Notre Dame to open 2025 college football season at Miami Hurricanes
The Notre Dame vs. Miami game that was supposed to take place this season and would have pitted two current playoff teams together will be played in Week 1 of 2025, according to multiple reports. The Fighting Irish will take a Labor Day weekend trip down to Miami Gardens to open up the season against the Hurricanes.
Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald was first to report the news. Matt Fortuna, founder of The Inside Zone and formerly of The Athletic, posted on social media that he could confirm Jackson’s report. The reports did not specify if the game will be played on Saturday, Sunday or Monday. In 2021, Notre Dame played at Florida State in the standalone Sunday night game during opening weekend.
A Notre Dame spokesperson confirmed the news with Blue & Gold Wednesday evening. Notre Dame will begin on the road at a power conference foe for the fourth time in five years dating back to the FSU game in 2021, at Ohio State in 2022, at Texas A&M this year and at Miami next year.
Miami will return the home-and-home favor and head to South Bend in 2026. The back-and-forth was supposed to begin in South Bend this season, but the Hurricanes postponed the onset of it last year because of a scheduling conflict.
The two storied programs have played 26 times with Notre Dame owning a 17-8-1 advantage in the all-time series. The Hurricanes won the last meeting, 41-8, in Miami Gardens on Nov. 11, 2017. Before then, the Irish won four consecutive matchups spaced out between 1990 and 2016.
This year, Notre Dame is 7-1 at its second bye week. The No. 8 Irish are coming off a 51-14 drilling of the Navy Midshipmen at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Miami, meanwhile, is a perfect 8-0 with a home game against Duke on the horizon this weekend. The Hurricanes have yet to beat a ranked team and barely got by Virginia Tech, 38-34, in a controversial thriller on Sept. 27 then escaped Cal, 39-28, the next Saturday.
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Nevertheless, head coach Mario Cristobal already has more wins this season than he had in either of his first two seasons in charge of the Canes. Miami has the nation’s No. 1 offense in yards per game with 560.8.
Marcus Freeman and Notre Dame have gotten to where they are in the national landscape primarily through defense. The Irish are tied for ninth nationally in yards allowed per game at 282.9. The Irish are ever-improving offensively, too, climbing to a tie for 20th in points per game at 36.6.
Both Miami and Notre Dame are led by quarterbacks in 2024 who will not be around for the 2025 game. The Hurricanes’ Cam Ward and Irish’s Riley Leonard are out of eligibility at the end of the season. Ward came in from Washington State while Leonard spent three years at Duke. It’ll be new blood at QB for each team and new blood spilled in a rivalry that was as good as any in college football in the late 1980s.
2025 Notre Dame football schedule
• Week 1 (TBA): at Miami
• 9/13: Texas A&M
• 9/20: Purdue
• 9/27: at Arkansas
• 10/18: USC
• 11/8: Navy
• TBA: NC State, Syracuse, at Boston College, at Pitt
