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From Town Tools. For the current version, visit https://www.towntools.org/south-bend-indiana-us/game-days
Six Saturdays each fall, Notre Dame home football brings roughly 80,000 visitors to town — hotels fill, roads around campus change direction, and locals plan errands around kickoff. All six 2026 kickoff times are now published, and they are on each date below. This is a pattern from the published schedule, not a live count.
Pick a day
Quiet
Steady
Busy
Packed
Monday, October 12
QuietQuiet
Why
Monday
What to do
A normal day — drive and park downtown without a plan.
This is the usual pattern for each day, not a live count. It can’t tell you a space is free right now — it tells you which days to plan around.
Kickoff time is the thing to check
Notre Dame and NBC published all six 2026 kickoff times in May: Rice, Stanford and Boston College kick at 3:30 pm, Michigan State, Miami and SMU at 7:30 pm. That single fact decides which half of your Saturday is affected, and it is why three of these Saturdays are ordinary until mid-afternoon.
How game-day roads change
Before kickoff, police run an inbound pattern — Douglas Road goes one-way eastbound from campus to Ironwood. After the game, roads around campus turn one-way away from campus for about two hours while the lots empty. The exact hours shift with the kickoff time; follow officers and posted signs.
The free Game Day Express
Transpo runs a free shuttle between downtown (Aloft, Century Center / Courtyard by Marriott, DoubleTree on Washington St) and McKenna Hall on campus: from three hours before the game, with the last downtown departure an hour before kickoff, then for two hours after it ends. Regular Routes 5 and 7 run detours on home-game Saturdays. Transpo posts each season's game-day service on its rider alerts page — check it before the first game.
Notre Dame plays Wisconsin at Lambeau Field on 6 September and Navy at Gillette Stadium on 31 October. Both are home games on paper and neither fills this city, so neither is on this calendar.