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Inside The Huskies

Huskies Beef Up Future Schedules With College Football Icon

The coming home-and-home series will be very popular with the UW fan base.
Dan Raley|
Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen (7) calls the signals in a 37-30 overtime win over Washington in 2009.
Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen (7) calls the signals in a 37-30 overtime win over Washington in 2009. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

With Monday's announcement of an expanded College Football Playoff, with the caveat that schedules had to toughen up to get in, the University of Washington didn't waste any time in making that happen.

A day later, the UW announced it will play Notre Dame in South Bend in 2031 and at Husky Stadium in 2034.

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Unfortunately for the current Huskies, none of them will be around to see those non-conference match-ups play out, with the current freshmen missing out by a year with the five-and-five eligibility rule now in place.

It will be interesting to see if Jedd Fisch and his staff is still in Montlake when the first of those two games rolls around.

The schools have met eight times on the football field in four home-and-home series -- the last time in 2009 when Steve Sarkisian was the UW coach -- and the Huskies are still seeking their first victory over the Fighting Irish.

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The 2031 game will be played on September 27 and the return match in Montlake will take place near the end of the 2034 season on November 11.

The series between the schools began with a home-and-home exchage in 1948 and 1949. Notre Dame won the first match-up 46-0 in South Bend and a year later beat the Huskies 27-7 in Seattle.

They didn't play again for 45 seasons before another home-and-home series was arranged in 1995 and 1996. As the lower-ranked team, the Irish won the first one between 15th- and 23rd-rated entries in the polls with a 29-21 decision in Seattle. A year later, they were 16th and 11th and higher-ranked Notre Dame prevailed 54-20.

They met again in 2004 and 2005 when the UW was in a decided downturn with Tyrone Willingham, a former Notre Dame coach, now as its coach.

The Huskies lost 38-3 on the road and 36-17 at home.

These schools last played in 2008 and 2009 and the Huskies lost 33-7 at home and, in the closest game in the series, 37-30 in overtime in South Bend.

These latest non-conference games will help the Huskies satisfy the non-conference requirement of having 10 Power 4 teams on any one schedule to be playoff bound, counting nine outings in Big Ten play and one against an outsider.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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