I started thinking, as I’ve been writing my series on Notre Dame firsts, I wonder when the first Notre Dame spring game was? ... and so I did some digging. I found, in Murray Sperber’s book, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football, that the first Notre Dame spring game was in 1922. Here’s an excerpt from the book ...
By spring practice of 1922, the N.D. coach, by nature optimistic and full of self-confidence, looked forward to the new season. The Chicago Tribune state his most serious problem: “The disqualifications [of players] together with graduations .