On to Tennessee State.
It was a great weekend in Dublin for Notre Dame football. There was nothing else we could have asked for from that game. Sam Hartman may have raised his own expectations. The defense by and large took care of business, with only the safeties untested among the position groups expected to be vulnerable. Jaden Greathouse’s big game went a long way towards easing doubts about the wide receiver corps. Navy is in the worst place it’s been in years as a program, but there was nothing else we could have wanted.
Numerically, the Irish took a big step forward. Joe explained the weight of this yesterday in his national piece, but the short version is that Notre Dame looks, to Movelor (our college football model), to be 2.3 points better a team than Movelor previously thought. That might be a small number, but it’s a big change, taking the Irish from being a 10.1-point underdog against Ohio State in a few weeks to 7.8 points, just inside of one possession. It combines with the realization of that first win to move Marcus Freeman’s second year from a projected 8–4 season to a projected 9–3 season, and it pushes Notre Dame up to the front of a tight pack of teams, ranking them 8th in the country when our guys were previously 15th. Joe’s piece answers whether this is an overreaction to one good game against Navy, but the basic takeaway is that Notre Dame is most likely a team half a step above USC and Clemson, perhaps one step below Penn State, two steps below Ohio State & Michigan & Alabama, and three steps below Georgia. Entering the week, we would have gauged the Irish to be merely on the same plane as the Trojans and the Tigers.
There isn’t a lot of upside with this Tennessee State game. I don’t see odds right now from any sportsbook, but Movelor is going to set the line at 57.2 points, an obscene number but not impossible to reach. Tennessee State went 4–7 last year despite playing in one of the FCS’s worse conferences, losing to its only FBS opponent—Middle Tennessee State—by a score of 49 to 6. Eddie George (yes, that Eddie George) is in his third year there, but it’s far from guaranteed that there will be improvement from these Tigers. This is a team against which Navy would be a four-score favorite, and it’s not a team who nearly exclusively runs the ball like Navy does, which should combine with more opportunities for explosive plays from the Irish to increase the total possession count and keep the scoreboard busy. Notre Dame has never played an FCS team. If you are among the Notre Dame fans who read this (I would guess that’s most of you, but if not, get ready for some discourse on volleyball recruiting), you may not be used to these kinds of games. This is a different ballgame from those against New Mexico and Bowling Green in 2019.
Why is Notre Dame playing Tennessee State? Some of this ties back to Covid pushing this Dublin edition of the Navy game back a few years, creating a scheduling snafu, but the stated reason is that Notre Dame wants to amplify a Historically Black University. HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) are a collection of 101 institutions designated by the federal government as places where, since even before the Civil War in some cases, Black students have had the opportunity to obtain educations where educations were otherwise unavailable, often due to state law. Most HBCUs arose in response to racial segregation, and a portion—including Tennessee State, which was founded in 1912—are land grant schools opened after the second Morrill Act mandated that states who were barring Black students from their existing land grant institutions created a separate, Black land grant school. The H—Historically—is important. There is also such a thing as a PBI, a Predominantly Black Institution. But the thread connecting all HBCUs and PBIs is the important role they play and have played in offering educational opportunities to Black Americans. (There are similar federal designations for other Minority-Serving Institutions, for those curious.)
Over the years, HBCUs have understandably evolved their own collective identities, which is part of how we’ve become aware of them here at The Barking Crow. Two Division I conferences—the MEAC and the SWAC, each of which plays at the FCS level in football—are HBCU leagues which kind of operate as their own subdivision despite officially being part of the FCS. The MEAC and SWAC play their own national championship in football, the Celebration Bowl, and their attendance is often at or around the top of the FCS (Jackson State, where Deion Sanders was coaching, nearly doubled the third-place FCS program’s average attendance last year). Culturally, their marching bands receive more attention, relatively speaking, than any other marching bands. If you’ve seen the movie Drumline, that is about an HBCU marching band.
Tennessee State is an anomaly among HBCUs in that it plays sports at the Division I level but is not part of the MEAC or SWAC. This has become more common in recent years, with Hampton and North Carolina A&T leaving the MEAC for the Big South and now the CAA, but since 1988, Tennessee State has played in the Ohio Valley Conference, making it unusual in that respect for a long time. Tennessee State is not an anomaly on the marching band piece of things. Aristocrat of Bands (most if not all HBCUs have a specific name for their bands) should be a focal point on Saturday.
It would be easy for Notre Dame to get a little “White Savior” about this game, and I don’t doubt there will be flavors of that throughout the weekend. But given how little-known the HBCU story is nationally, and given how Northern and white Notre Dame is, this is a cool opportunity for Notre Dame to educate Notre Dame about a part of the world to which a lot of us Notre Dame people are completely blind. I didn’t know about HBCUs until we started this blog five years ago. It’s one of those things that feels obvious in hindsight—of course there must have been separate Black colleges in the Jim Crow era—but I had never given it the thought. I’m excited for other Notre Dame people to have that experience themselves. It feels important.
If you’re going to campus this weekend, there are events from Thursday through Saturday specifically about HBCUs, HBCU football, race, and diversity. Some of these are run by Notre Dame, some are being run by organizations elsewhere in South Bend. Niele Ivey will be involved, Tennessee State’s president will be involved, Eddie George will be involved…there’s a lot of cool stuff. Here’s a list. One of the things we love but don’t often name about college football is that it brings different threads of the American fabric in contact with one another. This is a thread Notre Dame has never met.
(We better beat them by fifty points, though.)
How Can Notre Dame Get Good at Volleyball?
Volleyball is, we estimate here at what’s primarily a college sports media enterprise, on its way to being one of the five biggest-moneyed college sports if it isn’t there already. It could even reach the top three. Women’s volleyball won’t catch football, and it won’t catch men’s basketball, but it could catch women’s basketball, and it could catch baseball. ESPN is investing in it. Its youth participation is booming. More high school girls play volleyball than play basketball.
Where this ties back to Notre Dame is that Notre Dame’s volleyball team has never been great. It’s been good at times, but it’s never been great, and it went through an especially rough patch last decade, only making the NCAA Tournament three times. This is especially bad as volleyball gets more prominent. The most important thing for a college athletic department is football success, because of the resources at stake for the university. The most important thing for this weekly Notre Dame blog post is men’s basketball success, because we named Good Things Shrewing after Micah Shrewsberry. Beyond that, it’s important to be competitive at every sport that’s cared about nationally. Winning national championships in fencing is great, I’m happy for and grateful to our fencers for their efforts. But it’s embarrassing if you start talking about athletic success and have to bring up fencing. Nobody has a fencing team. There can’t be a top 25 in Division I fencing because on the men’s side, there are only 21 teams.
We’re in a good spot right now as the broader Notre Dame community in that our football program is good, our women’s basketball program is great, our men’s basketball program should be respectable again in a few years, and our baseball and softball programs are competitive despite playing in tough territory for those two sports. Our soccer programs are good. Our lacrosse and hockey programs are good. Track and cross country aren’t great, but volleyball is the real problem here. Volleyball is the rare program Jack Swarbrick couldn’t elevate. I don’t know enough about it to know how much of this was simply getting exposed as the Big East boomed and how much was getting passed as other schools started leaning hard into volleyball, but I know this: We need a good volleyball team. Even just one. Volleyball is too important for us to be bad at it.
How do we fix it? I suggest we throw money at the problem. It’s too early in Salima Rockwell’s tenure to make any judgment on her as a coach, so let’s assume she’s the right person for the job. Whether she is or isn’t, there are conspicuous signs that our perennial talent is lacking. Nothing against the current volleyball players, but Notre Dame continues to top out lower in volleyball than it does in other comparable sports, and that’s happened across a few straight coaches now. If the training and facilities are working for baseball and softball, I would imagine they aren’t the volleyball problem. It seems to be talent. We need to get Coach Rockwell all the talent we can get.
NIL has yet to really blossom in the volleyball sphere, which is yet another reason it’s odd we aren’t better at volleyball. Generally, across all sports these days, Notre Dame has recruiting advantages right up until money gets involved, at which point our castrated NIL ecosystem becomes a massive liability. In volleyball, though, I don’t think you yet need NIL money to attract good recruits. I’m sure there’s some NIL out there—the volleyball players here in Austin are stars—but volleyball should still be a sport where you can buy top-25 talent, and from what I understand, northern Indiana is not a bad place to be if you’re trying to attract that talent locally. Wisconsin and Nebraska are good. Louisville is good. Minnesota and Pitt are both good. No, we might not get California’s best recruits, beach volleyball is a big option out there and we don’t have that at the Division I level. But you’re telling me we can’t get the second tier of volleyball players from Indiana and Illinois and Ohio and Michigan?
It’s trite right now to suggest using NIL money to try to gain advantage in a space without much NIL, but where I think this is unique for Notre Dame is that Notre Dame is struggling to use NIL in NIL-driven spaces. I’m not aware of us trying it at all in areas with little NIL involvement. The investment needed to make a difference in volleyball should be leagues smaller than it would be in football or basketball. So, if you’re a reader considering starting NIL activity in support of Notre Dame (and I know of at least two of you who are), maybe think about volleyball. You could try it out in a simpler, smaller space and probably learn a lot quickly. Please let me know if you do.
Quick(er) Hitters
There isn’t much for this space this week, but it was really nice having Noah Eagle in the NBC booth on Saturday. I thought he made Jason Garrett a perfectly fine color commentator.
The issue with the Collinsworth–Garrett booth (besides the nepotism angle, which is also an issue with Eagle but is at least less certainly the reason for his stature at NBC) is that both guys are goobers. One goober is fine, especially as an analyst. Two is tough. I have no problem with Jac Collinsworth on the sideline or involved in pretty much any capacity other than play by play, and as always, from everything we know he is a really nice guy. But. Jac Collinsworth single-handedly takes the fun out of watching highlights from that Clemson win last year, and a big part of it is the hard–to–control piece of how his voice sounds. (We at The Barking Crow can empathize with this—NIT Stu was told on TikTok two years ago that he sounds like Roland Schitt, and the commenter was perfectly correct.)
NBC needs to get Collinsworth out of the play by play role, and the fact Eagle was able to do such a great job with so little time to prepare now gives all of us clamoring for a switch a great replacement towards which to point. I don’t care if Collinsworth calls the Tennessee State and Central Michigan games. But for Ohio State and USC, he needs to be out of there. It’s even more offensive than if a retiring athletic director locked his successor into an inexplicably long apparel deal with the company for whom his son works.
This Week
The volleyball team went 1–1 in Lubbock, beating Wichita State but losing to Texas Tech, each of whom is unranked and did not receive votes in the AVCA poll. They’ll go to Pennsylvania this weekend to play Villanova and Santa Clara in something billed as the Catholic Challenge. Neither of those teams is in the top 25 picture either.
The women’s soccer team whooped Butler and had a nice comeback tie against Arkansas, who’s right around the Irish in the coaches poll for that sport (top 15 territory). They play Sunday this week on the road against Michigan State. The game will be on Big Ten Network at 1:00 PM EDT. Michigan State is also right around our women in the rankings.
The men’s soccer team tied Indiana and bullied IUPUI. The Hoosiers are seen as a national title contender, so even playing at home, that’s a good result which could do big things for our RPI number down the line. We’ve got Northern Illinois on Friday night, also at home. That’ll be on ACC Network X.
The cross country programs begin their seasons on Friday at Valparaiso, running in the Crusader Invite. No polls are out yet on the conference or national level, but Carter Solomon returns for the men’s team to defend his ACC individual title, and Josh Methner, who finished tenth at the ACC meet, also returns. For the women’s team, Olivia Markezich returns after finishing third in the ACC meet last year, and Siona Chisholm returns after finishing seventh, but beyond those two there’s going to be a lot of turnover from last year’s ACC runners up.
