A four-year pause in the greatest intersectional rivalry in college football history, Notre Dame vs. Southern Cal has forced the end of a yearly tradition for the Fighting Irish. The 2026 football season marks the first non-pandemic season since 1995 that Notre Dame will not play a regular season game in California.
The Irish are heading west this weekend, though, making their first trip since 2004 to Provo, Utah, to face No. 8 BYU. The two programs were once destined to become annual rivals in 2010, as BYU decided to become an independent in football and the teams agreed to meet a total of six times. Conference realignment and Notre Dame’s Atlantic Coast Conference scheduling agreement quickly put an end to that agreement almost as soon as it was announced.
Notre Dame did face the Cougars in the 2022 Shamrock Series in Las Vegas and will welcome BYU to Notre Dame Stadium in 2027.
The trip this weekend is not to the ‘left coast,’ but it continues a tradition of far west trips for Notre Dame that date back to the 1925 Rose Bowl with Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen. Other than the 2020 Covid season, the Irish have played a game in the Mountain or Pacific time zone for 43 consecutive years.
That legendary 1924 team set a west coast trip itinerary for the ages and it inspired me to do a deep dive on how the Notre Dame football team travel itinerary has changed through the years.
No one will ever be able to match the 1924 team trip to the Rose Bowl. It is difficult to conceive of just how big of a deal that football team was in a national conscience that was powered by newspapers, newsreels and the infamous picture of the four Irish running backs on horses.
I could spend all of my word count today recounting that trip but for the sake of getting to my point of the article, I will be brief. The team left campus on December 20, and had a Sunday mass in Memphis, Tennessee. Next up was New Orleans, where they practiced at Loyola University and took a yacht trip on the Mississippi River.
The train moved to Houston, where the team had a Christmas turkey dinner and Knute Rockne dressed as Santa Claus to hand out toys. The group travelled to Tucson, spending four days practicing at the University of Arizona. They finally arrived in Los Angeles on December 31, practiced that afternoon in the Rose Bowl then beat the tar out of Stanford on January 1.
The way back was just as amazing as the trip out. The team moved through San Francisco, Ogden, Utah, then Salt Lake City to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, onto Denver, Lincoln, Nebraska, and finally back to Chicago.
It was a trip of a lifetime with the team of a lifetime.
In the 1930s, Notre Dame made biennial trips to Southern Cal that would require seven days of train travel with stops for team workouts along the way.
We have a detailed view of Notre Dame’s trip to Southern Cal in 1947. The game was on December 6 and the Irish left campus on Dec. 3 at 3:30 p.m. via the South Shore rail line to Randolph Street Station in Chicago.
The train dubbed “The City of Los Angeles” left Chicago at 6:30 p.m. and the team slept overnight to wake up in Sidney, Nebraska, at 7:40 a.m. for Mass during a short stop. The group arrived in Los Angeles on December 5 at 8:40 a.m. and bussed to the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. That same day the team practiced in the Coliseum, had a special party at the hotel described as a radio broadcast, evening meal and movie, then ‘retired’ at 10 p.m.
The game was played at 2 p.m. on on the sixth, a 38-7 demolition of the third-ranked Trojans by the top-ranked Irish, and after the game the team bussed to the Biltmore Hotel with a stop at St. Vincent Church on the way.
The team was given a free day on December 7, then held Mass on Monday, December 8 before walking onto “The Golden State Limited” for the return trip to campus. That rain arrived in Chicago on December 10 and the team was back in South Bend at 3:40 p.m.
It didn’t take long for Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, to adopt air travel for the team when he took over as Executive Vice President of the University. By 1951, the Irish were flying to the Southern Cal game.
For the 1951 trip the plane left South Bend Thursday at 8:00 a.m., made a stop over in Denver and arrived in California at 2:30 p.m. local time. The team held Mass at the hotel and then a practice at the Coliseum on Friday, played the game at 2 p.m. on Saturday, attended a special party at the Los Angeles Country Club on Sunday and flew back Monday, December 3. The flight left Los Angeles at 9 a.m. local time and landed in South Bend at 7 p.m. ET.
The trips had whittled their way down from over 15 days in 1925 to eight days in 1947 and five days in 1951.