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.

As we approach the Fourth of July, I thought I should pause and take a moment to embrace the holiday. On other holidays you often hear of people using the occasion to appreciate their lives – whether it is assessing the things for which they are thankful on Thanksgiving or airing grievances on Festivus.

However, it doesn’t seem like anyone looks at the Fourth of July to appreciate all that our forefathers had to go through to allow us to live as we do.

It’s funny that as a kid you learn so much about the revolution but I don’t think it really dawned on me until just a few years ago reading about John Adams that our forefathers weren’t always heroes. Initially they were traitors.

With two hundred years of revisionist history, we have been trained to believe that they were good and the Brits were evil. All of this makes you really wonder what future generations will look back on this time and think.

Was the Iranian election of 2009 a watershed moment or a road bump on the road to continued maniacal, theological, narrow-minded, intolerant leadership? Was the war in Afghanistan, an imperial super power forcing its views on a simple people or the freeing of a people from tyrannical leadership? Was Michael Jackson a musical genius and man of god or a pervy weirdo that took advantage of children?

We can’t address these questions today, but it got me to thinking about the greatness of this country. Those many years ago our forefathers fought for freedom. Freedom to say and think as you desire. Freedom from afternoon tea and crumpets and poor oral hygiene.

So in honor of the men that founded this country I have decided to express a number of things I am free to think and say because of them.

In the United States in 2009 I am free to think:

• That Michael O’Donoghue’s quote of ‘Good career move’ when he heard that Elvis had just died summed up better than I ever could my feelings about all of these people suddenly sanctifying a child molester.
• That people who have decided to forget that Michael Jackson molested children just because he made some good music and passed away are too moronic to be allowed to reproduce.
• That when these people (inevitably) do reproduce their children will most likely become reality show contestants and inflict their uselessness and idiocy on the rest of us.
• That a better use for Guantanamo would be as a detention center for all reality show participants and the paparazzi
• That the 2-0 lead that U.S. soccer held over Brazil was a much less accurate indicator of their relative strength than getting outscored 3-0 in the second half.
• That you should only watch the movie Vantage Point once because the second time you will start figuring out that there are some holes in the timelines between the different versions of the same event.
• That the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is the perfect combination of realism and absurdity
• That in Walk Hard, the fact that Pam from The Office is surprisingly gorgeous and wearing low cut tops the whole time more than makes up for the extended penis close-ups.
• That Raul Ibanez is not taking steroids, despite what some blogger said. Here is what I wrote last year on my first visit to SafeCo field: Raul Ibanez might be the greatest player in the majors…if he could bat exclusively against Jered Weaver. Lifetime he is 12-21 with 4 homers against Weaver. Friday night, he hit two massive homers (the first was measured at 438 feet) on a cool, damp evening. Put him in Coors Field and he might hit one 600 feet.
• That the Rockies are a fun story but I wouldn’t put much money on a Rockune, Rockuly, Rockust, and Rocktember run propelling them into the playoffs.
• That after watching some of the Rockies / A’s series last weekend, everyone involved would be happier if Holliday were still playing for the Rockies.
• That Jim Tracy’s helming of this team to a 23-9 record actually helped prove the point of my rant in which I declared the Rockies dead to me.
• That after questioning every single move that Tracy made in the 9^th inning of a tie game against the Pirates a couple weeks ago only to see them all work to perfection, I should stick to football.
• That they could all get ‘Brady-ed’ in the first quarter of the first game and Colt McCoy, Sam Bradford and Tim Tebow would still be the top three vote-getters for the Heisman.
• That the guy whose thesis in PCU was that you could find a Gene Hackman or Michael Caine movie on cable at any hour of any day, will be proven correct this fall only it will be about finding a glowing tribute to Tim Tebow.
• That T.O. and Tony Romo are going to both wish T.O. was still in a Cowboy uniform by November 1^st.
• That Jay Cutler’s perception of his time in Denver is going to change radically about the fourth time he throws to a wide-open Devin Hester and the ball goes through his hand after spending an entire quarter handing off to Matt Forte.
• That it is sort of pathetic that the NFL is currently trying to determine which of the following players deserves the harshest penalty: a guy that inadvertently shot himself in the leg, a guy that ran a dog fighting ring and treated dogs worse than Kabayashi, and a guy that ran over and killed another person while driving drunk
• That a guy being stupid enough to shoot himself in the leg is to the other two as Martha ‘Dumptruck’ Dunstock is to Christian Slater in Heathers.
• That the Fourth of July signifies the beginning of the end of summer despite technically coming about 14 days after the official start of summer.
• That training camp can’t come fast enough.

What are you free to think?