Earlier this week, Warchant.com reported that Notre Dame would play at Florida State on a to-be-determined date in 2014. The game would be part of the Irish’s scheduling agreement with the ACC, which was announced last year and involves five football games against ACC members.
As it turned out, Arizona State was apparently the program getting bumped from Notre Dame’s schedule to make room for the ‘Noles. Except Arizona State doesn’t want to get bumped from Notre Dame’s schedule to make room for the ‘Noles.
“As far as Arizona State University is concerned we still have a valid contract with the University of Notre Dame to play football in 2014,” a statement released earlier this week by ASU read. “We look forward to hosting them at Sun Devil Stadium.”
Sun Devils athletic director Steve Patterson was more blunt in assessing the situation, however.
“Our position is ‘Hey, we’ve got a contract,’ and we expect Notre Dame to live up to it,” Patterson said on Wednesday. “What people don’t understand is you do this 18 months before a game, virtually every other university in the country’s got their teams scheduled until 2014. So who do you get as a replacement even if you wanted to do it?”
The two schools signed an agreement to play a home-and-home series in 2008: Notre Dame would come to Tempe in 2014 and ASU would go to South Bend in 2017. The two sides are also set to play on Oct. 5 of this year in Cowboys Stadium as part of the “Shamrock Series” for Notre Dame. That game, as well as the one in 2017 (for the moment), is not in jeopardy.
According to the series contract, both schools agreed to “exercise their best efforts to reschedule to a date and time that are mutually agreeable” should a game be “canceled due to an act of God, a national crisis, or other events beyond the control of the host institution...”
“Considering we had virtually completed schedules in 2014 and the next few years, we have had to make some changes based simply on having too many prospective games in those years,” John Heisler, the senior associate athletics director at Notre Dame, wrote in an e-mai to the Arizona Republic.