BY ANDY BAGGOT
UWBadgers.com Insider
MADISON, Wis. — When Barry Alvarez was employed at Notre Dame in the late 1980s, the Irish were one of the elite programs in college football.
From 1987 to '89, Notre Dame went 32-5 overall and won a national championship in part because of a nasty defense assembled, designed and managed by Alvarez.
When Alvarez left to become the head coach at Wisconsin in 1990, few could have envisioned that one day the two schools would enjoy the same national profile.
But that's part of the backdrop to the news Monday that UW and Notre Dame have agreed on a unique series, one that features two games, two Midwestern cities, two NFL stadiums and two of the most fervent fan bases in college football.
The schools will face one another on Oct. 3, 2020 at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, the iconic NFL home of the Packers.
The following season, on Sept. 25, 2021, the teams will meet at Soldier Field in Chicago, the prideful NFL home of the Bears.
Alvarez rattled off the obvious attractions of the arrangement, which has been on the negotiating table since October of 2015.
"You have two tremendous fan bases," he said. "From the home stadiums, they're easy to get to. And you have tremendous venues."
You also have two highly regarded football programs that are — this might surprise some — evenly matched of late.
Since 1990, the Badgers are 227-111-4 (.670) overall with a 13-9 record in 22 bowl assignments.
The Irish, meanwhile, are 213-118-2 (.642) overall with a 7-13 mark in 20 bowl games.
"How many people would guess that?" Alvarez asked with a smile.
This is the same legendary Notre Dame brand that has won a record 11 consensus national championships since 1924 — the most recent in 1988 — and has an overall winning percentage of .723 (874-321-42).
For comparison, Wisconsin has never won a national title and has an overall winning percentage of .580 (684-489-53).
Alvarez cited another obvious attraction to the series: UW players getting to face a college blue blood on big-time stages.
"It's a high-profile school and to get in venues like that is a great experience for them," he said. "It will be a very positive thing."
Alvarez coached the Badgers for 16 years, winning three Big Ten Conference titles, three Rose Bowls and earning a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Not long after he became the full-time UW director of athletics in 2006, Alvarez said he began the task of trying to add the Irish to the football schedule.
Alvarez recalled a speaking engagement he had on the South Bend, Indiana, campus in which he broached the topic with Notre Dame counterpart, Jack Swarbrick.
"He was interested, but it just never happened," Alvarez said of Swarbrick, who took over as Irish AD in 2008. "Back then they didn't have many openings."
Notre Dame plays a famously independent schedule that taps into a variety of leagues, including the Big Ten.
UW and the Irish have played 16 times previously going back to 1900, the most recent in 1964. The Badgers are 6-8-2 in those meetings.
The upcoming series took a while to come together.
"The challenge there, like all our scheduling, is finding dates that match up," said Jeff Schmidt, UW's Associate Athletic Director for Administration and Legal Affairs who oversees football scheduling. "It's particularly difficult with them. We went back and forth for probably a few months just to find dates that worked."
Once that was done, Schmidt said, contact was made with the two stadiums to reserve those dates.
The talks between UW and Notre Dame gained some traction after everyone saw what happened at Lambeau Field last September.
The Badgers opened the season with a 16-14 victory over fifth-ranked LSU before a raucous crowd of 77,823. Alvarez said he got feedback from attendees who described it as "a Packer game on steroids."
The triumph served as a launching pad for UW, which won the Big Ten West Division title and knocked off Western Michigan, 24-16, in the Cotton Bowl to finish 11-3 overall.
"It wasn't long after the LSU game at Lambeau — that went so well and was such a good experience for our team — that we had conversations with (Packers president) Mark Murphy and the folks up there that, 'Hey, we should do this again,'" Schmidt said. "Things started to ramp up from there."
The latest series of games is unusual.
For one thing, they were arranged by the schools and not a TV network, which was the case in 2014, '15 and '16 when ESPN brought the Badgers to neutral sites to face LSU, Alabama and LSU again, respectively.
"This one we put together ourselves," Alvarez said. "We're splitting the games. We're basically renting the stadiums. It's our game."
Another unusual feature is that Notre Dame will be the home team in Green Bay with the Badgers having that role in Chicago.
You'd think it would be the other way around.
In 2009 the Irish began playing a "Shamrock Series" of games in which they stage a home-away-from-home contest at a unique venue. The sites have included Yankee Stadium in New York, Fenway Park in Boston and Soldier Field.
The success of those games sparked interest from Notre Dame officials in playing at Lambeau Field.
"They're looking for some iconic stadiums to play in so they approached us," Schmidt said. "At that point, that's when we agreed, but also negotiated a second game as part of the series where we'd be the home team at Soldier Field."
As such, the idea of playing a true home-and-home series — a game in front of Touchdown Jesus at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend and Camp Randall Stadium in Madison — was never on the table.
That was the case when the Badgers played LSU in Houston in 2014, Alabama in Arlington, Texas, in 2015 and LSU again in 2016.
"Neutral sites has been the plan all along," Alvarez said.
The last time the Badgers faced Notre Dame, their coach, Paul Chryst, wasn't born yet.
"I just think it's a good experience for our kids," Alvarez said.
"For us, the emphasis is on providing a unique experience for our team and our fans," Schmidt said. "That's important to us and these games definitely provide that."
