except locally, in South Bend (WNDU-Ch. 16), and only if the game was either sold out or beyond a 400-mile radius from South Bend. Luckily, I lived in South Bend, so I got to see the vast majority of ND games on TV, with most of them on Ch. 16 with Tom Dennin doing the play-by-play. We still watched Lindsey Nelson on Sunday morning, but for most of the nation that was their primary source of exposure to ND football.
From the time I started watching ND games in 1972 until the NCAA restrictions on TV were voided by the Supreme Court in 1984 on antitrust grounds, only a handful of games were not televised in South Bend. These included some of the games at Northwestern, and the 1976 and 1978 Navy games at Cleveland, which didn't sell out and were inside 400 miles from South Bend. By comparison, games at Purdue and MSU typically sold out and were televised to South Bend. (Sometimes ABC picked those games up; the sellout/400 mile rule didn't apply to them.)
Also, the 1979 game versus Miami in Tokyo wasn't televised, but presumably that was due to a cost-benefit analysis -- very expensive, especially then, to broadcast a game from Japan, and the game started at 11:30 ET Saturday night (Sunday afternoon in Tokyo).
