Notre Dame Football: Don’t count on a fall 2020 season for the Irish

After over 100 students and a handful of student-athletes tested positive for COVID-19 this week, Notre Dame football’s season isn’t looking good.

Joining the ACC for the season was the best move for Notre Dame as the Irish were facing a lost year with every league going with conference-only schedules, save a few Group of Five programs.

The Irish were granted a one-season exception from the ACC as the league allowed the Irish to ditch independence to save a 2020 campaign.

But it might be all for naught after recent developments on campus.

Notre Dame is following in the footsteps of North Carolina, racking up an obscene amount of cases just a week into the fall semester which may be extremely telling when it comes to the approaching football season.

Every single student was tested before getting to campus and it took one off-campus party to create a spike in cases and shut down the entire university for a couple of weeks.

This shows that you simply cannot police college students. What they do after they’re on the field in “safe” environments isn’t controllable. All students who attended classes tested negative, but they spend one night at a party off campus and that’s the end of in-person learning for the immediate future and potentially the entire semester.

It’s impossible to keep these kids in a bubble because they’ll eventually wander off campus for food or friends or parties and anything is contractable at that point.

If Notre Dame wanted to play football this fall, which it looked like it did, it needed on-campus learning to go well. It doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case.

Everyone wants football to happen, but this may have just ruined it for the Irish and the rest of the ACC.