Calling Knute Rockne

We need you back.

So it’s finally here. A day I’ve been trying for months not to think about. College football is back.

Note to readers: This entire post is about college football, so feel free to ignore if you don’t care. I’ll resume normal content next week.

This isn’t normally how I start a season. Normally I’m pumped for this day. I get special snacks and break out my college swag. I paint my nails blue and add gold flecks. (Yes, really.)

Today, my nails are unpainted. I’ve planned no snacks. About a month ago my husband tried to strike up a casual conversation about how Notre Dame’s lineup was looking this year, and I… might’ve bit his head off a little bit. (Sorry.) I don’t blame him for trying. We usually talk football a lot in the month of August, and I feel a little bad for dampening that normally-exciting season, but I emphatically did not want to. He hasn’t brought it up again.

No doubt many readers are concluding right now that I’m obsessive and crazy, and perhaps that’s fair, but let me explain. I have loved the Fighting Irish with a deep, ardent, heart-pumping loyalty for over 25 years. Since I returned from the Peace Corps in 2004, I’m not sure there’s a single game I haven’t seen at least in part. (Not always live. For instance, once I was in advanced stages of labor, not really up for doing the Irish Jig, but I still watched the recording the next day. Cradling my infant. We named him Knute. No, not really.)

As I sometimes say: Grace made me a Catholic, Notre Dame football made me an American Catholic. It has great symbolic significance for me. Obviously I love football just as a sport, but Notre Dame football represents something especially profound: The striving of Catholics in a Protestant country to overcome prejudice. To win respect. To make America our country too. It’s the symbol of a people struggling to overcome, but also of a country that makes that possible. It’s the thing that planted Our Lady triumphant on New World soil.

So yes, I love it, but despite that ardent loyalty, I think I have generally not been a vengeful or deranged sort of fan. I’m sad of course when we lose big games, but my love of the Irish is connected to things bigger than turnover ratios and nickel packages. I’ve been disappointed many many many times, but I get over it. I don’t cry or break things. I’m also reasonably fair, I think, in my evaluation of just desserts. I have surprised people before by agreeing with them when they complain that back in the BCS days, Notre Dame sometimes got major bowl bids we didn’t deserve, just because the suits wanted all those Catholic eyeballs. That did happen, and I hated it. It wasn’t fair. Or fun! Who wants to spend every New Year’s watching your team get pulverized by a much better team? Far better to play in the Holiday Bowl and make a game of it.

I’ve watched some fairly depressing seasons. (Eh, it happens.) I’ve also watched Notre Dame lose the National Championship twice. I’ve watched them win it zero times, but still, the losses didn’t upset me. I knew both times that we were overmatched; those were both incredible seasons for which I was deeply grateful. I put my kids to bed those evenings saying, “Hey, that’s life, but you try to remember the good times.”

They laugh at that, by the way. They used to chide me sometimes for being too Pollyannaish about football, which they tell me should involve some “good clean hate.” Even when I’m sad about losing, for instance, I sometimes acknowledge that I’m a little bit happy for the other team. They find that absurd.

I reiterate therefore that I was an ardent fan, but also emotionally balanced. I found the joy, wasn’t crippled by the disappointment, and tried to give competitors their due. I can do this because I love my team for historical, cultural, and spiritual reasons that go beyond the scoreboard. Of course I love winning, but losing cannot destroy the things that make Notre Dame football meaningful.

And yet… last season kind of broke me. Last season I found the hate. I was grateful when the postseason ended, because my family still insisted on watching the stuff, and basically all proximity to football filled me with rage and a thirst for vengeance, which was exhausting. I was finding it hard to imagine actually wanting to watch a football game, ever again. The thought of just sitting down casually to watch GameDay, now repels me. How could I ever hear Kirk Herbstreit’s voice again and not want to retch?

I understand how this sounds. As a multiple-decade non-crazy fan. You can go on thinking I’m crazy, but let me at least supply context.

The season before last was a fairy tale. It was blissful. Watching Coach Marcus Freeman get shafted in the seeding, come back and trounce Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, and take us all the way to the championship, was a level of sweetness that I never really expected to experience as a 21^st-century Notre Dame fan. Who knew I still had the capacity for that much wild joy, even in middle age? After the National Championship (which, yes, we lost) I didn’t take the decorations down for months because they just made me happy. I didn’t particularly expect a repeat. Again, I focus on gratitude.

So we started the next fall with a very strong team, but we also had a freshman QB, were missing a few key defenders, and were starting the season with two monster games. (This is hard to avoid these days because, thanks to the conference cartels, it’s hard for ND to schedule challenging games mid-season. Front-loading is sometimes the only way to beef up our schedule.) We lost those two games, albeit very narrowly, with a few freaky breaks each time that didn’t go our way. That was sad, but a familiar sad. I knew going in it might happen. I settled into a pragmatic, “Maybe we’ll make the playoffs, maybe not, just enjoy the season.”

Week after week, we proceeded to dismantle mediocre opposition with ease. I knew we weren’t playing with the best, but still, I’ve watched a lot of football. I was trying to stay even-keel, but as we rolled towards November, wheels started turning in my brain. “Hot diggidy dang. These guys are good. They are the real deal. They’re definitely better than last year.” And then came that voice whispering in the back of my head. “I think this is the best Irish team I have ever seen.”

Once formulated, the thought could not be banished. It kept drifting back to me in idle moments. My family watches large quantities of football, so soon it was paired with another thought. “This could possibly be the best team in the country right now.”

I’m not prone to these wild enthusiasms. Not in the least. Indeed, I’ve never taken this view of any other Irish squad, in all the years I’ve been watching them. Which is to say, since 1998. Even in 2012, when we were undefeated, ranked #1, and headed to the National Championship, I was properly excited and all, but also reasonably sure Saban was going steamroll us. (Yep.) This was the first time, ever, that I actually believed Notre Dame might be the best team in the country.

One day in early November, I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I pulled up some of the Vegas betting lines. I hate sports gambling and normally try to avoid that world, but they do at least represent a semi-independent source of evaluation and I just had to know. I pulled up a betting site, and my breath caught. They listed Notre Dame at… 17%. Those weren’t their odds for making the playoff. Those were the odds Vegas gave them for winning the championship. Only Ohio State had a slightly higher number. I just sat there gaping. No, I wasn’t seeing things. It wasn’t just wild flights of fancy. The pundits were still downplaying the Irish but Vegas agreed: Our team was phenomenal.

Well, you can guess what happened at that point. I fell pretty hard down the rabbit hole. I read the analyses. Listened to the podcasts. Geeked out over the stats. It is a bit like a drug. It was also sort of interesting, as a person with politicalmedia experience, to give truly sustained attention for the first time to the sports media. What became clear to me was that the boys in Vegas, the experts, the computers, every remotely independent source, knew perfectly well that the Irish were quite possibly the best team in the nation. The commentators, for their part, were positioning. Of course. Like media men do. All talking heads have unspoken obligations to the wallet that pays them, which right now are aligned with the conference cartels and their major media partners.

I understood all that in theory, but usually I’ve tried not to obsess over those nuances. Leave media politics for politics. Let Football Stay Fun. But now, finally, I was attending to the nuances. Watching the factions position themselves to back-stab my Irish. Which of course is exactly what happened.

My husband kept telling me I was paranoid. I don’t blame him. It seemed genuinely incredible that the media would pull out all the stops to sandbag us. But then the ACC Network started playing the Miami game on an endless, looping taunt. New rules and precedents seemed to emerge out of thin air just to justify our slide. When a decrepit Alabama team jumped the Irish after they barely squeaked past a 5-6 Auburn, the writing was clearly emerging on the wall, and sure enough, they handed the Tide a playoff spot mere hours after Georgia left them torn and bleeding all over Mercedes-Benz Stadium. I watched it happen like a slow-motion train wreck, the malevolent stars all aligning. Yet up until the very moment of the announcement, I still desperately wanted to believe that college football couldn’t be quite that corrupt.

It is. It’s that corrupt. Wake up and smell the chili dogs, Rachel.

Doubtless many people reading this have their own narratives about why the Irish didn’t really deserve a playoff spot (or not clearly), and I can’t answer them all, but let me break it down like this. Playoff selection has always been an inexact science, clearly, but there are really two pieces to the puzzle that must somehow be balanced. First, who deserves to compete in the playoff, given their regular-season performance? Second, which teams are truly the best in the nation at the time of selection? The two are often in tension, but you really can’t pick just one, because both matter. We want the post-season to be a proper sequel to the regular season, but it’s also supposed to be a thrilling winner-take-all among the best teams. So it’s messy.

Florida State in 2023 was almost the most textbook case one could imagine of a team that perfectly split these criteria. They had an absolutely incontrovertible, gold-plated case for their merit, based on regular-season performance. But at time of selection, they quite obviously were not one of the nation’s best. (Their incredible QB, Jordan Travis, sustained a season-ending injury in the penultimate game; despite that, the team still managed to eek out an ugly win in the ACC Championship to seal their undefeated season. But they got left out of the playoff anyway. It was brutal.) At that time the commentators duly went around reminding us that the playoff was simply for “the four best teams,” and reassuring us that the impending 12-team playoff would resolve these hard questions.

Cue laugh track. So obviously all that “four best teams” stuff went straight down the memory hole two years later when it was the Irish they wanted to sandbag. Notre Dame was very clearly one of the twelve best teams. They were one of the four best teams. But on the “merit” front their case wasn’t so gold-plated. Indeed, even in November, when I first went traipsing down that rabbit hole, I had to admit (though it was excruciating) that there were hypothetically possible scenarios in which the Irish could be justly excluded, on merit grounds. Those scenarios were not realized, of course; it in fact took a lot of politicking, rule-inventing, and chart-manipulation to axe us. But we did not, in the standard phrase, “control our own destiny” through November.

That made things easier for the media men, because “merit” is a vague and highly manipulable category, but it’s not why we were excluded. In the end, we solidly cleared the “merit” bar. We did double back flips over the “real-time excellence” bar. There was no plausible football-based argument for excluding us. We were left out of the playoff because the conference-media cartels successfully protected their assets in the post-season negotiation. Corrupt politics, familiar story.

I’ve always been a staunch opponent of the playoff, the creation of which I’ve viewed as a terrible mistake. But I do actually think this was the first time in playoff history that a plausible contender for “best team” was left out of the competition entirely. Supposedly the one great virtue of the playoff was that it would give us a clear champion, decided on the field. Nope! Sorry. In the pros it does, but the college system is too unstable to prevent this kind of petty corruption. So we’ll never actually know which was the best team in 2025, even in the state of Indiana.

I believe it was Notre Dame. I like the Hoosiers and was genuinely happy for them in their joy, but I think late-season Notre Dame was even better. It’s not a ridiculous view, and no one will ever prove it wrong. Nobody beat us except the suits.

It was great how the aftermath of that travesty gave everyone wide avenues to spew their hatred at Notre Dame. Loved all that commentary went something like this, “So that was a little sticky, but after all the Irish lost to Miami and let me tell you, that fan base…”

Sure, real classy. The system is indefensible so might as well put the fans on trial. But of course, everyone’s always loved to hate Notre Dame. Damn papists.

I’m aware that a lot of Irish fans are pumped for a new season. They rave about C.J. Carr, Leonard Moore, the incredible motivation Freeman can pull from last season’s injustice. No doubt! And I do like Carr. (A philosophy major!) I love Freeman. A Rockne-esque “shake down the thunder” comeback season would be sweet beyond words.

But… most likely it won’t happen. Promising seasons can go wrong in a million ways. In 28 years, I have only once sincerely believed that my team might be the best in the nation. And then we got crushed by cronyism. Given the inhospitable cartel-ruled landscape, I’d give less-than-even odds that I’ll ever reach that point again.

How do you just sit down and enjoy a game after that? The whole enterprise now has in my mind an aura of banana-republic sleaze. This whole week, I’ve had this weird premonition that Notre Dame will find some way to lose to Wisconsin, which is undoubtedly emotional, and my son keeps laughing at me and reminding me that we’re favored by 3 touchdowns. Yeah, but who knows.

If they could somehow do it, though? If the spirit of Knute Rockne, George Gipp, or Joe Montana could somehow be reawakened? I might wear that blue nail polish for a year. It’ll feel a little silly at conferences, but eh, you’ve got to have priorities in life.

Don’t worry, gentle readers. I won’t indulge in regular rants about college football. But is it not of some lateral relevance to Christendom Reborn? Natural loves, spiritual longings. The human drive to overcome.

Go Irish.