You didn’t need to be a world-renowned epidemiologist to see Notre Dame’s debacle coming.
Despite a surge in COVID-19 cases — the seven-day rate on campus alone soared from 18.9 cases to 30.7 cases in one week — Notre Dame treated its Saturday night showdown against top-ranked Clemson as if it was a run-of-the-mill game against Navy. Most of the 11,000-plus in the stands were students, despite athletic director Jack Swarbrick acknowledging after the fact that keeping them in their seats was never going to happen and Notre Dame making little effort to even try.
"Our philosophy of giving our preference to attend the game to students results in a very different dynamic than all the other places we go, where they allocated them to traditional fans.