Irish get ready for showdown with Huskers

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- Notre Dame is not a newcomer to this season's Top 25 as far as Nebraska coach Frank Solich is concerned.

Solich, whose Cornhuskers have been ranked No. 1 since the preseason, has had the Fighting Irish in each of his coaches' polls.

"I believed that they would be a very fine football team and deserving of being ranked," Solich said.

And Notre Dame's 24-10 win over Texas A&M in the season opener Saturday was enough to convince others. The Irish, out of the AP's preseason poll for the first time since 1986, are ranked No. 23 by the media heading into Saturday's game against the Cornhuskers, the first between the traditional powers since 1973.

"They are on a very high note right now. They're playing with a lot of confidence," Solich said. "They really flow to the ball very quickly defensively. They get a lot of people involved in the tackle. They're a strong physical type of team on both sides of the ball."

Solich doesn't want to fuel any talk in the Huskers' most anticipated non-conference game in years, so he isn't saying where he put the Irish in the USA Today/ESPN coaches' poll, which has Notre Dame at No. 25.

"Regardless of who's favored and the point spread, they're going to be fired up and ready to play. They've had something good happen to them out of the chute, winning the first game and winning it impressively against a nationally recognized football program," Solich said. "I doubt that there's anything that can be said or done to inspire them any more than they've been inspired."

Well, playing the No. 1 team might be a little bit more of an incentive for the Irish. But Solich wants the Huskers to treat it just like any other game and forget about "Touchdown Jesus," "The Four Horsemen" and the rest of the Notre Dame mystique.