Notre Dame Fighting Irish: Week 1 Preview
By Stiofán Mac Fhilib
A year ago, Notre Dame fans had but a seven-month close season to wait for the return of America’s greatest game and for the Fighting Irish to head down to Miami. This time round, it’s been a long, LONG, nine months, which began with what felt like several seasons’ worth of talking points crammed in before the end of January.
Calmer waters have prevailed since, and the biggest problem now facing Marcus Freeman, his coaching staff, his team, and, frankly, even Irish fans is how to cope with the almost unprecedented hype surrounding the 2026 Notre Dame football team. Ranked #4 in the pre-season AP Poll, ND are the trendy National Champion pick.
Every playoff run, like every journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step, and for Notre Dame, that is a trip to historic Lambeau Field to take on the home-state team, Wisconsin, this Sunday night.
Looking Back at Last Week
Last weekend was one of the highlights of the college football calendar for fans on this side of the pond: the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, featuring a rematch between Bill Belichick’s North Carolina and TCU. And in a defensive slugfest, the Tar Heels obtained revenge for their 2025 routing by coming away with a 15-10 victory in Dublin.
For Notre Dame, however, ‘last week’ was a straightforward 49-20 win at the Stanford Cardinal on Thanksgiving weekend 2025, which seemed to put the icing on the cake of their playoff résumé. The Playoff Selection Committee decided differently, of course, and the rest is history.
Never one to let a good setback and the associated pain go to waste, Coach Freeman has laboured the ‘Leave no doubt!’ mantra, and Irish fans are keen to see precisely how that manifests itself on the field in 2026.
ND lost both of its top Running Backs to the first round of the NFL draft, but that aside, they return more snaps and production, especially on defense, than most top teams. And it is a measure of the quality of the returning experienced talent that a host of five-star freshmen will struggle to see significant time in starting roles.
The Week Ahead
Wisconsin Badgers (Lambeau Field, Green Bay, WI); 7.30pm EST; 12.30am IST/BST
Six years after the two teams were originally due to meet at the home of the Green Bay Packers, the COVID-delayed rematch of the Irish and the Badgers will finally take place this weekend. The other half of the series ended in a fourth-quarter blowout by Notre Dame en route to a 41-13 victory at the Chicago Bears’ Soldier Field in 2021.
For two of the more high-profile Midwestern schools, they have met surprisingly infrequently. The current series is the first since Ara Parseghian’s first year (1964). Notre Dame holds a 9-6-2 series lead, though they failed to score in their first four encounters with the Badgers, all before the end of World War I.
Much has changed for Wisconsin Head Coach Luke Fickell since the 2021 game. Fickell was in charge at Cincinnati, and when Brian Kelly upped and left for Baton Rouge, he was considered by many national commentators as the frontrunner for the big job in South Bend. Instead, of course, it was his former DC at the Bearcats who got promoted from that role at ND, and their paths have further diverged since.
Fickell is 17-21 in his three years in Madison, with a pair of consecutive losing seasons, and after an ill-advised and disastrous attempt to turn the Badgers into a wide-open pass-first offense, he has now reverted to the tried-and-tested run-first approach that underpinned 30 years of Wisconsin success before his arrival.
The fly in that particular ointment in week 1 could be the health of his Offensive Line. RT, Kevin Heywood, was injured on the second day of Fall camp and has only just stopped walking in a boot. RG, Emerson Mandell, is coming off Spring surgery on his foot and has yet to practice fully. The Badgers declined to issue a Depth Chart for this game, which does not bode well for both being fully healthy.
Behind Center, Fickel brought in Colton Joseph, the Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year in 2025, from Old Dominion. He is experienced and a true dual-threat option – he ran for 179 yards, including a 78-yard TD, against Indiana last season. However, he also threw a trio of INTs in that game, consistent with the difficulties he had passing against the better defenses on ODU’s schedule. He was picked off ten times in 2025 and also fumbled on a dozen occasions.
Their defense is the strength of the team and their best hope of keeping things close in Green Bay. Linebackers Mason Posa and Cooper Catalano will be among the best duo that the Irish will face in the regular season, and they have proved a difficult team to run on – they were the only unit to hold Indiana under 100 yards last year.
Notre Dame OC Mike Denbrock is on record that he wants the Irish to continue to be a run-first team, regardless of any losses to the NFL draft, but the key to success for ND may be CJ Carr’s ability to generate big plays against a Wisconsin secondary with multiple transfers.
The Badgers’ kicker has zero career attempts, and their punting game is average. Irish fans will be keen to see what their Special Teams Coordinator, Marti Biagi, can conjure up in a fixture where Chris Tyree had a 96-yard kickoff return last time out.
Game Prediction
Notre Dame 38-13 Wisconsin
CJ Carr won’t finish the game, but he will do more than enough by the end of the third quarter to ensure a comfortable start to the Irish season. The Badgers’ banged-up OL will struggle against an ND D-line that throws waves of fresh legs at them. And the ‘let’s throw at Leonard Moore’ experiment will end very soon after it begins.
Where to Watch
Sky Sports Action (Channel 412 on Sky) coverage starts at 12.30am IST/BST
NBC (in the USA)
Playoff Picture
Perhaps the seemingly inevitable, if unwanted, 24-team playoff will see a return to the days of a smorgasbord of high-profile Week 1 games. This year, there are no Top 10 matchups and only one Top 25 game, when #24 Louisville faces #9 Ole Miss in Nashville, TN, at the same time as the Notre Dame – Wisconsin tussle.
STIOFÁN MAC FHILIB
COLLEGE FOOTBALL ANALYST
A VERY LONG-DISTANCE SUBWAY ALUMNUS OF NOTRE DAME, COUNTY ANTRIM-BASED STIOFÁN HAS BEEN A FAN OF THE FIGHTING IRISH SINCE 2000. FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER @SMACFHILIB.
