When I was a child first acquainting myself with college football, I believe the EA Sports NCAA Football video game included rivalry pages, screens with a short blurb and a picture of the trophy and a list of recent head-to-head results. Whether I learned it through the video game or not, the year was 2004, and it was unfathomable to me that just three falls earlier Notre Dame had been capable of beating Southern Cal. How far each program had come.
The Notre Dame–USC rivalry is a streaky one, looking backwards. Notre Dame ruled the 40s and 50s. USC ruled the 70s. Notre Dame ruled the 80s. USC ruled the 2000s. Since 2012, though, when Notre Dame stuffed the Trojans on the goal line in Los Angeles, the series has belonged to the Irish, and it’s been especially so since 2017, when Josh Adams ran roughshod over the SC defense en route to a 35-point pounding of the eventual Pac-12 champions. After last year, it looked like possession was changing again, Notre Dame unable to keep up with Caleb Williams in Lincoln Riley’s first year in Los Angeles. It seemed the 2020s would be a decade of rubies on the Shillelagh.
As Lee Corso liked to say in that video game…
It’s fun to stop something in college football. It’s more fun to be the team others are trying to stop, and to refuse them that pleasure, but finding oneself on one’s heels, it’s fun to step up and put an end to someone else’s dreams. USC entered South Bend dreaming: Dreaming of a repeat Heisman winner, dreaming of an undefeated season, dreaming of a trip to the playoff and a return to the sport’s greatest stage. USC left South Bend with its tail between its legs, concerned about a 7–5 finish and grasping at the shreds of Williams’s Heisman campaign, shreds which floated breezily on the Indiana wind. 2023 is not USC’s season in college football, and the 2020s are not USC’s decade in this storied rivalry. Notre Dame still holds the upper hand. USC still hasn’t won at Notre Dame Stadium since 2011. All remains right with this power structure.
For Notre Dame, it’s a breath of fresh air and a pump of gasoline after three weeks in which every play looked harder than the last. Sam Hartman’s team (and this is Sam Hartman’s team, even after the 2–2 stretch) was down bad, afraid of an eight-win season in which making the ReliaQuest Bowl would constitute a good break. Instead, they head into the first idle week on an exuberant kick, and Marcus Freeman’s staff hits the recruiting trail with plenty of highlights on the iPad. The offense still has its questions, but it played within its limited self and gets thirteen days of rest and practice to get right before Pitt. The defense looks like one of the four or five best in the country, grading out even better than those of Alabama and Georgia by ESPN’s SP+. Facing the reigning Heisman winner and aggressively anointed number one pick, Al Golden made football look easy, interceptions falling gently into Watts’s and Benjamin Morrison’s hands with sacks on a Black Friday sale in the USC backfield. Scheme and execution created the opportunities, and Notre Dame did not drop the ball, figuratively or literally. The result was a blowout of an overrated team, but not a bad one, and an emphatic destruction of a very good offense.
Playoffs!?
There was a current last week which said the game didn’t matter, with the playoff out of reach. That current has mostly been washed away by the reminder of how fun it is to beat a rival, but it’s worth addressing again: College football is less about its postseason than any other major American sport. Winning the national championship is the goal, but part of that goal is winning all the games leading up to the national championship. Every college football game is a championship of its own, and some of these single-game championships loom gigantic. I would rather win a national title than beat USC. But I haven’t been alive for a Notre Dame national championship, and I sure like beating USC.
I think part of what drives this degradation of the sport is fans and media bringing a pro sports mentality to watching college football. If you’ve only ever watched the NFL, you’ve rightly been taught that what matters is the Super Bowl, partly because Super Bowls are attainable for every team. Ideally, it won’t be this way forever, but right now it would be less impressive for the Browns to win a Super Bowl than for Marcus Freeman to win a national championship at Notre Dame. Pro sports are built to give everyone a chance. College football is not. College football is about its regular season, and about beating opponents each week, and about the unchecked joy of watching Xavier Watts come up with the football a third time and carry it giddily into the endzone. If you want to view college football as a binary thing in which the national title is all that matters, you’re missing the point of college football.
What makes this more galling is that even if national championships are the only measure of success, beating USC goes a long way towards winning those national championships. Against whom do we recruit in California? Against whom do we gain whatever national credibility we have in the perennial nature? Part of winning a national championship, as a program, is building to that finished product, and that is something that takes years. Notre Dame is not going to roll out Joe Burrow and Justin Jefferson one Labor Day Weekend and dance the whole way to the parade. Notre Dame needs to get there step by difficult step, and one of the boxes this program must check is continuing to dominate USC.
For those interested, however:
We’ve got a 1-in-200 chance of making the playoff.
Not great.
But better than 1-in-3,000, which is where that chance stood entering the week.
Our college football model is useful for examining hypotheticals such as, “What if all but three power conference teams lose two or more games?” We don’t have an exact answer to that, but we can get there with some backdoor math. In our model’s latest 10,000 simulations, Notre Dame finishes with a 10–2 record 46% of the time (9–3 is 42% likely). In those 10–2 instances, we make the playoff 1.1% of the time. It is highly unlikely that enough teams will lose for us to reenter the playoff mix. But with no one to play this week, it’s fun to look at that 1-in-200 chance, and at the 1-in-90 once our fate has been controlled, and to see what could happen. Here are some things we learn:
- In the 51 simulations in which Notre Dame makes the playoff, Ohio State also makes the playoff 38 times, or in roughly 75% of instances. With Ohio State’s overall playoff probability 57%, this shows the expected positive correlation between Notre Dame’s playoff chances and Ohio State’s.
- The strongest negative correlations are with Florida State’s chances, Oklahoma’s chances, Oregon’s chances, and Washington’s chances. Michigan and Georgia are negative—most teams are negative, naturally, because Notre Dame has to take a spot from someone—but the Irish are playing in different lanes from the Big Ten and the SEC. Notre Dame is trying to finish ahead of the Pac-12 champion (ideally, USC), the ACC champion (ideally, Duke), and the Big 12 champion (ideally, a three-loss team who handed Oklahoma its second loss).
- There is something around the magnitude of a 1-in-5,000 chance that Notre Dame and Louisville both make the playoff, even after Louisville’s loss to Pitt. The rematch remains possible. In some universe.
You don’t have to cheer this way (we just spent a lot of time making the case to not cheer this way), but the fact is that Notre Dame has some sort of playoff chance, miniscule though it may be, and that if Duke upsets Florida State on Saturday and Ohio State takes down Penn State, our probability will rise. It wouldn’t hurt to see USC beat Utah, or to see Oklahoma or Washington or Oregon go down, but we’re mostly drafting off of Ohio State and hoping someone not called the Seminoles finishes on top in the ACC.
President Watch
We mentioned on Friday that Fr. Gerry Olinger’s name had come up a lot in presidential speculation, and we’d like to offer an update on that. From what we’re hearing, the conventional wisdom within the Congregation of Holy Cross and within the university is that the leading candidates are Fr. Bob Dowd and Fr. Dan Groody. Apologies for any misleading we did on Friday. As could have been predicted, more people are talking about this than were before Fr. Jenkins announced his retirement. From what we understand, Fr. Olinger is a possibility, among others beyond these three, but Holy Cross and the university have placed Fr. Dowd and Fr. Groody in positions in recent years that should deepen their experience in areas relevant to administering Notre Dame. Those with whom we’ve talked consider Fr. Dowd and Fr. Groody the favorites.
To be clear, we aren’t talking to sources close to either Fr. Dowd or Fr. Groody on this, and we aren’t talking to sources close to those who will make the decision (nor are we talking about this with anyone actually making the decision, or either of those two men). This is just the conventional wisdom within Holy Cross and within Notre Dame, as our connections on both sides are leading us to understand. We also don’t know the thoughts of Fr. Dowd or Fr. Groody on athletic matters.
What we do know is that our limited interactions with both Fr. Dowd and Fr. Groody have been exclusively positive. We have some personal connections to Fr. Dowd, and Fr. Groody lived in Alumni Hall while I was there, and the few times we’ve spoken have left us with nothing but good impressions. Fr. Groody has done some staggering work on the topics of migration and refugees (he once referred, in a Dorm Mass homily, to an experience interviewing sex trafficked women in the slums of Southeast Asia—the topic of the homily was walking where Jesus would have walked). Fr. Dowd likewise has an academic history in international matters, though I’m less familiar with his work.
It is so hard to tell from a distance, but what we do know is that both are serious academic men and longtime stewards of Holy Cross, and our impression is that like Fr. Jenkins, neither has been guided by personal ambition in their route to this potential consideration for the role of university president. Again, we don’t know what they think about sports.
What do we want Notre Dame’s next president to think about sports? Our hope would be that they share our appreciation for football’s unique role in building Notre Dame into what it is, and share our belief that lessening the prominence of football would alter Notre Dame’s character in a fundamental way. We’ve been fearful at times that Notre Dame’s recent pursuit of academic excellence could lead it to change its identity in so major a way as to leave it less itself. Of schools in Notre Dame’s academic stratosphere, only Duke and UCLA are close to Notre Dame in how important athletics are to their culture, and with Duke’s athletic prominence more recent and UCLA’s athletics more casually culturally supported, I do think Notre Dame stands alone in this intersection of school and sport. To reduce the specific commitment to nationally competitive football would be to change Notre Dame’s character. There are arguments to be made on that behalf, but what we really want from a president is that they understand and appreciate the weight of such a stance, especially if FBS football should break apart during their tenure and leave the school facing a hard choice.
This conversation does not have all that much to do with academics. Plenty of elite academic schools excel in sports other than football and basketball. Stanford has a storied baseball program. Princeton currently has an excellent cross country team. With football and basketball, it would always be entirely defensible for a Notre Dame president to say, You know what? We’re not going to bend the admissions standard all that far. It would raise the level of difficulty, but you could do it. I’d be interested in seeing the SAT scores of Stanford football players under Jim Harbaugh. Andrew Luck was rare, but was that offensive line?
The impact of the president’s attitude towards sports has more to do with NIL, which Notre Dame currently seems to be treating as a scandalous thing, something to be facilitated only in limited capacity. FUND, the Brady Quinn-faced NIL collective, is a good thing (charity is great), but its recruiting impact does not appear significant, because it does not give very much money to players. This is the NIL approach Notre Dame encourages, giving the cold shoulder to efforts focused on getting athletes the money a free market would yield. Sam Hartman clearly has encountered plenty of NIL opportunities, but it’s unclear how many of those came with sanctioned help from the Notre Dame world versus how many Hartman navigated with the help of his own support staff. From what we can tell, if donors want to financially support players, they have to do so by going around the university, while Notre Dame’s competitor programs are easing those lines of communication, opening doors and letting interested parties work things out. NIL opportunities are more limited at Notre Dame than they are at other top-20 football programs, and this is by choice.
What’s troubling about this is how it connects to Jack Swarbrick’s own statements about college athletics. Swarbrick has expressed concern that payments to players could lead to their legal status changing to one of employment, and that this could violate overtime laws because of all the demands placed upon student-athletes’ time. Swarbrick has expressed a desire for a wide-ranging football minor league, so that colleges don’t have to deal with the athletic prospects who, for whichever reason, are highly motivated by getting money for their talent as quickly as they can. You would hope a university’s athletic director would want any athlete meeting the prescribed academic and athletic standards to be welcome in their school’s athletic department, but a straightforward interpretation of Swarbrick’s stances on the matter is that he’d prefer Notre Dame athletes come from money, so that Notre Dame can avoid the legal headache of a system he admits is asking players to do more than employment standards allow. Rather than taking stock of this situation and saying, We need to get our kids the best opportunities possible and make that work legally, Swarbrick has taken a stance which arbitrarily limits Notre Dame’s talent pool, especially in football, a sport where raw athletic talent is more strongly correlated with success than in college basketball or softball or fencing (in other words, in the sport where recruiting matters most). Notre Dame’s lack of a prominent for-player-profit NIL collective makes it harder to recruit poorer players. There is a moral problem with that, in addition to the competitive one.
We’ve never known exactly how Fr. Jenkins feels about this worldview his AD espouses. He’s signed off on it, but there have been plenty of other stances included in the op-eds (for instance, the very reasonable stance that limits should be placed on scheduling in order to protect athletes from missing too much class). Our hope is that Fr. Dowd or Fr. Groody or whoever becomes Notre Dame’s next president at the very least does not endorse this Swarbrickian view. We don’t need them to be especially involved in the athletic world—they have other big things to worry about—but we would hope that they don’t stand in the way of a poorer athlete who wants to play football or basketball at Notre Dame. We would hope they see the situation with clear eyes and a desire to fulfill Notre Dame’s mission, and less through a legalistic, liability-focused lens.
This is probably a good place to reiterate our stance that Jack Swarbrick has been a great athletic director at Notre Dame and that we wish him all the best in whatever’s next for him. He hired the guy from whom Good Things Shrewing gets its name, after all. Similarly, we’re fans of Fr. Jenkins, and we mostly approve of the job he’s done. All love from Good Things Shrewing, we just think Notre Dame should focus more on winning than on stopping college athletes from making money at a school which puts real gold on its football helmets.
Quick(er) Hitters
I lost it at this picture of Hartman between Jenkins and Swarbrick, with Bevacqua at the end (I’m ashamed to not have a name for the face of the fifth member of the lineup). They look like they’re in the principal’s office for an elaborate plot which ended with Caleb Williams receiving an atomic wedgie. On another Hartman note: Why have I never seen someone do Horns Down with the Fight On signal before? Sam Hartman is really good at the fan engagement stuff. Honed his craft admirably in Winston-Salem.
KenPom’s preseason ratings are out, and the system is a little higher on Notre Dame than T-Rank is, which we’d previously been referencing. Even so, it has the Irish as the worst team in the ACC, projecting an 11–19 record in the 30 scheduled games. Honestly? If we can get to 12 or 13 wins, not finish 15th in the ACC, and finish the season looking better than when we started it, that’s a great first year for Micah Shrewsberry given where the program stood when he inherited it. Especially if he continues to seem like a cool guy. Marcus Freeman continues to demonstrate the importance of our coaches being cool.
This Week
The men’s soccer team beat Virginia Tech 1–0 on Friday in Blacksburg, maintaining their hold on first place in the ACC. They visit Michigan tonight for a nonconference matchup, then visit Wake Forest on Friday night on ACC Network. Michigan was unranked in last week’s poll. Wake Forest was ranked 4th, four spots ahead of Notre Dame, and leads the ACC’s Atlantic Division.
The women’s soccer team visits UNC on Thursday and NC State on Sunday, looking for a big upset win in the former. UNC was ranked 3rd in the country in last week’s poll after being ranked 1st a week prior. At 4–0–3, they trail Notre Dame by a point in the ACC standings. NC State is closer to the bottom of the conference.
The volleyball team beat Virginia and lost to Pitt over the weekend homestand, continuing their string of expected results. They’ll visit Virginia Tech on Friday and Wake Forest on Sunday. Neither is ranked, and Virginia Tech is one game out of last place in the ACC, but Wake Forest is 27th in the volleyball RPI rankings, so a sweep might do something for ND’s meager NCAA Tournament hopes.
Notre Dame hockey fell 3–0 at RIT on Saturday, dropping to 1–2 in the season’s early going. They’ll host 6th-ranked BU on Friday and Saturday.
The cross country teams are idle this week, but each received votes of confidence in this week’s polls. Both the men and women were ranked first in the Great Lakes Region, and the women’s team was ranked 8th nationally while the men are 14th.
The men’s swimming and diving team beat Purdue on Friday, 177–123, while the women’s team lost 165–135. In the October coaches poll, the men are ranked 17th nationally while the women aren’t receiving votes. The programs host Pitt and Penn State in a two-day meet on Friday and Saturday.
The golf programs are idle but are on their way to Scotland for an invitational at St. Andrews which begins on Monday.
The tennis and women’s lacrosse programs continue their offseason action. The individual tennis invitationals are a little too hard to track for our capabilities right now. If you want Sebastian Dominko fall season updates, you’re going to need to find those yourself for the time being.
