So, basically, Notre Dame VS Navy is preseason Holiday Bowl?

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish will fly out to San Diego next week for their annual game against the Navy Midshipmen. During the offseason, many Irish fans (including this one) openly expressed real concern when it came to the amount of travel the Irish were going to have to do this season.

In case you may not know, this game is technically a Navy home game. Per tradition, Navy chooses a neutral site for the game — usually in an NFL Stadium. Almost always, the game is played east of the Mississippi River.

When the location for this game was announced, I don’t remember thinking much about it at all. This is a Navy decision (with plenty of Notre Dame discussion I’m sure) and it really didn’t start to fester in my brain until Notre Dame decided to move the Syracuse game to Yankee Stadium for the Shamrock Series.

That decision caused many to start railing against the Shamrock Series, and Notre Dame’s scheduling policy as a whole. I’m sure we will talk about that much more in the weeks to come, so let me just bring to the point of why we’re here.

Like I said... it’s Navy’s decision where the game is played, so I really paid it no mind. That is, until I came across some things in this video that I didn’t know about the game:

Within the video, it basically outlines why this game is being played in San Diego — and if you connect the dots, it’s not exactly because of the Navy base.

• The game is being run by the San Diego Bowl Game Association (red jackets)
• Navy used to have a bowl tie-in with the now defunct Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego
• The SDBGA also oversees the Holiday Bowl, sponsored by the San Diego County Credit Union
• The SDBGA approached Navy about playing this game in San Diego because wouldn’t that be great?

It sure is great — great for the SDBGA and the businesses in San Diego. With the loss of thr Poinsettia Bowl, this game not only fills the void, it will far exceed anything the Poinsettia Bowl produced in terms of economic gain.

It’s an easy sell to Navy because of the base, and their gratitude to the SDBGA for the bowl ti-in they had as an Independent. Notre Dame... well they are just going along for the ride. Any chance Jack Swarbrick gets to play in every major city in the northern hemisphere — he’s jumping in head first.

The game weekend will feature all sorts of events around the San Diego area. So what we really have is a bowl game... in October.

Perhaps it really isn’t a big deal, but as the miles start chipping away at the bodies of the Notre Dame players, it could end up being a very big deal. I’m just happy Notre Dame is traveling all the way across the country to help support the economy of a city that has an astronomically high cost of living. Yay capitalism!

Carry-on — until the next time I get worked up over this ridiculous schedule again.