An occasional lament concerning college football’s championship format is that it leaves teams with “nothing to play for.” The idea goes that because so few teams reach the sport’s playoff, teams who’ve secured bowl eligibility but aren’t in the playoff race start playing out the string. To be fair, there’s some truth to the argument. We have our Iowa State loyalties here, and there have been seasons where the difference between 6–6 and 8–4 feels largely meaningless. I don’t think there’s a good way to fix this—this is sports, there will always be a few low-stakes games—but I do understand the lament.
Thankfully, it rarely applies to Notre Dame.
Notre Dame plays very few low-stakes games. Some of this comes from Notre Dame’s value to the bowl industry. The difference between 6–6 and 8–4 might not affect the quality of Iowa State’s bowl destination, but for Notre Dame it can be the difference between playing in the Pinstripe Bowl* and getting a New Year’s slot. Some of it comes from the ability to play spoiler. Last season, it was very fun to pull Clemson’s pants down and show the class the color of their underwear. Most of it, though, comes from the high number of rivalries on Notre Dame’s schedule. Iowa State plays out its string some years against West Virginia and TCU, teams with whom it enjoys little historic hostility. Notre Dame plays Stanford and USC.
*It’s odd that the Pinstripe Bowl is a punchline, now that I type it out. But punchline it is, and I would like Notre Dame to avoid it.
The great gift college football gives its fans is that if you took away the postseason entirely, the regular season would still matter. This was how it used to be, for many teams. The structure of the sport is one in which every game constitutes a battle, and in most of the games there is something special about that battle. The battle is in Ireland. The battle features a sensational underdog. The battle is a rare one against a competing regional power. The battle is the other team’s Super Bowl. The battle is against the team’s biggest rival, one with whom we enjoy a lengthy history of bitterness and petty feuds, one with whom we ascended to the top of college football’s world long ago.
Notre Dame does not owe USC the same debt it owes the U.S. Navy, but in college football’s early days, it was USC with whom we aligned when the racists in Ann Arbor kept us out of what would become the Big Ten. Two years after the Rose Bowl win over Pop Warner capped off college football’s first ever national championship season, the Fighting Irish took the train to Los Angeles and edged the Trojans 13–12. The national championship was not at stake—Notre Dame had been upset by Carnegie Tech the weekend prior, shut out in Pittsburgh at Forbes Field—but that didn’t stop Knute Rockne from calling the contest the greatest game he ever saw. The next season? 120,000 came to watch the Irish and Trojans play at Soldier Field. The series has continued for nearly 100 years now, breaks coming only for World War II and the Covid pandemic. It’s given Notre Dame the green jersey game and the “Fuck Pete Carroll” chant and the last of many Manti Te’o goal line stands. It’s given USC an annual leg up on the rest of the Pac-8 or Pac-10 or Pac-12 in terms of schedule prestige. Originally, it gave both programs a national marquee game between two of the top teams in the country. Time will tell if tomorrow’s involves the country’s top teams. But it’s certainly a national marquee game.
The Trojans enter with the loudest doubts they’ve faced in the young Lincoln Riley era. The honeymoon is over, a Heisman has been won, but the team fell flat last season in a Pac-12 Championship many painted as a coronation. After repeated underwhelm this year, especially the last three weeks, the college football zeitgeist is ready for a USC loss, perhaps the first of a few over an end-of-season stretch which includes this game, visits from Utah and Washington, and a trip to Eugene to play the potentially mighty Oregon Ducks. Notre Dame is favored by bettors by about three points, something that—as the home team—signals markets view USC as roughly equivalent in quality to a team that just lost at Louisville by two touchdowns and looked weakened and exhausted while doing it.
We should talk about the Louisville game, as much as I’d rather not. We spoke last week about the need to merely survive and the hope the Irish might have recovered more in the physical sense being one week more removed from Ohio State. For a moment, it looked like that would be the case. But the offensive line is not what it was purported to be, and Sam Hartman does not elevate this team highly enough to escape its own demons. Notre Dame, netted out, is almost exactly what we were expected to be in June. After those first five weeks, that is a sad disappointment. Peculiarly, the biggest issues are in the offensive trenches.
The line should get a respite this week against a USC front seven that has yet to form a cohesive whole. The receivers and Hartman should get a respite this week against a secondary that just allowed more than eight yards per pass attempt to Arizona’s backup quarterback. The defense will be up against it, facing the guy who really might become the second two-time Heisman winner, but there is a chance that Benjamin Morrison is the best player on this team, and that kind of coverage goes a long way. Is there anything to play for? Sorry, Joe Tessitore, but there is. College football has always been more than the playoff. College football has always been about games like this. There’s pride on the line. That is more than enough.
How Does Gerry Olinger Feel About NIL?
In bigger Notre Dame news than the USC game (fun hypothetical—when would this announcement have been made if the Irish were 7–0), Fr. Jenkins is stepping down. This will be his last academic year as the university president at Notre Dame.
This isn’t a great surprise. Fr. John has been the president for nearly twenty years. Only Fr. Hesburgh and Fr. Sorin were presidents longer than Fr. Jenkins will have been president by the time we get to May. We knew it was coming soon, but we didn’t know when exactly it would come. The time is evidently now.
I have complaints with Fr. Jenkins, but I would have complaints with anyone who worked a job I care deeply about over nineteen years. I also have a hard time complaining about the guy who by many indications never seemed to want to be a university president. Fr. Jenkins is an Oxford-educated philosopher, not a wheeler and a dealer, and it seemed to be because of this that Holy Cross and the board of trustees agreed he’d be a good man for the position, the idea seemingly that he would be a mediator between dueling impulses and a steady voice of reason. Whether he was or wasn’t is for history to decide, but I’d guess I’ll always have the impression that Fr. Jenkins is a good man who cares deeply about Notre Dame, and it’s hard to ask for more than that.
With one exception, Fr. Jenkins operated best out of the spotlight, his most frustrating instances coming when he ventured into the public eye. In those moments—the Supreme Court ceremony, the college sports op-ed this March, his longtime involvement with the Commission on Presidential Debates—his actions appeared guided by a zeal to be or look precociously thoughtful. He was a little too giddy to be at the table in instances when it would have been best for Notre Dame had he stayed out of the room. But that one exception, that one time he revealed his inner fire, was an inspiring moment. I will never forget many parts of Fr. Hesburgh’s funeral week, but one among those is Fr. Jenkins’s remarks at his mentor’s service. The distant man rose into the present moment and revealed a love of Holy Cross and a gratitude to Fr. Ted that transcended political culture wars or the NCAA.
On the topic of college sports, Fr. Jenkins was a little bit of a visionary, seeing earlier than most that the NCAA needs universities more than universities need the NCAA. It’s hard to know his current opinions on the right way to treat college athletes, because he and Jack Swarbrick ostensibly did the writing this winter while it was Swarbrick who did the talking this spring, but they’re much less consequential now.
From what I’ve heard, the favorite for the job is Fr. Gerry Olinger, the current VP of Student Affairs. This doesn’t mean he’ll get it—and even if he does, things aren’t always a done deal, as the recent mess at Portland revealed—but when you ask about candidates, his name always comes up, and few others do with any kind of consistency. The problem with this, for me, is that I don’t know anything about Fr. Gerry Olinger beyond what’s on his CV. Overall, Fr. Olinger or whoever the next president is will have bigger fish to fry than how exactly to encourage and discourage NIL payments and transfer admissions. His job is to steer the university, and it is for Pete Bevacqua to run the athletic department. But, university presidents play large roles in the athletics of the universities they administer. We will likely talk about Fr. Jenkins’s successor often in this space.
Update, 10/16: More on the presidential candidates this week, but we’ve been updated that Fr. Olinger is not in the lead.
Quick(er) Hitters
Jordan Faison is now on football scholarship rather than lacrosse scholarship, because football had a scholarship to give. That is bad. Football cannot be the one giving lacrosse the assists at Notre Dame. Lacrosse should be a place for us to stash our longest-haired football players. At any moment, the lacrosse roster should be 20% backup wide receivers. I will bring this to Fr. Olinger at our first lunch.
LaPhonso Ellis landed at Big Ten Network as an analyst this basketball season, and Jordan Cornette is going to work with Peacock. The program remains well-represented in the national conversation. Those are the guys we want carrying the banner.
This Week
One final thought about football before we open the door to the rest of the athletic department: The penalties were lesser in number last week, but their impact was seismic. Consider that another area in which the Freeman program needs to grow.
The women’s soccer team smoked Miami on Sunday, winning 7–2 at home, but they lost to top-ranked Florida State on the road last night, 4–1. They’re in second place in the ACC and remained 11th in the country in Monday’s rankings.
The men’s soccer team got a good win over Duke on Saturday, beating the Blue Devils 1–0 at home. They then won a tuneup over Oberlin on Tuesday. They visit Virginia Tech tonight on ACC Network, meeting a Hokies team that’s .500 in ACC play. The Irish lead the conference and were up to 8th in Monday’s rankings. Virginia Tech is unranked.
The volleyball team lost at Duke but won at UNC last weekend, staying .500 in conference play. They’ll host Virginia and Pitt this weekend. Virginia isn’t supposed to be much, but Pitt is ranked 8th in the country heading into their top-ten matchup tonight at Louisville.
Notre Dame hockey split its series with Clarkson last weekend. They visit RIT tonight. Like Notre Dame and Clarkson, RIT is unranked but in the “receiving votes” territory. They play in the Atlantic Hockey Association.
The cross country programs were in action today in Madison at a big invitational. The women’s team finished sixth, with Olivia Markezich ninth overall. All teams who beat Notre Dame are also ranked in the top ten nationally, or right on the verge. The men’s team finished eleventh and mostly lost to fellow top-20 teams, with the lone exception being a surprising Furman.
The men’s swimming and diving team beat Wisconsin 163–137 while the women lost 213–87. Not a high-level surprise on either side there. They host Purdue this afternoon.
The women’s golf team finished tenth at Old Dominion’s invitational. The men’s program was idle.
Tennis, baseball, softball, and women’s lacrosse all continued their offseason action. Not a lot I’ve seen to report on there.
