Notre Dame and Life’s Lessons

On January 1, 2001 we gathered at the Multnomah Athletic Club (MAC) in Portland, Oregon to watch the Fiesta Bowl featuring the 5^th ranked Oregon State Beavers and the 10^th ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish. It wasn’t hard to spot the Notre Dame fans. They were dressed in their blue blazers with Notre Dame scarves even for those who wore ties. And if you couldn’t spot them by their dress, you couldn’t miss them by the volume of the braggadocio. This was the Ivy League stooping to play the rabble who dared to take the field against the great Fighting Irish. This was the titans of society versus the lumberjacks from rural Corvallis. This was going to be too easy for the vaunted Notre Dame football team.

But karma can be a bitch.

The hoots and hollers from the Fighting Irish began to dissipate at about the start of the second quarter. By half time it was 9 to 3 in favor of the Beavers and the score underwhelmed the actual play – the Beavers were pushing the Fighting Irish all over the field. One wag noted that if it were not for the number penalties called against the Beavers, Notre Dame would have had negative yardage. At half time nearly half of the Notre Dame fans left the MAC. And then the real beating started. In the third quarter, the Beavers scored at will with twenty-nine unanswered points. The final score was 41 to 9 and proved that Notre Dame did not belong on the field with Dennis Erickson and the Beavers. A fact that was confirmed by the fact that this was Notre Dame’s fifth loss in a row in post-season play – a string that would eventually run up to nine losses in a row. The Fighting Irish were living on the past glories of a once sound football program – a time that ended when head coach Lou Holtz left the program.

And Notre Dame has been living on that past glory ever since. And those that run the national college football games – and particularly the rankings – help perpetuate. While the power programs and their conferences are required to play other ranked teams within their conferences, Notre Dame refuses to join a conference – and they can afford to do that given their rich television contract with NBC, currently worth about $22 Million annually. And so Notre Dame is left to determine who it plays – and more importantly who it does not play – and that would be the titans of college football. Instead they run at a combination of smaller colleges and a couple of orphanages and call it a season. They are regularly ranked in the Top Ten preseason and routinely fall into the teens by mid-season.

Trust me, while I think Notre Dame is overrated annually, I recognize that they still have a pretty good football team – just not as good as they and the sportswriters think they are.

But if you were ever in doubt you need look no further than this past weekend to discover the true nature of a failing program. Notre Dame was passed over in the final determination of who would play in the bowls leading up to the national championship. You can argue all day long that the committee should have adhered to its inflated ranking of Notre Dame but, in reality, their decision was a combination of recognizing that Miami, with an identical win/loss record, had beaten Notre Dame earlier in the season and that the quality of the teams Notre Dame played was lacking.

Nobody should expect their worthiness is accomplished by someone who came before them. That’s true in sports, in business, and in politics. The fact that an ancestor, a relative or a spouse succeeded does not qualify you for success. And so the fact that Lou Holtz guided the Fighting Irish through successful seasons and a national championship does not make succeeding teams great. If you play that game, you will find out soon enough that winning is a day-to-day feat and not a perennial rite.

It did not surprise me that the Notre Dame, in a snit, decided that it would not play in any post-season bowl games. It sets a poor standard for the young men and women attending Notre Dame who, now, have an example of cutting and running in the face of adversity.