Welcome back to Irish Illustrated Insider.

It is Thursday, May 21st.

I'm Tim O'Malley joined today by Drew Mentock of Irish Illustrated, John Bryce of USA Today.

We had some well-time news guys on the schedule front for segment one.

Notre Dame yesterday announced it will continue its rivalry slash series with Stanford playing the 2027 road finale

in Palo Alto and they're per usual the cardinal will come back the next year mid-October

I believe it's October 14th in 2028 along with that guys Kent State joins the 2027 schedule

I think the good news there is it is not week two,

where Notre Dame has been vulnerable to such opponents of the past. J.B., thoughts on the Kent State

bombshell? Yeah, look, it's getting tougher and tougher to generate a schedule, And I think the days of generating series that are going to be conducted six, seven, eight years down the road, they're done right now. There's not a format that makes those types of arrangements palatable right now overall in college athletics, college football.

Not one off series, not one single home in a way.

You just can't you can't schedule that far out right now because of where the sport is

because of the specter of college football playoff expansion.

You know, Notre Dame, I think, has played one FCS team, and that's Tennessee State a couple of years ago,

and that was a very meaningful game.

And beyond that, I give Notre Dame credit for continually putting out a schedule that has 12 FBS opponents on it.

You guys know they can't control if Purdue's in a complete gutter because it made poor hires and poor

decisions after Jeff Brom left. It's not Notre Dame's fault that Michigan State has been

in a Spartan toilet since the Mel Tucker debacle. They're scheduling power conference programs.

They're scheduling FBS programs.

And Kent State, I guess, at least as a MAC team, they can sell a special reason for it.

Lou Holtz is alma mater.

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