Notre Dame-Navy (in Dublin) highlights college football’s return. Here’s the compete Week 0 TV schedule.

College football is back, though Penn State fans will have to wait a week to see the Nittany Lions in action.

While Saturday is the official start of the college football schedule, it’s become known as Week 0. The majority of NCAA Division I teams historically begin their seasons the Saturday before Labor Day. The first Week 0 game took place 39 years ago, when Nebraska crushed Penn State at Giants Stadium in New Jersey in the 1983 Kickoff Classic.

Easily the biggest game will be Navy taking on Notre Dame at Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, on NBC and Peacock. It’s part of a five-game deal dubbed the Aer Lingus College Football Classic and was originally scheduled in 2020, but was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notre Dame, ranked No. 13 in the AP’s top 25 college football poll, is coming off a 9-4 year and Gator Bowl win under rookie head coach Marcus Freeman. This season, there’s a lot of optimism in South Bend about new starting quarterback Sam Hartman, a 24-year-old senior who transferred from Wake Forest earlier this year after becoming the ACC’s all-time leader in touchdown passes.

A last-minute substitution in NBC’s broadcast booth is Noah Eagle (son of veteran announcer Ian Eagle) who will be calling the game in place of Jac Collinsworth (son of veteran announcer Cris Collinsworth), who is “under the weather and unable to travel,” according to the network. Calling the game alongside Eagle is former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett, in his second season broadcasting Notre Dame games on NBC.

Notre Dame has a lopsided 81-13-1 record against Navy. But last season the Midshipmen came close to upsetting the Irish, who survived a late Navy comeback to squeak by with a 35-32 win at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore last November.

Here’s everything you need to know about college football’s Week 0:

All start times Eastern:

There are also three FCS games Saturday:

The Nittany Lions, coming off an 11-2 season and a Rose Bowl victory, will kick off their 2023 season against the West Virginia Mountaineers on Sept. 2 at 7:30 p.m.

The two schools, once close rivals, haven’t faced one another on the football field since 1992, when West Virginia joined the Big East. The Mountaineers have been in the Big 12 since 2012.

It will air on NBC, which is debuting its Big Ten Saturday Night package — the first time the conference will have a dedicated weekly primetime game on a national network. Calling Big Ten games on Saturday nights will be Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge, a former Penn State quarterback and veteran broadcaster who joined NBC this year after spending 29 seasons in the booth for ABC, CBS, and ESPN. Kathryn Tappen will handle sideline reporting duties.

“I couldn’t have scripted it any better than to be in my old alma mater in Happy Valley for a game we used to play every year,” Blackledge said in a recent conference call.

Ahead of the game, NBC will debut B1G College Countdown, its new on-campus pregame show. Maria Taylor will host alongside a group of analysts that includes former USC quarterback Matt Cassel, former Ohio State defender Joshua Perry, and former Penn State star Michael Robinson.

Here’s Penn State’s full 2023 college football schedule:

» READ MORE: Penn State coach James Franklin talks realignment, QB competition, and the transfer portal

Philly college football fans will also have to wait a week before their schools take the field.

Here’s a schedule of the first games for Philly-area schools:

Big changes are coming to the college football landscape.

The Big Ten is expanding to 18 teams beginning in the 2024-25 season. The four teams joining the conference are Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA.

It’s the fourth expansion for the Big Ten since 2010, which hadn’t added a single school in the previous 21 years, dating back to when Penn State gave up its independence to join the conference in 1990.

Elsewhere, Texas and Oklahoma will move to the SEC in the 2024 season, and four schools are heading to the Big 12: Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah.

The big loser has obviously been the Pac-12, which has seen its conference crumble and could lose two of its four remaining schools to the ACC — Stanford and Cal. A merger between the Pac-12 and the Mountain West is possible, according to Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez. But there would be issues to resolve.

“These are four schools used to receiving $30 million a year,” Nevarez said of the remaining Pac-12 schools. “We are not in that stratosphere. But I certainly think we could provide an excellent landing place for those in need.”

If all that wasn’t enough change, the College Football Playoff is expanding to 12 teams beginning in 2024. The 2024 quarterfinals will take place in the Fiesta Bowl, Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, while the two semifinal games will be hosted by the Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl.