The Notre Dame-Miami rivalry was peak college football. Then it abruptly stopped

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Pat Walsh set up shop outside the Orange Bowl figuring business would be good. A year earlier, as a senior at Notre Dame in 1988, he had made a small fortune selling “Catholics vs. Convicts” T-shirts around campus when Notre Dame upset No. 1 Miami, which felt like an exorcism for Irish fans after four consecutive losses to the Hurricanes.

The coloring wasn’t much different on the update: basic white background, similar green and orange lettering. The front read, “#1 Catholics vs. #7 Convicts” with “War On The Shore” on the back.

Walsh admits it was a bit bland, the impossible follow-up to a shirt that spawned an ESPN “30 for 30” documentary. As it turned out, the reaction outside the Orange Bowl was more memorable than the item for sale.

“People were throwing s— at us, beer cans, swearing at us,” Walsh said. “I remember the corner we were on backed up to a parking lot with bushes. After 45 minutes, We gotta get out of here. These people had some real hatred.”

When Notre Dame returns to Miami on Sunday night, there won’t be a T-shirt. There won’t even be an Orange Bowl, a college football relic, almost like the series itself. If rivalries are what make college football great, Notre Dame-Miami is a case study of fervor gone too far. It’s not clear who hated whom first or most, just that both fan bases did so in a way that turned the rivalry into more than a football game. Something worse.

The games themselves should have been enough to continue the annual series. The final four meetings of the 20-year engagement from 1971 to 1990 were all top-10 matchups, and three of those four featured the eventual national champion. And the games were great, from Pat Terrell’s game-winning pass breakup in ’88 to Craig Erickson hitting Randal Hill to convert third-and-43 in ’89. It was everything else that helped end the series, though the ground has thawed since.

When Walsh returned home to Chicago after the game and went back to work at the Board of Trade, he got a call from a Notre Dame administrator. Word had gotten back to campus that he’d been selling shirts again.

“I was fearful walking out of the Orange Bowl, wearing Notre Dame stuff,” Walsh said. “It was intimidating. We’d been pursing Miami for years. Now they were coming at us. All the spirit and hype we had in South Bend, that transferred to Miami. And they took it well beyond.”


When Miami and Notre Dame played in 1990, it was the 19th time the schools met over a 20-year span (the teams did not play in 1986). Notre Dame’s athletic director at the time, Dick Rosenthal, cited an unhealthy hatred between fans of both schools, a desire to play new opponents and a full schedule through 2004 as the reasons why the Irish were discontinuing the series.

“This rivalry is a little bigger than it should be,” Rosenthal told the Miami Herald in the lead-up to the 1990 game. “Many fans have a passion for this game that’s unhealthy. Maybe cooling it off for a period of time isn’t such a bad idea.”

The hottest the rivalry ever got on the field was in 1988 when a pregame fight broke out as Miami players were attempting to head back to the locker room near the tunnel. Irish nose tackle Chris Zorich later admitted Notre Dame players started the skirmish.


Tony Rice and the Irish topped Miami 31-30 in 1988. (Notre Dame Athletics)

Kelvin Harris got a front row seat to four meetings between the Canes and Irish at the height of the rivalry. Harris played with Terrell and Todd Lyght, another former Irish defensive back, with the Los Angeles Rams.

“I think most of us felt like it was a travesty for college football that it didn’t continue,” Harris said. “And I understand Notre Dame had rivalries with USC, Michigan and others. But there was something different about Miami-Notre Dame from an intensity standpoint. The dislike of the two teams — Duke-North Carolina in basketball is what comes to mind.”

Dave Scott had a lot of jobs at the University of Miami from 1981 to 2009, from assistant baseball coach to football recruiting coordinator to assistant athletic director. Now in his 70s, he’s still teaching classes at the school. He’s excited about Saturday’s game, but he is also old enough to remember what it was like before the rivalry became heated. He grew up in South Florida when Notre Dame beat the Hurricanes regularly in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

“When I became assistant (athletic director) for football at Miami, I did a little research and I learned Notre Dame would come to Miami and spend the entire week here enjoying the beach before playing here — and they dominated the series,” Scott said.

Scott believes Notre Dame began looking for a way out of the series when Miami embarrassed the Irish 58-7 in 1985 — the infamous final game for Irish head coach Gerry Faust.

“Jimmy (Johnson) didn’t run up the score — I don’t think,” Scott said. “I think it was just one of those things where our No. 2s were better than their No. 1s and they gave up.

“Then, we went up there in 1988 and had the fight pregame. Well, every time USC came to town, they had the same fight in the tunnel. But people forget that. To me, it was almost like Florida (which stopped its annual series with the Hurricanes in the late 1980s). Florida didn’t want to lose those games to us. Notre Dame didn’t want to lose them either.”

Jimmy Johnson and his successor Dennis Erickson twice sent Scott to Notre Dame’s campus ahead of Notre Dame-Miami games to speak about the Hurricanes in front of more than 1,000 Irish fans.

“They had this tradition where the visiting team would send an assistant coach to this alumni smoker,” said Scott, who was a part of eight national championships between baseball and football. “I was extremely nervous — probably the largest gathering I’d ever spoken to. I remember listening very intently to Notre Dame’s running backs coach, and the Irish fans were booing him, saying he needed to be fired because of the fumbles the game before. I’m thinking if they’re doing this to him, they’re going to crucify me.

“So, it’s my turn. I get up in front of this old, skinny microphone — I mean, Knute Rockne might’ve breathed into this thing. So, I touch it and the mic falls. I put it back, did my thing. As I’m speaking, you could hear crickets in the room. I’m sitting there talking about what we’re going to do offensively with (quarterback) Steve Walsh. I went back two years later and made a joke about the microphone, and they didn’t like it. Then again, they didn’t like us very much anyway.”

Miami and Notre Dame are scheduled to play six more times between now and 2037. Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich told The Athletic the Hurricanes would love to play the Irish every year or every other year if it were possible.

It’s not known how those plans might change if the ACC follows the SEC’s footsteps and adopts a nine-game conference schedule to match the Big Ten and Big 12. But Radakovich believes scheduling 10 Power 4 conference opponents per season is what most P4 schools will aim for in the future.

Miami’s nonconference schedule over the next few years includes home-and-home series with South Carolina (2026, 2027) and Auburn (2029, 2030) and a showdown with Utah from the Big 12 in 2027. It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a chance South Carolina could nix the series with Miami and use in-state rival Clemson to hit the SEC’s minimum requirements of one nonconference game against a P4 opponent. Who could Miami fill those vacancies with? Radakovich speculated it would be an SEC, Big 12 or Big Ten opponent that plays its natural rival in league play.

Notre Dame has future home-and-homes set with Alabama, Michigan, Texas and Florida, in addition to a 12-year agreement with Clemson beginning in 2027. There’s a chance a similar arrangement could be made with Miami, although Irish athletic director Pete Bevacqua believes Notre Dame would benefit from more home-and-home games against the SEC and Big Ten, which includes some historical rivals.

The Irish would be staring at a scheduling hole if their series with USC is not renewed after this season; negotiations are ongoing. There’s also the issue of Stanford, another annual Notre Dame opponent whose series is set to end this season. The Cardinal could at least become a generic ACC rotation opponent instead of an annual event. Notre Dame has played Stanford every season since 1988, with the exception of 1995-96 and the pandemic-altered 2020 season. The game has stuck on the schedule in part because Notre Dame wanted a warm weather regular-season finale in years when it didn’t travel to USC. Thanksgiving weekend in Palo Alto filled the need.


When the Notre Dame-Miami series hit its breaking point in 1989, with the revenge cycle swinging back toward Miami, 7-year-old Tyler Hildenbrandt watched from end zone Orange Bowl seats, which were purchased as part of a travel package that included meeting the Notre Dame team the morning after the game. Hildenbrandt still has the T-shirt autographed by that Irish team. Tony Rice and Rocket Ismail are near the left shoulder, just below Lou Holtz.

Hildenbrandt — he goes by Ty now — is co-host of “The Solid Verbal,” the national college football podcast launched before everyone else tried to start one. Hildenbrandt arrived at the Orange Bowl with his mom in a party of four. They all wore Notre Dame gear, although none of it was provided by Pat Walsh.

“As my mom tells it, I have to go to the bathroom, decked out in Notre Dame stuff. A lot of people threw beer at us, which she still talks about to this day,” Hildenbrandt said. “My heart was definitely pumping. I don’t think I had a full understanding of what safe versus unsafe meant at 7 years old.

“I probably remember the concourse more than the game.”

They say you can throw the records out in rivalry games. In the Orange Bowl, whatever could be thrown probably was. It was a scene and series that included some of the mythological best of college football and some of the real-life worst. There’s a reason why “Catholics vs. Convicts” is part of the sport’s permanent vocabulary. It’s even referenced in EA Sports’ College Football 2026 video game.

It left a mark, not just on the Notre Dame administration as it moved to cancel the series or the Miami program that resented the way it was labeled in an infamous T-shirt. The origin of the hate, whether it was Johnson running up the score on Faust or Notre Dame punching first in the tunnel, doesn’t matter. It impacted how Hildenbrandt has covered the sport ever since. It impacted how two fan bases saw each other and themselves.

“The lifeblood of this whole sport is this passion, and what better way to see it, especially when you’re really young,” Hildenbrandt said. “There was tangible hatred there. There’s a reason we still talk about it at family functions all these years later. It was a real shared trauma.”

(Top photo of Chris Zorich and Steve Walsh: Bill Smith / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)


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