Oct 18, 2025; South Bend, Indiana, USA; Notre Dame Fighting Irish running back Jeremiyah Love (4) celebrates his touchdown with teammates in the first half against the Southern California Trojans at Notre Dame Stadium. Credit: Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images
By Sam Neumann on

Notre Dame will close its regular season at Stanford with a 10:30 p.m. ET kickoff on Nov. 29, and Irish fans and the associated media aren’t exactly thrilled about it.

The ACC announced the kickoff time for ESPN on Sunday. For fans on the East Coast, that means the game won’t end until well after 1 a.m. ET. All of this for a matchup against a 3-7 Stanford team.

The 10:30 p.m. ET start guarantees a smaller viewing audience for the 10-1 Irish, who are firmly in playoff contention. Instead of maximizing the audience for a ranked Notre Dame team in its regular-season finale, ESPN chose a time slot that will test fans’ endurance across the Eastern and Central time zones.

This is the tradeoff Notre Dame made when it agreed to play five ACC games per season while maintaining quasi-football independence. The Irish have their own NBC television contract and don’t have to play in a conference championship game, which gives them scheduling flexibility and keeps them out of the grueling league title game gauntlet. But when Notre Dame plays ACC opponents, the conference and its broadcast partners control kickoff times.

Now Stanford is in the ACC, and what used to be a natural intersectional rivalry has become a conference obligation with conference-dictated kickoff times.

If only there were a way to avoid scheduling games with playoff implications at 10:30 p.m. ET. Maybe someone could consider that fans might actually want to watch the game. No, that’s too logical.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann