USC-Notre Dame: Now an October classic

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The weather wasn’t a factor in Saturday’s USC-Notre Dame game at South Bend, Ind. -- and it’s been that way for most of the past 50 years.

Before that?

Not so much.

Fifty years ago, the Trojans and Fighting Irish played their last late November game at South Bend -- and weather was a factor in that one.

The date was Nov. 28, 1959, and USC had one of its better teams under Coach Don Clark, a squad led by Willie Wood and brothers Mike and Marlin McKeever. The Trojans came in 8-1, but they weren’t prepared for the bitter cold of South Bend -- at game time, the temperature was 29 degrees -- or Irish quarterback George Izo, whose nickname, appropriately, was Iceman.

Izo completed 11 of 23 passes and Notre Dame won, 16-6.

Read The Times’ report: ‘It was colder than a Klondike clam.’

Clark resigned as coach after the season, and he was replaced by one of his assistants. No, not Al Davis.

John McKay.

And it was McKay who insisted that USC change the away-game date of the annual Notre Dame game because of that 1959 game when some players reportedly suffered frost bite.

Since then, the games at South Bend have been played around mid-October.

-- John Scheibe