How Cal and Notre Dame Arranged a Football Game After a 55-Year Hiatus
The phone call came to the Cal athletic department in the summer of 2018, offering an unexpected but irresistible proposition: Would the Bears be interested in playing a football game at Notre Dame in the fall of 2022?
That game is Saturday, the first meeting between the schools in 55 years.
And yes, Cal was enthusiastically interested when the game was first suggested. Now, on the eve of the 11:30 a.m. PDT kickoff at South Bend, Indiana, the anticipation is peaking.
"It’s one of those bucket-list items,” said Jay Larson, senior associate athletic director for administration at Cal. “Everyone from Joe Starkey to long-time Old Blues to the young crowd, people are thrilled to have this experience.”
Cal’s first chance since 1967 to play a storied program that has won 13 national championships and claimed seven Heisman Trophy winners was born out of that random phone call.
It didn’t come from the folks in the shadow of the Golden Dome, but from Austin, Texas, home to Dave Brown, a college football matchmaker.
Brown was employed for nearly three decades by ESPN and over the final 12 years of his tenure was the network’s chief college football schedule-maker. In 2015, after developing a software program that would help him wade trough the labyrinth of non-conference schedules from schools across the country, Brown ventured out on his own.
Brown is something of a college football Yente, the matchmaker from the film Fiddler on the Roof. He says his company, Gridiron, has contracts with every FBS school in the country and all but a few from the FCS level
“A lot of what I work on is really solving people’s problems,” said Brown, 64. “I give schools all the (scheduling) options and they’re going to make the decision.”
Brown received a call from Notre Dame in 2018, asking if he could help identify a Power 5 program that had room on its schedule for play at Notre Dame Stadium on Sept. 17, 2022. The Irish wanted to beef up their schedule, and it was Brown’s task to provide them the most realistic options.
“I keyed it into the computer and it showed that Cal could go on the road for a game based on the fact that they had five games at home in their conference,” Brown said. “That’s when the lightbulb moment hit me.”
So Brown contacted Cal, which was on board but had some schedule shuffling to do first. The Bears were supposed to play UNLV on Sept. 17, but moved that game up one week. Cal beat the Rebels 20-14 last Saturday.
The original Sept. 10 opponent was supposed to be North Texas at Denton, Texas. That’s a return game for the 2019 visit the Mean Green made to Berkeley.
North Texas agreed to shift the game to Sept. 2, 2023.
“We only went back one year on North Texas. That helped us,” Brown said. “If Cal had said we can’t go back until 2028, I think the phone would have gone dead.”
Larson calls Brown a scheduling genius, and a deal finally was announced in January 2020 after Brown’s computer helped sort out a chain reaction of scheduling adjustments that touched eight schools and impacted 10 games. Besides, Cal, Notre Dame, UNLV and North Texas, others involved were Stephen F. Austin, Texas Southern, UTSA and Wyoming.
The Cowboys of the Mountain West Conference came out of the negotiations with a home-and-home series with Cal in 2029 (at Laramie) and 2032 (at Berkeley).
Bottom line: Cal will get a fifth shot at the Fighting Irish, which has won all four previous games, in 1959, ’60, ’65 and ’67. Notre Dame will pay Cal $1.9 million to make the trip and there will be no return game in Berkeley.
Larson estimates it’s possible close to 10,000 Cal fans will be among the crowd on Saturday. The school sold out all 5,000 tickets allotted by Notre Dame to its visitor, requested 300 more and sold all of them.
Cal fans in the Midwest have bought tickets through the secondary market, Larson said, some of those included among the 850 fans scheduled to bus from the Chicago area to the game. Cal will host pre-game tailgate events across the Irish campus.
One lifelong Cal fan who won’t be there is Dwight Barker, a 1959 graduate of the school and former two-time president of the Grid Club booster group. Barker is now approaching 88 years old and says he couldn’t make the trip. Instead, his son and daughter-in-law, along with eight of their friends, will represent Barker in South Bend.
Back in ’67, Barker was 32 years old and working in Detroit as part of the advertising sales staff for Life magazine. He and his wife made the 210-mile drive to South Bend.
He remembers the efficient manner in which state police kept heavy traffic moving easily over the final 35 miles leading to the stadium. And, because Notre Dame wouldn’t become co-ed for five more years, Barker said the school brought in cheerleaders from a nearby women’s university.
“I’ve seen games all over the country and it’s one of the great venues in college football,” Barker said.
Cal had beaten Oregon the week before but this was the season opener for the Irish, who were defending national champs and ranked No. 1 in the country. They blistered Cal, building a 41-0 lead.
Ara Parseghian, wanted the shutout and when Cal moved the ball into scoring position late in the game, the legendary coach was out on the field, exhorting his team to maintain the status quo.
With 2:49 to play, running back Troy Cox went in from the 1-yard line.
“We scored and he went ballistic,” Barker said of Parseghian. “Then we made the two-point conversion just to rub it in.”
No one on the Cal side will be satisfied with that scenario this time. The Bears are 2-0 and Notre Dame 0-2, but still favored by 11 points.
Nine other Cal head coaches have come and gone since Ray Willsey ran the team in 1967, so Justin Wilcox has a rare opportunity against a team he remembers watching on TV while growing up in Junction City, Oregon.
Wilcox said the chance for Cal to test itself against Notre Dame is “special,” but this is a business trip for the Bears, not a cultural outing.
“Maybe one day I’ll look back and be a bit more nostalgic about it,” he said, “but right now it’s all football.”
Photo of Notre Dame's "Touchdown Jesus" by Matt Cashore, USA Today
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo
