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 attended 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.

For this week’s THH, with only NFL games to pick from (I refuse to acknowledge the New Mexico Bowl or St. Petersburg Bowl) I resurrected the theme approach – adding a level of complexity to our usual free-for-all picking approach.

Our three games this week are rematches of games played years ago and the rules are that we cheer for the team we would have cheered for back then. I didn’t tell Turner or Shadow what the common thread was between these games but instead used hints that the games played before had been ‘historically important’.

This choice of words set off a firestorm of email traffic as it quickly became apparent that based on the phrase ‘historically important’, the two of them had spent hours trying to determine what the common theme could be. Of course, they were in Jacksonville at the time, so it isn’t like they had anything better to do.

Needless to say they greatly overthought what could have been historically important about these three games. They actually arrived at the correct answer very quickly but moved right past and kept looking. Sort of like when my friend Greg and I were driving to Key West for the first time and we were excited to see the Seven-Mile Bridge but didn’t think we would ever get there because the bridge we were driving across just seemed to go on forever.

Anyway, this started a great debate on what constitutes ‘historically important’ which is probably 14 times more interesting than the resulting THH picks.

If a game is important at the time it is played (hypothetical example that might have something to do with today’s THH: AFC and NFC Championship games) but nothing about it stands up to time (compare: Dwight Clark’s ‘Catch’ in 1981 versus the following year’s Redskins vs. Cowboys game – and yes, I had to look up who the Redskins played) – is it historically important?

Games are certainly important to those that have a personal connection to the game – if your favorite team was the Redskins in the early 80’s, that 1982 game might be one of your greatest memories. But what about the rest of us? If the Cowboys had beaten the Redskins, would my life be different in any way, other than dealing with the ridiculous Cowboys bandwagon being rejuvenated a decade early? If I have no distinct memories of a game I most likely watched – does that mean it was unimportant?

If an important game was played yet nothing memorable happened – if the context of the game were taken out of consideration and the game played was no more remarkable than any of the 448 regular season NFL games that season – would the game be considered historic in hindsight?

Maybe I am in the minority, but I say yes. Ok, I know I am in the minority (at least among THHers). It doesn’t matter to me what happened on the field as much as the context of the game. Of the 43 Super Bowls played – how many individual plays can you remember today? Even the biggest NFL fan would only remember 3-4 plays per game. Hell, half of the Super Bowls were so boring or unwatchable that their only redeeming qualities were the commercials. For anyone that wasn’t there, the only reason most of us remember any plays at all are NFL Films. For any games before 1990 how many plays do any of us remember watching live?

Super Bowl XX in 1985 featured one of the greatest teams (the ‘85 Bears), greatest players (Walter Payton) and longest necks (Steve Grogan – #2 all-time behind Merton Hanks) in NFL history yet I literally remember nothing (that was the year they experimented with 60-second blank screen, overloading sewers nationwide) as much or more than I remember any particular play.

I don’t think Turner is even stubborn enough to argue that a Super Bowl is not historic, yet his feeling was that none of the games I picked this week were historic despite their determining one of the participants of that season’s Super Bowl. Last time I checked ‘memorable’ and ‘unforgettable’ are not synonyms for historically important.

Turner and Shadow were so disgusted by my labeling of these games as historically important they have decided to boycott this week. In fact, I think I hear them outside picketing right now.

This is yet another reason I wish I was friends with Chuck Klosterman so he could definitively resolve when a game is historically important.

NFL:

(Actual phrasing of email that started it all: The following 3 match-ups pair teams that met in important games that have something in common. Your job is to pick the game based on who you would have cheered for in that historically important game.)

Cincinnati @ San Diego (1981 AFC championship Game)

SD: Sure, you could argue that if I say I would have cheered for the Bengals, it is revisionist history based on my current hating of the Bolts but that isn’t strictly true. One of my best friends in 1983 was a huge Chargers fan. Like many childhood friends, in hindsight I didn’t really like him. You could say he was my frienemy or (to borrow from Chuck Klosterman again) my nemesis. Just to agitate Joel I would have been cheering against the Chargers in this game. Looking backward and using Dan Fouts’ subsequent announcing career and Ken Anderson’s rocking porn-stache as deciding factors only re-enforces my instincts at the time.

Oakland @ Denver (1977 AFC Championship Game)

SD: When this game was played I was still counting my age in months and pooping in my pants. Which may help explain why I would have cheered for the Raiders in this game – since I assume all Raiders fans still poop in their pants. At the time I was living in Kansas and to be honest had never even heard of the state of Colorado before my parents told me we were moving there a few years later. So as much as I want to write this as a tribute to the Barrel Man (who actually started in an Orange Crush can in honor of the Broncos defense), I can’t. I would have cheered for the Raiders in this one. And then I would have crapped my pants – even my bowels knew it was wrong to cheer for the Raiders.

NY Giants @ Washington (1986 NFC Championship Game)

SD: Today, this Giants team is glorified by the east coast biased media, as an all-time great. Yes, they had a great defense – especially for a bunch of guys drowning in piles of coke and whores but can we really forget that this offense relied on players like Mark Bavarro and Phil McConkey to catch passes from Phil Simms’ feathered hairdo? That is an all-time great team? The Redskins on the other hand had the Hogs and the Smurfs and Dexter Manley (to appeal to the coke and whores crowd) – how could you cheer against them? Even if their quarterback was Jay Shroeder. I loved the Smurfs.