Notre Dame and Navy could return to Dublin to meet in the Aer Lingus College Classic series as early as 2022 with both teams still keen to play in Ireland.
The rivals had been set to kick off the new season at the Aviva Stadium on August 29th but the coronavirus pandemic has forced the plans to be cancelled.
ESPN's College GameDay was also show set to broadcast from College Green as part of the coverage in the United States while 40,000 Americans were due to travel to Ireland for the occasion, generating an estimated 80-million Euro for the ecomony.
"It was going to be a new world record for the number of Americans to leave America for a single sporting event," organising committee member Padraic O'Kane told Off The Ball this evening. "The record still stands from Notre Dame against Navy at the Aviva Stadium in 2012 so at least we would have been breaking our own record.
"We've all put two years of our life into this to be bluntly honest so it's been a tough pill to swallow but we're looking at it from a positive standpoint, the five game series now starts in 2021 with Illinois and Nebraska, we're very confident that Notre Dame and Navy will make it back within the five years and maybe even as early as 2022 if a lot of cards fall the right way for us.
"They don't know in the States where the college football season is going, the game has been tentatively been booked for Annapolis, Notre Dame and Navy haven't met there in their 94 games there so there's potentially something a little bit special there on Labour weekend. Whether they'll have fans in the stadium, they're not that far down the line in making those decisions.
"It would be a shame for the game not to go ahead but both schools are completely committed about coming back to Ireland as soon as possible. The steering committee will be keeping them to their promise and keeping the pressure under them."
The University of Illinois will play the University of Nebraska at the Aviva Stadium next August and O'Kane says it's very likely that a Notre Dame versus Navy clash will still be part of the Aer Lingus series over the next five seasons:
"We've been speaking to colleges about 2022 but had a setback a number of months ago so we would be able to slot the game (between Navy and Notre Dame) in. It would take a lot of movements, the difference between traditional sport here and college football over there is just a completely different scenario, where you'd need a degree in schedule management to navigate it.
"Both schools have a number of commitments to this year and next year and some of those games don't happen then those contracts would have to be dealt with in the next year or so. So there's an outside opportunity for 2022 and both schools would love it to happen for '22, but while it's an outside for that year, there's a very strong possibility that we'll see them back during this series and that would be a great win for Ireland on the back of a negative news story today."
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