Kent State to play Notre Dame in 2027

Kent State has added another opponent to its customary Power Four gauntlet, with Notre Dame confirming the addition of Kent State to its 2027 schedule yesterday. The meeting, scheduled for Oct. 2, 2027, will be the first between the two schools, but there are plenty of connections between the two institutions.

Current Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman was an assistant on Darrell Hazell's staff at Kent State from 2011-12, while former Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz– who won a national title with the Irish in 1988– walked on to Kent State as a linebacker, playing with the Flashes in the 1956-57 season before graduating in 1959.

A road game at Notre Dame could net Kent State an appearance on over-the-air broadcast television. If selected for broadcast on NBC, it would be only be the third time– aside from syndication– that the Golden Flashes would appear on one of the five major over-the-air networks.

There’s good reason to believe that this game will avoid receiving the “Peacock treatment”. NBC selected Notre Dame home games against ACC teams as the annual Peacock-exclusive contest in 2024 and 2025, while 2026 will see a Notre Dame road game against Big Ten foe Purdue get the streaming treatment thanks to a back-room deal, signaling a potential change in scheduling philosophy.

Kent State’s first appearance on over-the-air television came in 1974, when ABC selected the Golden Flashes’ game with Ohio on September 21st. The Golden Flashes were fresh off a 1973 season where they went 9-2 and narrowly missed an appearance in their second-straight Tangerine Bowl with the great Don James at the helm.

ABC aired the game to nine stations, with just one being outside of Ohio, in Wheeling, West Virginia. The rest of the country got a regional slate comprising Air Force-Oregon, Nebraska-Wisconsin, or Miami (FL)-Houston.

The game appeared to be an effort by ABC to make up for their snub of Kent State’s conference game against Miami University the prior year. The network passed on the matchup between #17 KSU and #19 Miami to air a Big Ten matchup between Minnesota and Purdue, who were both 4-4 going into the contest. (To make matters worse, one of Purdue’s losses came to Miami.)

The network’s reasoning? It was mostly due to the broadcast structure of the time, which capped the number of games aired on TV in a given week. To that point in the season, only five Big Ten teams saw air time, necessitating a shift in schedule.

The Golden Flashes faltered in front of the ABC cameras, notching just 118 yards and eight first downs in a 20-0 loss to the Bobcats. Perhaps more notably, a young broadcaster, Verne Lundquist, who called the game for ABC, received harsh reviews from the papers in the lead-up to the game. 

Kent State would not appear on any of the major networks for another forty years– though ABC would eventually select KSU's Week 3 game against Ohio State for a regional broadcast with a reverse-mirror on ESPN2.

Most of the country would get Kent State-Ohio State on ABC, while the regions that did not get that game on ABC would instead see it on ESPN2. The other half of this pairing was the Boise State-UConn game. (We've provided coverage maps below for reference on how this worked.)

The game may as well have been tucked away on ESPN2. Ohio State outgained Kent State offensively by a margin of 628 yards to 126 in a 66-0 win. Nick Holley was the lone bright spot, rushing and receiving for 71 of the Golden Flashes’ 128 total yards. 

Although the odds are against Kent State when they walk into South Bend, the Golden Flashes have a rare opportunity to showcase the MAC to the country. The Golden Flashes not only hope to score their first points on broadcast television but also to replicate Northern Illinois' success in South Bend.