Notre Dame, Michigan Presidents Ponder Football’s Way Forward

Notre Dame and Michigan aren’t scheduled to meet again on the football field until 2033, but the two storied programs still managed to make national news in recent days. 

Both university presidents — Rev. John I. Jenkins of Notre Dame and Dr. Mark Schlissel of Michigan — shared their thoughts on the reopening of their respective campuses and what that could mean from a football perspective. 

While clarity is expected by next week on whether the Fighting Irish will indeed be able to open their 2020 football season against Navy in Dublin, Ireland, Jenkins’ guest editorial in the New York Times
NYT
left most readers believing such a showcase event on foreign soil was highly unlikely. 

That’s because Notre Dame, as Jenkins explained, is taking great care to limit additional travel for its student body while inviting students and faculty back to campus in August, two weeks earlier than normal. Fall break will be canceled and the fall semester will conclude before Thanksgiving in order to mitigate the chances that traveling students “will carry pathogens with them” back to South Bend, Ind. 

If domestic travel is considered an unwanted risk for the Notre Dame student body this summer and fall, it’s hard to see how sending coach Brian Kelly’s 11th edition of Fighting Irish footballers abroad would fit into the overall plan. More likely is that Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and Chet Gladchuk, his counterpart at the U.S. Naval Academy, will announce an alternate site for this game. 

Baltimore, Philadelphia and Landover, Md., have all been mentioned as potential replacement sites this fall for a rivalry that stands as the longest-running intersectional matchup in the sport. This would be Navy’s home game, so that must be taken into account as well. 

For home games at 80,795-seat Notre Dame Stadium, Jenkins wrote he saw “no way currently” to welcome fans without restricting admission and enforcing physical distancing. 

“We will soon turn to answer the question of how many games we will play, when we will play them and how many fans will be in the stadium,” Jenkins wrote.

Lest anyone forget, Notre Dame was selected last fall as the site of the first presidential debate for the fall of 2020, currently scheduled for Sept. 29.  

As for the back end of Notre Dame’s football schedule, currently set to conclude with a traditional road trip to Los Angeles to meet USC, a pre-Thanksgiving end to the fall semester could mean final exams during the regular season for Kelly’s team. Would long-distance travel even be acceptable for the program at that point? 

“We believe we can, with aggressive testing, hygiene and careful monitoring, keep student-athletes safe,” Jenkins wrote. “Indeed, keeping healthy relatively small cadres of student-athletes, coaches and support staff members is a less daunting challenge than keeping safe the several thousand other people in the campus community.” 

A few days earlier, Schlissel struck a more pessimistic tone in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. An immunologist by training, Schlissel expressed “some degree of doubt as to whether there will be college athletics, at least in the fall.” 

While several other state universities in Michigan have announced they will welcome back students for the fall semester, Schlissel said it wouldn’t be until “the coming weeks” that his Ann Arbor campus would offer clarity in that regard. Without the general student body returning to campus, he added, “there won’t be intercollegiate athletics, at least for Michigan.”

Even if football returns, the idea of ticket-holding fans filing into Michigan Stadium (capacity 107,601) this fall remains a riddle at this point for the university president. 

“I can’t imagine a way to do that safely,” Schlissel told the Journal. 

For Notre Dame and Michigan, when it comes to football in the modern pandemic age, questions still outnumber answers by a wide margin.