This Saturday, the battle for the Legends Trophy returns to Notre Dame Stadium as the Irish host the Stanford Cardinal. The game will mark Notre Dame football’s second “prize game” of the season — the Irish kept the Shillelagh Trophy with a 66-7 annihilation of Purdue in Week Three.
Notre Dame and Stanford have previously met 37 times on the gridiron, with the Irish holding a 22-14 advantage that doesn’t include their vacated overtime win in 2012. The series began in 1925, became a regular fixture in Notre Dame’s schedule in 1988 and has run yearly (aside from the 2020 season) since 1997. Here’s a look back at the rivalry’s development, including a breakdown of a randomly selected Notre Dame-Stanford game among the 37.
Early but sparse beginnings
In a way, Notre Dame and Stanford can celebrate the 100-year anniversary of their first meeting this weekend. Although the Irish and Cardinal officially first met on January 1, 1925, in the Rose Bowl, the game marked the end of the 1924 season. Of course, Notre Dame fans probably won’t be shocked to hear the contest’s outcome knowing it was 1924. Head coach Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen marched to a 27-10 victory in Pasadena, California, clinching Notre Dame’s first national title.
The Irish and Cardinal would not meet again until October 1942, when Notre Dame shut out Stanford by a 27-0 score in South Bend. Stanford would host the Irish next in 1963, securing its first defeat of the Irish with a 24-14 victory. First-year head coach Ara Parseghian and the Irish would return the favor in 1964, toppling the Cardinal 28-6 as the second-ranked team in the nation.
The rivalry returns under Lou Holtz
As the series went yearly for the first time between 1988 and 1994, Notre Dame took a stranglehold of the rivalry, winning five of seven matchups during the Lou Holtz years. The Irish pounded the Cardinal en route to another national championship in 1988 and won again in 1989, but Stanford flipped the script with a dramatic victory in 1990. With the Irish off to a 3-0 start as the nation’s No. 1, Dennis Green’s Cardinal shocked the house with a 36-31 win in South Bend.
Notre Dame would beat Stanford in four of the next five meetings before the series briefly halted at the end of Bill Wash’s tenure in Palo Alto in 1994.
Notre Dame-Stanford as we know it
With soon-to-be Irish head coach Tyrone Willingham leading the Cardinal, the rivalry returned to an annual state in 1997, Bob Davie’s first year in South Bend. The tradition of playing games the weekend following Thanksgiving in Palo Alto during odd-numbered years would arrive two seasons later. Stanford defeated Notre Dame three consecutive times at home after 1997, only for the Irish to take control and rattle off seven straight victories when the Cardinal went rotten in the mid-2000s.
As the Charlie Weis years faded into the start of Brian Kelly’s tenure at Notre Dame and the Jim Harbaugh-to-David Shaw transition revitalized Stanford just over a decade ago, the series shifted back. The Cardinal officially won seven out of eight meetings between 2009 and 2017, with Notre Dame triumphing only on 2012’s vacated goal-line stand in overtime and Ben Koyack’s game-winning touchdown catch in 2014. Since 2018, Stanford has fallen back downhill, allowing Notre Dame to claim four of the series’ last five contests.
The last time Stanford visited South Bend, however, the Irish went down. In David Shaw’s final year and Marcus Freeman’s first as Notre Dame head coach, the lowly Cardinal dropped the Irish to 3-3 with a 16-14 defeat in 2022. The Irish would respond with a 56-23 win in last year’s regular-season finale, as Audric Estimé rushed for a career-high 238 yards and broke Notre Dame’s single-season record for rushing touchdowns with 18.
Random Notre Dame-Stanford game
Using a random number generator, we’re going back in time to Sept. 29, 2018, for Notre Dame’s 33rd all-time game against Stanford. If I were to ask you about Notre Dame Stadium’s only game in the 2010s that featured two teams ranked inside the top eight, what would you respond with? Perhaps the 2012 Stanford goal-line stand game. Maybe the October tilts with USC from 2015 or 2017. The 2018 season opener against Michigan, perchance.
I can almost guarantee that you wouldn’t think of the Notre Dame-Stanford game that happened four weeks later, but that’s the one. It’s not by fault of the Irish. Notre Dame, ranked eighth in the country on that overcast Saturday night in South Bend, would go 12-0 and reach its first College Football Playoff. Stanford, on the other hand, entered the game ranked seventh and would finish the year a disappointing 9-4.
This game kicked off the Cardinal’s downfall. Ian Book, starting just his second game at quarterback after taking over for Brandon Wimbush at Wake Forest a week prior, led a 38-17 dismantling of Stanford. The young Irish signal-caller could do no wrong, completing 24 of his 33 passes for 278 yards and four touchdowns. Wide receiver Miles Boykin gobbled up 144 of those yards on 11 catches while running back Dexter Williams coasted for 161 yards in his post-suspension season debut.
It was Williams who set the night’s tone, spelling Tony Jones Jr. and taking his first carry of the season for a 45-yard score midway through the first quarter. Stanford countered with its own star tailback, Bryce Love, who gashed the Irish for a 40-yard touchdown in response. Notre Dame, with the help of another big Williams run and a fourth-down completion to tight end Cole Kmet, would return to the end zone a drive later on a 6-yard snag by tight end Nic Weishar. The Cardinal answered again, though, making for a fourth consecutive touchdown drive on a jump ball to wideout JJ Arcega-Whiteside.
The scoring went quiet for a while in the second quarter until Book used marvelous pocket presence to roll left and hit Chase Claypool in the end zone for a goal-line score. Only 39 seconds remained in the first half as Notre Dame took a 21-14 lead. Stanford would hang around down 24-17 into the early fourth quarter, but the Irish ran away with the game down the stretch. Book and Boykin hooked up on an 8-yard bubble screen to build a 14-point lead. Then linebacker Te’Von Coney intercepted a pass in the red zone to set up tight end Alize Mack for a putaway touchdown reception. In between all of that and the final whistle, defensive end Jerry Tillery bullied the Stanford offense and finished with four sacks.
Favored by three touchdowns this week and knowing full well the disasters that struck many of college football’s elites last week, Notre Dame certainly wouldn’t mind another 21-point victory six years later.
