Make no mistake, this is the Jack Coan game.
It is not often a quarterback leaves a Power Five school and has to start against his former coaches and teammates so early in the first season with his new program. That’s exactly what Coan, Notre Dame’s starter, is tasked with doing against Wisconsin this week at Soldier Field, though.
But just because it’s the Jack Coan game does not mean there isn’t more to it than that. There is. A whole lot more.
You can drive from South Bend to Madison, Wis., in roughly four hours. Just around the southern tip of Lake Michigan, through Chicago, right by Rockford, Ill., and north into the Badger State. Boom, you’re there. All in the time it takes to kick a college football game off until the final whistle blows. That’s the case a lot of the time these days, anyway.
And yet, Notre Dame and Wisconsin haven’t gotten together on the gridiron since 1964. It’s been 57 years. Legendary Notre Dame head coach Ara Parseghian was in the first year of his tenure when the Fighting Irish beat Milton Bruhn and the Badgers 31-7 in Madison. It was Parseghian’s Notre Dame debut, in fact.
