A shutout on offense is pretty rare for major college football programs. It’s happened 75 times over the course of Notre Dame history, or 5.7% of total games played. However, only 26 of those games have come in the AP Poll era. Brian Kelly has never been shutout as head coach of the Irish and its only happened 10 times since the early 1960’s.

Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine, Gerry Faust, Lou Holtz, and Bob Davie were all shutout only once, while Tyrone Willingham was blanked twice and Charlie Weis three separate times. Schematic advantage?

The coaches to be shutout the most would be Hunk Anderson (10 times), Knute Rockne (8 times), and Elmer Layden (7 times). This is largely due to the era of low-scoring football. All of these shutouts came in the post-World War I years and covered nearly 12% of games for these 3 consecutive head coaches.

Scoreless ties can’t happen any more since college football adopted an overtime for the 1995 bowl season and then fully beginning in 1996. However, in Notre Dame’s past the 0-0 tie happened 17 different times with that Rockne/Anderson/Leahy group accounting for 6 of the games.

The last 0-0 tie happened in 1965 and was the only such score for the Irish in the 534 games played between late 1946 and the end of the 1995 season. This was during Ara Parseghian’s second season and it may be one of the strangest Notre Dame games I’ve ever come across in my research.

#6 Notre Dame at Miami
November 27, 1965
0-0 Tie

Games down at Miami have largely been a house of horrors for Notre Dame. The Irish have only beat a Miami team defending their home stadium who finished ranked one time, during the first meeting back in 1955. The last 6 visits have all been losses for Notre Dame while being out-scored 207-40. So, there was probably some budding hometown Hurricane voodoo for the 1965 regular season finale.

This was the end to a season before Notre Dame would win a National Championship the next fall. They’d go unbeaten over the next 11 games into 1967 which makes this 0-0 tie stick out even more.

By all accounts, something broke with the 1965 offense late in the season. I’m going to blame quarterback Bill Zloch, if you don’t mind. He was a senior who converted to quarterback for ’65 and didn’t help the offense out very much completing 36 of 89 passes on the season for just 558 yards with 3 touchdowns and 9 interceptions. The Irish were battling for a National Championship the previous week against #1 Michigan State and mustered only 3 points in a bad loss. Against the Hurricanes, Zloch completed only 6 of 20 passes for 60 yards. Somewhat ironically, Zloch was from just outside Miami and today is a Senior United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida.

Miami’s defense was playing pretty well (and they’d carry the momentum into 1966 and a top 10 finish) late in the season. Even though the Canes lost 4 games in 1965, they only gave up 3 touchdowns over their final 4 games. The reporting at the time mentioned how Miami stacked the line of scrimmage to stifle the Irish running game. Afterwards, Parseghian said, “But they [Miami] stormed us. They stacked up on us. Half the time we were running against virtually a nine-man line.”

I guess it’s not just Brian Kelly who struggled running against a loaded box.

Both teams missed a pair of field goals, which honestly is just funny. Reporters asked Ara after the game about the poor field quality and Irish runners slipping all over the place. I’d bet that hurt the kickers, too.

Miami couldn’t do much offensively, either. They finished with -17 yards rushing. I wonder how many other times Notre Dame held an opponent to negative rushing and didn’t win? This might be the only game in the last 60 years.

We mythologize coaches like Parseghian and with good reason, but it’s moments like these that allow us to understand how ‘normal’ frustrating games are for even the best coaches. The 1965 Miami tie was one of only 4 games under Ara along with Michigan State 1968, Missouri 1972, and Purdue 1974 where the Irish lost or tied a team that would finish unranked.