Revisiting Notre Dame's Biggest Blowout

Before Syracuse in 2025, there was Haskell in 1932, but before that, there was an even bigger victory with an even wilder story.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED NOVEMBER 25, 2025

When the Fighting Irish boat raced an overmatched Syracuse squad in the opening minutes of their 2025 matchup. After putting up 21 quick points — before the offense even got onto the field — you could almost hear the broadcast crew's fact checkers looking to find evidence of historic blowouts that they could revisit as the game continued to get out of hand.

There were those 49 points in the first half, then 70 by the final whistle — more points than Notre Dame has scored in a single game in almost a century. There was Jeremiyah Love, needing just eight touches to drop 171 yards and three touchdowns. Maybe the wildest stat is that the team had more points than passing yards.

When Syracuse punched in a garbage-time touchdown to make the final 70-7, it looked like a historic blowout, and it was...

...for Syracuse.

For Notre Dame, there have been bigger victories, and the broadcast crew was quick to point to a game usually considered to be the largest blowout in the program's history — a 73-0 rout over Haskell Institute in 1936. There's a whole story to be told about that game and that institution, but that's a story for another day.

That's because we're here to remember another game, an even more lopsided rout, all the way back in 1896, against a team from a place called Highland Views.

So far as I can tell, Highland Views was a South Bend neighborhood hemmed in on four sides by South Bend Avenue, Turnock Street, St. Louis Boulevard, and Corby Boulevard. Old maps call it Turnock & Macks Addition. It was 1893 when the first advertisements ran in the local newspapers, boasting about the proximity to the Singer Sewing Machine Factory and the wide sweeping views of Notre Dame and the city of South Bend.

It wasn't a real big subdivision at just sixty homes, but they must have filled up pretty quick, because the ads stopped running two months after they started. Just like that, the neighborhood was built and lived in.

And then they started their own football team.

The Highland Views Football Eleven were eager to take any field they could find, and they were not choosy about their opponents. They competed against small colleges, regional factory teams, military regiments, and even the occasional high school. They convinced other South Bend neighborhoods to assemble teams for rushed matches, and then they ran roughshod over those teams. More than one team existed just for one game, only to get stomped by Highland Views, and then ceased to exist thereafter.

Highland Views even started its own Juniors Team, then played against the Juniors Team, then counted the win alongside all of the others. It was hardly honorable.

The boasts only grew, and by 1896, Highland Views claimed to be the non-collegiate football champions of Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan. They bragged that they had not allowed a single point in three years. They taunted the men at Notre Dame to accept their challenge.

Eventually, the taunts worked.

 

 

The game was scheduled for November 20, 1896.

Highland Views was coming off of an easy victory against Valparaiso High School. An angry Notre Dame team was coming off a tough loss against Purdue.

The result was predictable — an 82-0 drubbing that remains Notre Dame's largest margin of victory with the only caveat being that their opponent wasn't actually a real team.

When the Highland Views squad claimed that the only reason — the only reason! — Notre Dame won the game was because they had stolen signals, those accusations were laughed off by the general public and so too were the Eleven from Highland Views.

They were in the paper again a year later — a 4-0 loss to the team from Howard Park.

Aaron Helman is an author, historian and adventurer from South Bend. You may have seen him around South Bend drinking coffee. Learn more about his work or check out his books at aaronhelman.com.