Irish Have Just One Thing Left To Do: Win Every Game

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The New York Sun

In college football, nothing revs up the hype machine like the potential of a national-championship run by Notre Dame, the sport’s “love ’em or hate ’em, but don’t ignore ’em” version of the New York Yankees.

For more than a decade, the Fighting Irish have produced more hype than results. Notre Dame hasn’t factored in the national-title picture since 1993, which is also the last season it won a bowl game.But pollsters and fans alike are expecting that to change this fall following a breakthrough season under rookie head coach Charlie Weis in 2005.

But was 2005 really such a breakthrough? There’s no question the Irish improved from 2004’s six-win effort under Tyrone Willingham. They beat Michigan and Tennessee on the road and nearly pulled off a stunning upset of no. 1 USC. It’s reasonable to expect the offense, which boasts leading Heisman contender Brady Quinn at quarterback among seven returning starters, to be as explosive as last season’s 36.7 points-per-game attack. With nine starters returning on defense, it’s also reasonable to project an improvement over last year’s leaky unit (397 yards a game allowed).

The nation’s coaches agree with the rosy outlook — Notre Dame is ranked third in the preseason USA Today Coaches’ Poll, receiving nine of 63 firstplace votes.It’s the school’s highest preseason ranking since 1994.Yet there is ample evidence to suggest last season’s successes may be overvalued.Despite a schedule that looked to be among the toughest ever put together, the Irish ended up beating just two teams that finished with winning records. One was a 7–5 Michigan team that was that school’s worst in 21 years; the other was 8–4 Navy, a school Notre Dame has beaten 42 consecutive years.

More evidence that the 2005 schedule’s difficulty was vastly overrated: Notre Dame played just two teams that were ranked at season’s end, the aforementioned USC loss and the Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State. In the latter game, the Buckeyes gained 617 yards (to 348 by Notre Dame) in a 34–20 win that could have easily been a bigger blowout than it was.

On paper, this season’s schedule is nearly as tough, with games against Penn State, Michigan, UCLA, and USC

all looming as potential losses.That list doesn’t include Michigan State, whom the Irish travel to meet on September 23.Despite a lack of overall success, the Spartans have owned Notre Dame like no other school in recent seasons, winning seven of the past nine meetings — including a 44–41 overtime thriller last season in South Bend.

Still, barring unforeseen injury, Notre Dame is likely to be favored in its first 11 games and could very well take on USC in the regular-season finale on November 25 with a berth in the national championship game at stake.

If there’s one man not buying into they hype, it’s probably Weis, who no doubt knows that the Irish weren’t as good as many people believed last season.The best sign for Notre Dame’s 2006 outlook may have come immediately following the heartbreaking loss to USC last October. In the postgame press conference, Weis resisted every attempt by the press to heap praise upon him for the near-upset.

“If you are waiting for me to say this is a good loss, you’ll be waiting a long time,” Weis said.”There are no moral victories.”

The two coaches who preceded Weis in South Bend — Willingham and Bob Davie — seemed to wilt under the pressure that Notre Dame’s unique standing in the college football universe presents.Weis appears immune to the same fate.Having graduated from the university, he understands the Notre Dame mystique and doesn’t shrink from high expectations. Weis also has four Super Bowl rings from his days as an assistant in the NFL — the ultimate win-or-gohome league — so he’s well-prepared to meet the Notre Dame challenge.

Weis won’t allow the pressure to swallow him, and he also won’t complain about the particular stresses of leading Notre Dame. He understands the school’s situation is somewhat selfimposed — the Irish have their own network TV contract with NBC and have refused to join a conference so they can continue to craft a schedule to create maximum exposure. He also knows how to use the school’s stature to his advantage.

Whereas Willingham and Davie — and even Lou Holtz at the end of his tenure in Indiana — struggled to recruit top-notch talent, Weis is already paving a blue-and-gold brick road of prized recruits to South Bend.The Irish haven’t had a skill-position player drafted in the first round since quarterback Rick Mirer in 1993, a streak that will almost certainly end with Quinn (a Willingham recruit) next April. But the heir apparent is already on the way. In a highly publicized recruiting coup, Weis landed blue-chip quarterback Jimmy Claussen to headline his 2007 recruiting class.

While it was officially the Claussen family who orchestrated the elaborate press conference at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend to announce his intentions, Weis had to be privately smiling at all the attention the signing attracted. For years, there have been whispers that top-notch recruits wanted no part of Notre Dame, caring little for its storied history and wanting to avoid its supposedly more stringent academic requirements, let alone playing in a staid offense.Weis has changed all that, bringing both a Super Bowl cachet and a pro-style offense to a program that had grown stale. He has embraced, rather than complained, about the ultimate microscope his program is under, all while spouting a no-nonsense, “second place isn’t good enough” attitude that has been missing since the early days of the Holtz regime.

The Irish last claimed a national championship in 1988, Holtz’s third season. Plenty of college football observers feel Weis is poised to beat that mark by a year.While it’s certainly possible Notre Dame could arrive in Los Angeles for its date with USC 11–0, the defensive shortcomings probably mean the Irish are at least a season away from true title contention.

But that likelihood won’t slow the press frenzy this fall. Even USC, coming off a four-year run as the darlings of college football, were a relative rarity on national television. Not so for Notre Dame, which will be a staple on the national TV menu. And if the Irish are indeed undefeated heading into the USC game, get ready for an avalanche of hype the likes of which college football has never seen.

Mr. Levine is a regular writer for FootballOutsiders.com


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