2020 Expectations: The Time Is Now For Notre Dame

Notre Dame kicks off the 2020 season on Saturday when the Fighting Irish football team hosts the Duke Blue Devils. It’s Notre Dame’s first season in the ACC, which means it’s the first time in program history that Notre Dame gets to compete for a conference championship.

Of course, it’s now been 31 seasons since Notre Dame last won a championship, which was the national championship back in 1988. From a record standpoint, Notre Dame’s 33-6 record from the previous three seasons is the best stretch of football we’ve seen in South Bend since a 31-5-1 stretch from 1991-93.

Notre Dame enters the 2020 season with extremely high expectations. The Irish are a preseason Top 10 program, and three programs ahead of them (Ohio State, Penn State, Oregon) aren’t playing this season. There are plenty of outsiders predicting the Irish to make a playoff run in 2020, and the list includes Urban Meyer, who recently announced he was on the Notre Dame bandwagon.

So what should expectations be for Notre Dame in 2020?

Let’s be honest, the standard at Notre Dame is and always should be to compete for, and win, a national championship. Some might try to downplay that, but that is absolutely the standard for ultimate success at Notre Dame.

The three coaches that followed Lou Holtz, the last coach to win a title at Notre Dame, never came close to living up to that standard. So much so that there are many Irish fans who seem completely content with Notre Dame going 33-6 over the last three seasons, even though the Irish haven’t sniffed a national championship.

Head coach Brian Kelly has brought the Irish quite a long way during his 11 seasons, and that is especially true in the last three seasons. Kelly has taken Notre Dame to a BCS title game and to the College Football Playoff, but the Irish weren’t competitive in either game.

It’s time for Kelly to take Notre Dame to the next level.

He returns five starting offensive linemen, a three-year starter at quarterback, a deep group of skill players, a veteran defensive line and a talented group of linebackers from last season’s 11-2 squad. He returns one of the best defensive coordinators in the game, and his hand-picked offensive coordinator knows his system as well as anyone.

The schedule was expected to be challenging, but the chaotic offseason ended up with Notre Dame completely revamping its 2020 docket, and the new-look schedule is far, far more manageable.

Notre Dame’s 11 opponents combined for just a 74-67 record last season, and if you take out Clemson’s 14-1 record the other 10 opponents combined for a paltry 60-66 record. Not one of those 10 opponents won more than eight games, and six of the 11 total opponents finished with a losing record.

Is there any roster other than Clemson’s that anyone would actually trade for Notre Dame’s. There is no doubt that Kelly’s team will be the most talented in 10 of the 11 games during the regular season.

There is just one elite team on the 2020 schedule, and Notre Dame gets that team at home. It’s also a southern team that will be coming to South Bend, Indiana in November. There’s a chance Notre Dame might have to play and beat the Tigers twice, and according to some of the playoff projections that have the Irish as a semi-finalists, they might have to play the Tigers three times.

That will obviously be a difficult challenge, but now is the time for Notre Dame to come out on top in this kind of situation. Kelly and his team have a lot working in their favor, and this is now the fourth season since the post-2016 program makeover. Kelly is now in his 11th total season in South Bend.

The time to take the next step as a program is now.

The question must be asked, if not now, when will it happen under Kelly? When will the Irish be true title contenders with him at the helm if not this season?

If it doesn’t happen in 2020, does that mean the rest of Notre Dame nation must accept the fact that being “pretty good” is good enough? Does it mean Notre Dame nation as a whole must accept that the days of Notre Dame being a football powerhouse are truly a part of the distant past, and championships should no longer be the standard by which the program - and it’s head coach - should be held to?

The time is now.

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