Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, UCLA and Washington. I'd even give overrated Oregon a call. atrain78255: Gotta say it's refreshing to hear Fitzgerald's comments; much respect for somebody who doesn't back down from a challenge unlike our friends in L.A. JOIN THE CONVERSATION AT BLUEANDGOLD.COM! Sign up for just $1 ANTI-NOTRE DAME BIAS? Don't get too optimistic yet about this season's Irish football prospects. There is a looming obstacle that no one seems to have noticed. It wasn't only the play- off committee that was biased against Notre Dame football last December. Our "partners" in the Atlantic Coast Conference also had a special brand of treachery cooked up. What their public campaign for Miami's playoff inclusion and against ND revealed is that official ACC policy is hostility toward Notre Dame football. (Miami later proved playoff-worthy, but that does not jus- tify the conference's biased behavior at the time.) The negative conference sentiment may carry over in a particular and damaging way this fall. Ponder the upcoming November game against Miami. The ACC officiating crew for that game will inevitably be very aware that their conference employer's policy and norms amount to bias against ND — actual policy, that is, even if not explicitly stated, yet demonstrated publicly. What- ever their private integrity, neither those game officials nor anyone else can erase awareness of the public ACC posture fa- voring Miami and opposing ND. That bell cannot be unrung. What will be the impact of that cognitive reality on the officiating crew's in-game sentiment, perception, and behavior? Biased offici- ating against ND will be totally compat- ible with recent precedent and the con- ference landscape, as well as consistent with prior observed bias. We do know that close games are often decided by errone- ous or biased decisions by officials. It gets worse. All our road games, whether against ACC teams or not, as well as all home games with ACC teams, are officiated by ACC crews. (The cus- tom is for the road team to take its own conference refs, which means "our" refs are from the ACC, for better or worse.) So, this coming season, potentially hostile ACC crews will officiate all our games except the home games against non-ACC teams (Wisconsin, Rice, Michigan State; good luck against those Big Ten refs, Irish!). Of course, the of- ficials from other conferences may in- deed screw ND as badly or worse than the ACC refs do. Overall, expect the ND football team to get hosed by the refs even worse than usual this fall because the ACC has normalized, endorsed, and exemplified such anti-ND bias. What to do? What can be done to oppose the predictable injustice as de- scribed? Does our athletic administra- tion even have a strategy for the con- tingency? If not, here's one: ND Nation, including BGI, needs to make a public issue, starting now, of the concrete ba- sis for expecting dishonest officiating from the ACC on-field employees — or in-stadium employees, that is, not to ig- nore the sometimes errant ACC replay officials. Such an initiative may help to inoculate against the manifestation of the systematic anti-ND bias. That is, the ACC officiating crews would then know that they are under scrutiny because of the ACC's bias has been exposed. Does anyone have a better idea? Any- one not expecting the questionable of- ficiating to get even worse this year? John F. Gaski South Bend FROM THE WEBSITE .com .com Marcus Freeman and the Irish don't need to worry about the officials if they take care of busi- ness on the field. PHOTO BY LARRY BLANKENSHIP