Notre Dame Football: The Fighting Irish are listed as double digit underdogs to the Georgia Bulldogs

Perhaps the biggest game on the 2019 schedule for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish is their early season matchup against the Georgia Bulldogs in Athens, Georgia. Given the storylines that accompanied the end of the regular season and the bowl season, this isn’t just a big game — it’s incredibly important to the Notre Dame football program and its future.

It’s also a game that has the Irish listed as fairly large underdogs.

It’s still February, so these kind of spreads are pretty much useless right now, but it’s still interesting to contemplate. Notre Dame is a 10.5 underdog to Georgia.

For all of the bad press the Irish get as a team that “can’t hang with the elite teams in the country,” they held their own just fine against the Bulldogs in 2017. You probably remember the game for its “sea of red” as Georgia fans invaded South Bend to the tune of an estimated 40,000 plus. It turned out to be an extremely close game as the Irish lost 20-19 in what was Brandon Wimbush’s second start of his career. The Bulldogs would go on to play in the championship game of the college football playoff (a close loss to the Alabama Crimson Tide).

The 2017 game was the first time the Bulldogs traveled to South Bend, and this year will be the first time the Irish will have traveled to Athens. The two teams played only one other time, and that was in the 1981 Sugar Bowl that Georgia won to give them a national championship.