Notre Dame

It has recently come to light that I have an issue with Notre Dame Football. This was brought up by my roommate no less who threw out the comment that I have such an outright bias against Notre Dame. While I have been railing against Notre Dame for the past two years it is not because I have strong bias against them, it is because they have not lived up to my standards of evaluation. Unlike the majority of the College Football public my standards of evaluation are the same across the board, I don’t have special ones just for Notre Dame. Simply put the media needs Notre Dame to be successful in much the same way that MLB needs the Yankees, the NFL needs the Cowboys or the NBA needs the Lakers or Knicks. When those teams are on top of their respective league’s it is a whole lot easier to drum up interest and publicity for the rest of the league. What happens is with the tiniest indication of success the media will come in and prop up those teams even when there may be better teams with better seasons they will not get the ink that the name teams of those league’s do. The same line of thought can be applied to Notre Dame. The Irish have not been deserving of half of the attention they have received in the past two years. But because they have had a measure of success against what is perennially one of the weakest schedules in the nation. The best win of this “resurgence” of Notre Dame has been against an 9-4 Penn State team that was a year removed from their best season since 1994. That is the only win that you can hang your hat on, the rest have come against the also rans of this sport with the exception of Michigan and Tennessee in 2005 which were both in once in a generation sort of bad seasons. There is no substance to the idea of Notre Dame being back among the elite of this sport. The Irish don’t have to earn that status like the rest of the teams do. Most average media types seem to wait patiently for the Irish to return to prominence, but instead of actually waiting for confirmation of their return to prominence they grant them elite status at the first sign of life. A lot of people point back to 2005 when the grounds keeper of Notre Dame stadium grew the grass three feet long in attempt to slow down USC. For the most part it worked and the game ended up being an all-timer that the Irish lost. People like Skip Bayless and Jay Mariotti scream at the top of their lungs that this game played in the cool Autumn afternoon in South Bend signaled the return of Notre Dame to the elite levels of this sport. They screamed it at the top of their lungs because they need Notre Dame to be good. They screamed it with the hope that they would actually start to believe it themselves. What they forgot is that to be amongst the elite of this sport you have to beat an elite team and they haven’t. Sure they came really close to beating USC, but you know who else did. Fresno State. The Bulldogs of the Valley pushed the Men of Troy every bit as far as Notre Dame did. Did anyone scream at the top of their lungs that the Bulldogs were among the elite of the sport like they did for the Irish? No, of course they didn’t because the pundits don’t need a healthy Fresno State but they do need a healthy Notre Dame. Notre Dame has not earned a damn thing in the past two years. They have twice gone to BCS bowls, which in and of itself is a crock and surely topic for the future, and they were twice promptly run out of the stadium by vastly superior teams in terms of speed, athleticism and physicality. They have failed to beat USC, they have split with Michigan with the one win against the worst UM team in decades, they split with the flakiest program in the nation, Michigan State. That is not the resume of an elite program. Notre Dame has not proven anything in the past two years but still gets treated like they have accomplished as much as USC, Texas or OSU has. That is the issue that I have with Notre Dame. The standard of proof for their program is so much lower than it is for the rest of the nation. If you put the reults of Notre Dame side by side with USC, LSU, Texas, OSU or Florida for the past five years, or even the past two years each program has a better record against better competition. If Notre Dame wants to sit at the big boy table they need to step up their game because as it stands right now they don’t deserve to be there. They are not a top 10 program right now. They will be in a few years but they aren’t right now.