Bevo’s Fake Nuts: Texas and Notre Dame, Distant Cousins

Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.

At their worst, Texas and Notre Dame are bad, and similar in who they are. At their best, Texas and Notre Dame are good, but different in who they are.

There are a number of similarities between the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Notre Dame, two schools which will meet tomorrow in the unnatural setting of Omaha, Nebraska. Intimately familiar with each place, we know these similarities, and we’re familiar with the differences. Each school has cause for academic and institutional pride. Each school can take that pride further than is earned. Each school has a storied history, especially on the football field. Each school’s recent inability to get over varying humps makes them a ready butt for jokes. Each school has a subset of its population that comes from humble, determined origins. Each school has a wealthy streak which deservedly brands them as cake eaters.

When these tribes are their most loathsome, traits run in parallel. Snobbery is one thing, but unearned snobbery? It’s one thing to be looked down at by Stanford, or in a different sense by Alabama. It’s another to be looked down at by schools that are good-not-great in a wide variety of categories. An ignorance sometimes enters the picture, born more of naivete at Notre Dame than the warped lens of Texas’s Greek and Greek-adjacent environments, an ignorance which brands common things as unique and turns away from an honest accounting of oneself. Ask a certain kind of Notre Dame person about their athletic department’s commitment to upstanding citizenship and academics, watch them describe perhaps a tenth of the school’s competitors. Ask a certain kind of Texas person about the depth of tradition at Texas, watch them describe things on par with those of every other major state school. Walk the concourse of either team’s campus during a football Saturday and you will quickly encounter someone who thinks of themselves as high society, dressing and acting the part. This vein exists more broadly at Texas and at Notre Dame than at Texas Tech or Purdue.

At their best, though, they’re incredible cultures. Notre Dame grew up as an immigrant school, persecuted because of its Catholicism. A wide section of its students are earnest, middle-class people of sincere faith, many of whom go into fields of service after graduation. Texas’s ten-percent rule fills sections of it with a gritty, independent batch of students bent on bettering their lives and those of their families. These are different hallmarks, and the differences between each and its foil—Michigan for Notre Dame, Texas A&M for Texas—manifest distinctly as well. When the schools are infuriating, it’s ego and ego-driven blindness. When the schools are inspiring, it’s drive for Texas, grace for Notre Dame. When the schools are fun, Notre Dame gets through on its campus, Texas gets through on Austin.

Tomorrow, two of the best athletic departments in the country go at it on college sports’ third or fourth-biggest stage. It’s not the College Football Playoff. It’s not a Final Four. But it’s a big game between regionally separate powers, the kind of thing that gives us so much of what we love about college sports.