Twice in the last three days, I have listened to someone talk about Notre Dame.
While this in itself, would drive me to seriously contemplate the inside of my oven, what has really annoyed me is the revisionist history that seems to have occurred in regards to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team.
On Saturday night, I was watching the UNC/Duke basketball game and with Duke having the game well in hand late in the game, Dick Vitale started talking about the general hatred people feel toward Duke.
SIDEBAR #1: Am I the only one that believes this year’s UNC team definitively proves one of two things: 1 – High school basketball scouting and recruiting rankings are completely flawed or 2 – Roy Williams is the most overrated coach in the country. Has a team of more highly regarded players, playing for one of the most respected coaches in the country ever been worse? Is Roy Williams the Larry Brown of the NCAA? He is great at leading great players but will never have a team overachieve above its talent level?
In Vitale’s warped, frozen in time view of the world, Duke is hated due to their great successes. Disregarding that Duke has been the surest early round upset pick in March Madness since Roy Williams left Kansas (see??), Dick thinks all of us out here in sportsfan world hate Duke because of their consistent success.
That may be debatable but the comparison that Vitale used was that Duke engenders the same hatred that Notre Dame does in football, because of their continued success.
For the record, Vitale did not mention his conflict of interest that his daughter attends Notre Dame and he thinks South Bend is the only place north of Cameron Indoor that will be saved when the rapture comes.
On Monday morning, I started listening to the BS Report with Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. While I should have been giddy with the opportunity to listen to my two favorite writers talk for two hours, they also started talking about Duke basketball and naturally segued to Notre Dame football. Which must be some sort of FCC requirement I don’t know about.
SIDEBAR #2: Chuck made an interesting point about the hatred of Duke deriving from some sort of reverse-racism that because Duke has an inordinate amount of white players and some of them were annoying (Laettner, Christian; Hurley, Bobby; Wojoczeheyskyzczheiy, Steve) we have assigned a level of ‘douche-i-ness’ to any white player as soon as they get on the Duke floor. This may have validity, although I should admit that despite being a white guy of average height, all of my least favorite basketball players have been white guys of average height – Dookie or non-Dookie – I’m looking at you John Stockton.
Simmons made the argument that people of a certain age will always overrate Notre Dame because as they were growing up, Notre Dame was always successful. I have made this argument myself before so I really shouldn’t have a problem with it but that was when talking about dinosaurs like Beano Cook.
Simmons and Klosterman are around 39-40 years old, roughly 5 years older than me. The fact that they have been brainwashed to think ‘Notre Dame’ was successful for their entire lives just speaks to the power of a media repeating a storyline long enough.
Let’s set the record straight on the ‘continued greatness of Notre Dame’.
- Notre Dame’s last national championship was in 1988
- Their last national championship before 1988 was 1977
- The last time Notre Dame was truly relevant to the National Championship conversations was 1993, when they lost at home to Boston College and cost themselves a national championship game appearance (on behalf of Seminole nation – thank you for that). 1993 was seventeen years ago.
- Notre Dame’s football record since 1975: 274 wins, 139 losses. A winning percentage of .663. On a twelve game season that breaks down to an average record of about 8-4.
- Six times since 1975 has Notre Dame had a season record with one loss or less. The last time: 1993.
- Notre Dame’s all-time Bowl record: 14-15
- Notre Dame did not win a bowl game from 1995 to 2008. Losing 9 straight. The streak breaking win was a defeat of 7-5 Hawaii in the Hawaii Bowl.
In every conceivable way, for my entire lifetime Notre Dame has been a mediocre football program. They have occasionally had good teams that even won a couple national titles, most recently twenty years ago. But for the other 85% of the time, they are at best above average, at worst truly awful.
Which, in my book puts them on par with schools like Colorado, Clemson and Tennessee.
Can we please, please stop this myth that Notre Dame has been a great football program for all time?
Yes, they were a great team from the 1920s all the way through the 1960’s. But then so was Army who won three straight national titles in the 1940’s. Minnesota won a share of 3 straight national titles in the 1930’s, two more in the 1940’s and another in 1960. The Golden Gophers even beat Alabama in the 2004 Music City Bowl. Yet, no one will ever go on the air and talk about Minnesota’s continued dominance of national football.
All of these national media types need to stop perpetuating the myth of Notre Dame football. They haven’t been great for twenty years. They aren’t relevant now.
If you insist on forcing down our throats never-ending hype about an occasionally decent football team from a religious school that last won a national title in the 1980’s that is fine.
Just try to mix it up and talk about BYU on occasion.
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