Notre Dame Stadium has a capacity to hold 80,795 football fans, and give or take, that’s how many will be on hand to see the 10th-ranked Irish face #18 UVA on Saturday in South Bend.
The last time a Virginia football team played in front of that many hostile fans: try 2014, at Florida State.
Safe to say, none of the kids that will be on the sidelines in orange and blue on Saturday were around for that one.
It will be loud. It will also be intense, with two teams in the stadium that think they can play their way into the College Football Playoff conversation facing what is essentially an elimination game, on national TV.
The lights will be bright. The atmosphere … electric.
How you prepare for the situations that will arise will determine how you perform.
“You do the best you can,” UVA coach Bronco Mendenhall said at his weekly presser on Monday. “So, most programs, including ours, you practice with crowd noise. I orchestrate and create crises during the week in as many different ways that I can, and that helps to some extent.”
But no amount of preparation can prevent bad things from happening.
“If you watched Notre Dame versus Georgia, and Notre Dame plays in a setting that is loud and impactful all the time, and they had a number of offsides or false starts themselves,” Mendenhall said.
“Emotion is something and chaos is something we work to create in practice. Again, I try to create that as much as possible. That’s really all you can do, other than continue to build your program and hopefully the experience of your players and the number of settings you’ve been in eventually helps balance that out.”
That will come. In the meantime, Virginia is coming off a game in which it dug itself a deep hole, trailing ODU 17-0 early in the second quarter, and then dug itself back out, rallying in the fourth quarter to post a 28-17 win.
It might not be ideal to be going into Notre Dame week off having had to rally to beat a 29-point underdog, but then again, maybe it is.
There has to be a value to having faced adversity and then overcome it – and better when it’s ODU on the other sideline than a Notre Dame.
That will be a key message from Mendenhall and his staff toward their team.
There’s also a bit of a “Hoosiers”-type aspect to arriving ahead of a big game like this one this weekend.
“We do this wherever we go. We always see and go to the stadium when we arrive and come off the plane and have a chance to see the field and get familiar with the locker room and make the unknown known for those that haven’t been there,” Mendenhall said.
Cue the mental image of Mendenhall with measuring tape to show his players that the field is 100 yards between end zones, just like at Scott Stadium.
This is the type of game that brought Mendenhall and his staff east to Charlottesville to be able to coach in.
It really hasn’t been that long since UVA was getting blown out in a season opener by an FCS school on its way to a 2-10 finish.
To say the least, Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly wasn’t thinking Week 5, 2019, UVA, game after at Georgia, we’ll be facing a Top 25 team with our backs against the wall.
“There are a lot of cool and positive things happening in your program. There will always be another metric, and this is the next one. Notre Dame is a very good team, national prominence, powerful name. We’re anxious to play,” Mendenhall said.
“To have a 4-0 start and have some of the attention we’re garnering just adds to, I think, the preparation and the urgency for us to continue to grow and learn,” Mendenhall said.
Story by Chris Graham
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