NCAA Football in Ireland: An bhfuil tú réidh le haghaidh roinnt peile?

An bhfuil tú réidh le haghaidh roinnt peile?*

NCAA Football in Ireland

By Denis M. Crawford, College Football Hall of Fame Historian

*We open this post with a disclaimer about the title of this post. If Google Translate is correct (honestly, when is AI ever wrong?!?), this is “Are you ready for some football?” in Gaeilge, a Celtic language of Ireland. Now on to the post!

TCU and North Carolina help to usher in the 2026 college football season in the Aer Lingus College Football Classic at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on August 29. This is the fifth year in a row the Aer Lingus Classic has been played, although this specific game dates to 2016. How and why did the college football season come to be opened on the Emerald Isle? Read on.  

The First Games

Boston College defeated Army 38-24 in the Emerald Isle Classic on November 19, 1988. The game was promoted to piggyback off a growing fascination with gridiron football in the United Kingdom. The National Football League (NFL) first staged a UK exhibition game in 1983 when the St. Louis Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings played at London’s Wembley Stadium. The NFL began to host an annual exhibition known as the American Bowl in 1986. The UK also began a fledgling college football system in 1985 which continues today.

Given Boston’s deep Irish roots, BC was a natural for the first game and over 40,000 spectators attended. The next two matchups did not draw as well, although the 1989 Pittsburgh-Rutgers and 1991 Fordham-Holy Cross contests were good matchups.

The Irish Come to Ireland

Irish games went on hiatus until 1996 when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish agreed to play their annual game with Navy at Croke Park in what was dubbed the Shamrock Classic. While the contest was one-sided, with Notre Dame winning 54-27, the Irish fans, and the Irish fans, left happy. See what we did there!?

It would be another sixteen years until the college game returned to Ireland, and again the Fighting Irish and Midshipmen were the draw. Notre Dame swamped Navy 50-10 in 2012 before a sellout crowd at Aviva Stadium. The attendance success of this contest and the 2014 Penn State-UCF contest helped generate sponsorship from Aer Lingus.

The 2016 game between Georgia Tech and Boston College drew over 40,000 fans but the game was again put on hiatus for several years while scheduling concerns and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic played themselves out.

The Modern Aer-a…We Mean Era

The annual Aer Lingus Classic as we know it today started with an exciting 31-28 shootout between the victorious Northwestern Wildcats and Nebraska Cornhuskers in 2022.

In 2023, Notre Dame and Navy met for the third time and once again Irish eyes were smiling following a 42-3 victory over the Middies. The next two games were much closer, however, and cemented the Ireland opener as a cornerstone of August football.

Unranked Georgia Tech shocked #10 Florida State 24-21 when Aidan Burr’s 44-yard field goal cleared the crossbar as time expired. The walk-off was a first for games in Ireland, but the opening act of the game was also historic. For the first time in the history of ESPN College GameDay, the roadshow travelled across the Atlantic Ocean and broadcast live from Trinity College in Dublin.

In 2025, the game featured a Top 25 matchup for the first time. The traditional rivalry known as “Farmageddon” left behind the wheat and corn of the Great Plains for the potato fields around Dublin. #22 Iowa State held on to defeat Big 12 rival #17 Kansas State 24-21.

This year’s game features Bill Belichick seeking a reset after a disappointing 2025 season, which included a 48-14 loss to TCU in the opener. If it is anything like the most recent Aer Lingus Classics, fans will demand that college football live up to the phrase “Erin go bragh!” (Ireland Forever)