On February 15, 1995, England and the Republic of Ireland met at Lansdowne Road (now Aviva Stadium) for a soccer friendly that became infamous for all the wrong reasons. 

Before kickoff, tensions were high. As the national anthems of each side were played, a section of Irish fans jeered God Save the Queen. English fans, some of whom were later found to be part of Combat 18, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization, hurled insults loosely translating to “no surrender to the IRA.” 

The match started straightforward enough, with kickoff at 6:15 p.m. Twenty-six minutes later, all hell broke loose. 

In the 22nd minute, Ireland’s David Kelly scored the opening goal. Four minutes later, a David Platt goal was disallowed for England due to Platt being deemed offside. Soon after the offside call, a group of English fans began throwing debris, including parts of ripped-out benches, down to the lower stands. As the chaos unfolded, the referee stepped in and immediately stopped the match and brought the players off the pitch. 

One of the more memorable moments came when Ireland manager and former English player Jack Charlton walked off the pitch to shouts of “Judas, Judas!” 

Amidst the chaos, fans in the lower stands spilled out onto the pitch to escape missiles from the English fans. Police stepped in, but mistakenly placed some Irish fans into the same area occupied by English fans. 

After the teams left the pitch, the frequency of the missiles intensified. After 12 minutes, the match was called off, and fans were evacuated, except for 4,500 English fans, who were kept inside the stadium until the Garda Public Order Unit (Irish police) tried to escort them out. More violence broke out. 

Twenty people were injured during the rioting, and 40 were arrested.

College football has more reach than you might think.

Back home, the Atlantic Coast Conference stretches for over 3,000 miles from Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California. The Big Ten has a foothold in states like New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, and California. The Southeastern Conference now has its tentacles in the great states of Texas and Oklahoma. And the MAC, whose backbone was built on the Central Michigans and Ohios of the world, now has conference affiliates as far as the East Coast and Sacramento, California. 

It only feels right that college football, in its quest for expansion and domination on Saturdays in the fall, continues to play games on international soil.

If the concept of regular-season international college football games feels relatively new, that’s understandable. One of the more “recent” regular-season games came in 2016 when Cal and Hawaii combined for 82 points at Sydney’s Olympic Stadium. A week later, Georgia Tech beat Boston College in Aviva Stadium. The very next year, a Christian McCaffrey-led Stanford team demolished Rice in 2017 during the Sydney College Football Cup. 

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered a few planned international matchups. International regular-season games started up again in 2022, giving us the infamous Scott Frost fake-punt play in a loss to Northwestern. In the years that followed, fans were treated to three other early-season games, featuring matchups including Notre Dame-Navy, Georgia Tech-Florida State, and Kansas State-Iowa State. 

The full history of international college football games is almost as old as the sport itself. The first was a two-game series in 1874 between Harvard and McGill University of Montreal in Quebec and featured a hybrid of soccer and rugby rules, with Harvard winning 3-0. Harvard would later win the second matchup 1-0. Historians claim that the Harvard players were incredibly impressed with McGill’s rugby-style running game and later adopted similar rules, which helped shape the modern sport. 

Other unique chapters of international college football include the Bacardi Bowl in Havana, Cuba, which featured schools such as the University of Havana, LSU, and Mississippi Southern. Perhaps the funniest game of the Bacardi Bowl era was in 1937, when the game between Auburn and Villanova was nearly cancelled when then-president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, noticed his picture was missing from the game program. A last-minute reprint saved the day, and the game went on as planned. 

The modern era of international college football began in the late 1970s. Highlights included the 1976 Pioneer Bowl between Grambling State and Morgan State in Tokyo. This later morphed into a series of games held in Japan known as the Mirage Bowl and later the Coca-Cola Classic. 

The 1988 Emerald Isle Classic in Dublin, Ireland, featured Boston College and Army, and was the first FBS regular-season college football game ever played in Europe. It later became the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, now a Week 0 staple.

College football has always found a way to show up where it wasn’t expected. On August 29, 2026, it’s doing it again. 

The first game of the 2026 college football season will kick off at noon ET this Saturday at Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, where North Carolina and TCU will reacquaint themselves after a seismic beatdown a year ago. 

Last season, in legendary coach Bill Belichick’s collegiate debut, the Horned Frogs schlacked North Carolina 48-14 in front of a national TV crowd. Outside of a well-scripted opening drive, nothing went right for the Tar Heels. 

The offense looked disjointed. The defense couldn’t get off the field. Even the special teams unit looked sloppy and out of sorts. 

This season, there’s a renewed sense of optimism that the Tar Heels can take a step in the right direction under the offensive tutelage of Bobby Petrino.

For TCU, this season is all about making waves in the Big 12 Conference after a season defined by close losses. Harvard transfer Jaden Craig was brought in after the departure of stalwart Josh Hoover. If the defense can come together, TCU should have as good a shot as any team not named Texas Tech or BYU to bolt up the Big 12 standings.

On February 15, 1995, England and the Republic of Ireland squared off in a football match at Lansdowne Road — the very ground that is now Aviva Stadium, where TCU and North Carolina will kick off the 2026 college football season — that ended before it ever got started. 

A riot broke out. Players left the pitch to avoid the chaos. Both managers later condemned the actions that unfolded that day, which inevitably left a black eye on a sport and rivalry so connected to both proud countries. 

Lansdowne Road has seen the worst of sport. This weekend, it gets to host something that reminds us why we love it.

Our new Verballer Portal turns college football into something you play, not just watch. Make your picks, rank the teams, and follow your season alongside the Verballerhood. Signing up also helps support our independent college football show more than anything else.

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College football is finally here, which means there’s only one piece of preseason business left: putting our predictions on the record. In this episode, we each build a complete 12-team College Football Playoff field, debate the teams that just missed the cut, seed the bracket, and play the whole thing forward through the national championship.

Along the way, we wrestle with some of the biggest questions surrounding the 2026 season. How many SEC teams can survive the league’s new nine-game schedule? Does the Big Ten get a fourth team? Can the Big 12 produce multiple playoff teams? And which Group of Five contender makes it through a particularly messy race for the automatic bid? There are also some aggressive calls involving Alabama, Houston, New Mexico, Notre Dame, and several teams sitting right on the postseason bubble.

We work through potential first-round games, playoff paths, and semifinal matchups before putting our national championship predictions on the record. Some picks felt safer than others; a few are almost guaranteed to come back and haunt us, and somehow we independently landed in exactly the same place at the very end.

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