Notre Dame Football: Irish can’t afford to overlook Ball State
4. Upsets like this happen every single year
On the onset, nothing about this game seems special. It’s an FCS school that’s getting a big check to show up to South Bend and get manhandled by a superior football team. That’s true. But that same storyline is played out hundreds of time every season and there’s always an outlier. Why not this game?
Appalachian State over Michigan in 2007 is best example of this kind of one-hit-wonder upset event. That same year, Louisiana Monroe upset Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide. Also in 2007, Navy broke a 43-year losing streak and defeated the Irish in triple overtime.
In 2010 James Madison beat Virginia Tech. UC Davis beat Stanford in 2015 and North Dakota State beat Iowa in 2016. Expand that bubble beyond FCS to lower-tiered Group of 5 schools and the potential for giants to fall grows and grows. No one, not even mighty Notre Dame is exempt from a weird game every now and then.