Notre Dame has long drawn the ire of the remainder of the collegiate football community for valuing its unique independence and refusing to join a conference. The most outspoken conference, and conference fans, come from America’s tradition-rich deep South and the SEC.
Fans all across SEC country, where it supposedly “just means more,” aren’t shy in their disdain for the Irish. For a while, they had good reason to believe that football was played at its highest level below the Mason-Dixon line. Teams from the SEC won 13 of the 17 national championships between 2006 and 2022, but with the changing landscape of the sport, each of the last two trophy hoisters have hailed from the Big Ten, and they both beat other northern schools in the title game.
Whether or not the SEC benefitted from compensating its athletes long before it was legal is up to individual speculation. What is known is that football royalty now and always resides in the college towns of the Northern heartland — Columbus, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Mich. and South Bend, Ind. to name a few examples — yet when heading south, the college football powers of the North often struggle to outduel SEC institutions defending their home turf.
Historically, Notre Dame has been the exception to that trend. The Irish have clashed with teams currently in the SEC 57 times throughout program history, winning twice as many as they’ve lost, sitting at 38-19. Under head coach Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame is 3-1 against the SEC, with the lone defeat coming this year with the heartbreaking Week Two home loss to Texas A&M. With the Irish heading into Fayetteville, Arkansas, for the first time ever this Saturday, this is a good time to look back pn how Notre Dame has fared against each SEC member institution.
The Razorbacks, who along with the Irish were coached by the legendary Lou Holtz, are one of four SEC programs who have yet to take the field against the Irish. Auburn, Kentucky and Mississippi State are the other three, and there is no public record of any planned future showdowns.
The SEC’s, and perhaps the nation’s, preeminent program Alabama has squared off with Notre Dame eight times, with the Irish leading the series 5-3. Notre Dame clinched the 1973 National Championship with a one-point win over the Crimson Tide on New Year’s Eve, but Nick Saban’s program returned the favor in recent years, dominating the Irish in the 2012 and 2020 postseasons. The Irish and the Tide have a home-and-home on the docket for 2029 (South Bend) and 2030 (Tuscaloosa).
Georgia, the SEC’s dominant program over the last half-decade, is 3-1 against Notre Dame. The Bulldogs claimed the 1980 National Championship with a Sugar Bowl win in Dan Devine’s final game leading the Irish. They also out-toughed Brian Kelly’s Irish in both South Bend and Athens in the late 2010s, before Freeman’s crew flipped the script in last year’s Sugar Bowl. That CFP quarterfinal showdown in the Big Easy seemed to signal that Notre Dame had finally risen to match the physicality and skill of the South’s best teams.
The two SEC teams Notre Dame has faced off with most on the gridiron are the LSU Tigers and Texas Longhorns. Notre Dame holds a 7-5 edge over the Bayou Bengals, but the pair haven’t met outside bowl season since before the turn of the millennium. The Irish also hold a convincing edge over the Horns, winning nine of the 12 meetings. They most recently threw down in Austin back in 2016, when Texas claimed a thrilling 50-47 victory in double overtime. Notre Dame has played impressively well in both Austin and Baton Rouge, going 6-3 on the road in the two series. There are no future dates with the Tigers on the schedule, but Notre Dame will renew the Texas series in 2028 (South Bend) and 2029 (Austin).
The Blue and Gold also possess a stranglehold over another of the SEC’s biggest brands, dominating the Oklahoma Sooners 9-2 all-time. The two programs played regularly throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, a period when the programs combined to claim four national titles. Despite the success of both programs, Notre Dame commanded Boomer Sooner over the eight games played between 1952 and 1968, with the only defeat coming in a 40-0 shutout at Notre Dame Stadium in 1956. Notre Dame’s success in SEC nation carries over to this series as well, as the Irish have never lost in Norman.
The aforementioned Lou Holtz not only headed the Razorbacks and Irish, but also led the South Carolina Gamecocks from 1999-2004. Notre Dame has bested the Gamecocks in four of five meetings, with the most recent being a 45-38 win in the 2022 Gator Bowl, which also served as Marcus Freeman’s first contest against the SEC. Following the trend, Notre Dame has never been beaten in Columbia, as the lone loss in the series was a 36-32 South Carolina win in South Bend in 1984.
The Irish are also unbeaten in the SEC’s other Columbia, home of the Missouri Tigers. That showdown sits at 2-2 all-time, with the visiting side winning each of the four contests between 1970 and 1984.
Perhaps the most lopsided football matchup, but the most comparable academic institution for Notre Dame, comes with the Vanderbilt Commodores. Notre Dame has won all three meetings, including in Nashville in 1996. The most recent affair was a nail-biting 22-17 Irish triumph in 2018, sparking the program’s first berth in the CFP. The Irish are even with Vanderbilt’s in-state foe, the Tennessee Volunteers. The eight-game series is split 4-4, with each program winning twice on the road.
The Golden Domers have matched up with Mississippi just twice, and the Florida Gators only once. The Irish were bested in Jackson by the Rebels in September 1977, before running the table the remainder of the year to claim another national championship. The only other game between the polar opposite programs was a blowout ND victory in November 1985. The sole battle with the Gators saw Notre Dame lift the 1992 Sugar Bowl trophy, but a home-and-home for 2031 (South Bend) and 2032 (Gainesville) is set.
That just leaves the most recent SEC opponent for Notre Dame, Texas A&M. Despite Week Two’s heartbreaking last-second loss, the Irish have bettered the Aggies in four of seven tries. The Irish captured consecutive Cotton Bowl crowns in Dallas in 1993 and ‘94, as well as last year’s Week One victory at a sold-out Kyle Field in College Station.
While Kyle Field is routinely considered to be amongst the nation’s toughest environments, Freeman and Notre Dame will face a similar challenge when they enter Fayetteville on Saturday morning. Both the Irish and the Razorbacks are in desperate need of a marquee win, but if history tells us anything, it’s that football at Notre Dame “just means more,” especially when battling the college football’s self-anointed toughest conference.
