The lights are on and the doors are open at Yankee Stadium to host a football game, the Pinstripe Bowl matchup between the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

Notre Dame (8-4) will be ending a disappointing season after playing for the National Championship last season. Rutgers (6-6) is trying to break even in the last season before moving up to a more difficult conference.

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Notre Dame's season was thrown a curveball before it started when quarterback Everett Golson was suspended for academic purposes. He later revealed the reason to be cheating. Still, without Golson, the offensive spark, and Manti Te'o, their defensive leader who left for the NFL, the Irish were not the same.

"Not good enough obviously. Proud of the guys and my teammates and how we fought all year but you don't come to Notre Dame to go 8-4, and everyone understands that," Tommy Rees, who took over for Golson, told reporters, according to ESPN. "You have to be better."

The Pinstripe Bowl is entering its fourth season and, as an independent team, Notre Dame fit in for the Big 12 for not having enough bowl-eligible teams. The Irish played at the old Yankee Stadium in 1928 and 1946 and even in 2010, but coach Brian Kelly said it is an honor to come back.

"We were privileged to play in New York City and Yankee Stadium in 2010. The treatment our university received from the Steinbrenner family, the New York Yankees and the entire organization was unlike anything we've experienced in my tenure at Notre Dame," he said.

Rutgers is playing its last season in the AAC and will move to the much tougher Big Ten next year. The 6-6 season thus far is hardly a strong bid for a conference upgrade, despite this being the eighth bowl game in nine years of the Scarlet Knights.

"It's a really attractive matchup," Rutgers second-year coach Kyle Flood told reporters. "It will certainly be an attractive matchup for their fan base and I think it will be attractive to just the casual college sports fan that wants to see an event and to get an opportunity to go watch a football game in Yankee Stadium, one of the premiere venues in the world."