Enough already about Notre Dame

It’s mid-November, and the telltale signs of the impending holiday season are upon us: eggnog, holly, and college football pundits asking why Notre Dame sucks. As we hurtle towards another bowl season, there are dozens of great stories to tell about players and teams impacting the national championship picture, and yet, the national media seems fixated on the happenings in South Bend, Indiana. One can only imagine how much oxygen would be used up if Notre Dame actually had a team worth talking about.

Yesterday’s game between Connecticut and Notre Dame was hardly over before Rivals.com’s Tom Dienhart wrote, “Look at Notre Dame, huddled on the shadowy fringe of irrelevance.” Never has so much been written and said about a football program that deserves so little attention, and yet the Notre Dame mystique persists, if only in the minds of the college football cognoscenti. Dienhart captures this attitude perfectly when he writes, “There’s no way Notre Dame and its wealth of built-in advantages ever should lose at home to UConn.”

But what exactly are those “built-in advantages”?

In any sport, at any level, money is always a great salve, and to be sure, no program in the country can boast an exclusive contract with a national television network like Notre Dame’s setup with NBC, but unlike Major League Baseball, money only goes so far in college football. You can’t buy players and stockpile them the way the New York Yankees are able to do. Who really believes that Notre Dame’s financial position is a difference-maker vis-à-vis the Alabamas, Floridas, and Southern Cals of the world? There are a lot of teams with a lot of money – some of them are successful and some of them struggle.

If it’s not money, then, what are other possible “built-in advantages” Notre Dame might enjoy?

Ah, it must be that Notre Dame is the flagship college of American Catholics and has the ability to leverage that role into a national recruiting base. Well, that might have been true 50 years ago when Catholics – particularly ethnic Catholics like Poles, Italians, and Irish – were discriminated against, but today? Not really. The fertile recruiting grounds in the Northeast and Midwest that used to fill Notre Dame’s roster with All-American players are now the locus of intense competition. Simply put, Notre Dame can no longer breeze into places like Boston, Mass. and northern New Jersey and cherry pick the best players. Besides, the “best players” in these areas aren’t as good as they used to be. Affluence and cultural assimilation tend to dampen a young man’s spirit for football, which requires a high degree of rage and aggression. The “poor, huddled masses” that Notre Dame used to count on for football players aren’t as poor and huddled as they used to be. The most fertile football recruiting grounds have shifted to the American South, a region that is, at best, indifferent to Notre Dame and, at worst, downright hostile.

If it’s not talent and money, then maybe Dienhart’s “built-in advantage” is the oft-invoked “tradition.” After all, Notre Dame is one of the hallowed programs of college football, touting numerous national championships and award-winning players. But let’s think about this. When Notre Dame won its last national championship in 1988, most of today’s college football players were not even born yet. Just this weekend, Notre Dame lost to a program – the University of Connecticut – that didn’t even play major-college football in 1988. That year, the Huskies’ landmark victories were against such powerhouses as Delaware, Yale, and Southern Connecticut State.

There is abundant evidence that “tradition” counts for a lot less than many folks assume. A simple comparison between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of South Florida is illustrative of this. Both schools compete in the Big East conference. Pitt began play in 1890 and has enjoyed long periods of dominance throughout its football program’s existence. From 1915 to 1938, Pop Warner and Jock Sutherland won over 80% of their games as Pitt racked up four national championships. More recently, Jackie Sherrill went 50-9-1 from 1977 to 1981, including a national championship and a Heisman Trophy winner in Tony Dorsett. By contrast, South Florida began play only in 1997, and only moved to the major college ranks in 2001. So what was the series record between these schools entering 2009? Tied at three wins apiece.

So much for tradition. It counts for so little in the here and now. After all, the Chicago Cubs enjoy a great “tradition” as well, but they haven’t won a World Series since the Roosevelt administration (that’s Teddy, not Franklin).

There’s nothing so wrong at Notre Dame that can’t be fixed with an excellent head coach, but let’s not kid ourselves about the school’s “built-in advantages.” There are none in this day and age of college football for a relatively small Catholic school located in a dreary town in northern Indiana.