The different conferences and the NCAA have yet to determine when college athletes will be able to return to their respective campuses to resume training, but once social distancing guidelines were extended through the month of April any hope of the Notre Dame football team making up its remaining 14 spring practices was all but eliminated.

“Would I have liked 15? Sure. But I’m not going to go into the season with trepidation that we’re not going to get prepared to play whomever we need to play,” Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said on the local radio show Sports Beat. “We’ve got a veteran football team that knows how to play the game. I watched our first practice. I kind of know what we have.”

While it is good Kelly is confident in his team’s ability to perform, it is still hard to ignore the notion that it is a competitive advantage for the 2020 Notre Dame opponents that were able to host more than one spring practice.

Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly and his squad only had one spring practice in 2020 — eight less than Clemson, the toughest opponent currently on the team’s schedule. (Joseph Sisson)

The NCAA allows all Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams 15 spring practices, which includes a limited number of fully and partially padded affairs. Notre Dame’s first and only spring practice was on March 5, but other schools began in February. At this time, it is unclear if the NCAA will do anything to rectify the spring practice discrepancies, such as by allowing teams to make up missed spring practices with extra OTAs over the summer.

2020 Fighting Irish Opponent Spring Practice Breakdown

• Clemson — 9 • Western Michigan — 8 • Louisville — 7 • Stanford — 7 • Wake Forest — 5 • Georgia Tech — 5 • Duke — 3 • Pittsburgh — 3 • USC — 1 • Navy — 0 • Arkansas — 0 • Wisconsin — 0