Notre Dame moved up to No. 7 in the latest AP rankings, although coach Brian Kelly would surely describe that as just "noise." But the noise from having ESPN's College Gameday on campus before Saturday's contest against Stanford will be impossible to ignore.
"You want to be in that group of football programs that has College Gameday on your campus." Kelly said Sunday. "You want to be that program that appeals to the audience that we're out recruiting. We saw those uniforms and we got great feedback from those. Yeah, I think you want to be in that in crowd. You don't want to be on the other side looking in.
"We're excited about the spotlight being here in South Bend and for our program, and I'll just work really diligently this week to keep our guys on task."
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GameDay is in South Bend for the first time since October of 2005, the day of Notre Dame's infamous "Bush Push" game against USC. While Stanford isn't ranked No. 1 -- as the Trojans were seven years ago -- they're coming off an impressive comeback in a 54-48 win over Arizona and are No. 18 in the AP poll.
Stanford's defense has been lauded all year -- the Arizona game notwithstanding -- and will present another challenge for Everett Golson a week after he played his best game of 2012.
"You're always concerned when you have a younger quarterback that he's going to be able to pick up a lot of things that a team like Stanford likes to do defensively," Kelly said. "They're an aggressive defense that bring a lot of looks, so we'll have to make sure he has the looks down."