Notre Dame announced the discontinuation of interhall tackle football last week, and if it were surprising, it wouldn’t be sad. It makes sense. It’s probably smart. The announcement from Fr. Gerry Olinger, VP for student affairs, cited the danger of a situation where 44% of the participants had never before played tackle football while others had experience playing at a high level in high school. The announcement also cited how much demand there was for interhall 7–on–7 flag football, which was introduced in 2019. Interhall football isn’t going away. It’s just being reshaped to a shape more accessible to Notre Dame’s new kind of student. The national decline in tackle football participation is well-documented, and the most cited reason behind that decline—brain health—is a valid concern. But the decline in student interhall football participation (a 27% decrease over the last five years) well outpaces the national rate (an 8% decrease over the last five documented seasons). This is not about football. This is about Notre Dame.
In April, I was back on campus for ordinations, and a friend employed by the university relayed a lament from a colleague in the admissions office, the perception behind that lament being that a rise in objectivity in the admissions process, certainly a noble aim, had inadvertently led to an environment where students admitted were less excited about attending Our Lady’s University.
“We used to admit kids who wanted to go to Notre Dame because they loved Notre Dame. Now we admit kids who want to go to Notre Dame because it’s the best school they got in to.”
Objectivity in admissions is good and just and fair. But the character of Notre Dame undergraduates is changing. Fifteen years ago, it was common to hear statistics saying something like 90% of Notre Dame students played a high school sport and something like 75% of students had been a captain of a high school team. Now, those numbers are so forgotten that I can’t even fact-check them online.
High school athletic participation is not the primary measure of the quality of a person. Far from it. But high school sports do help train kids to focus on a pursuit bigger than themselves and to sacrifice for that aim. At many high schools, they bring students from different cultural and financial backgrounds into not only contact but active, unforced collaboration, the kind Notre Dame likes to promote every time it invites Fr. Gregory Boyle to South Bend. In a world where more and more kids are raised with the attention formerly devoted to Only Children, high school sports teach kids to, often for the first time, participate in a community whose primary aim is something other than optimizing their college application.
In the Lori Loughlin era of parenting, sacrifice and community allegiance and authentic experience with some sort of diversity—not manufactured “service” projects designed for the infamous college application—are in short supply at top-25 colleges and universities. High school sports push students to think outside themselves amidst generations where the college application process is, for many parents, the ultimate proving ground as to the quality of their work. I’m not in the admissions office. I mostly see the same reports as everybody else. But the perception is widespread, and few anecdotes push back against it: Notre Dame is getting stronger academically. Its personality is changing as it pursues that goal.
Back in 2018, I happened to attend a presentation by Don Bishop, associate VP for undergraduate enrollment. The presentation included the exciting news that Notre Dame was trying to pivot away from accepting the best students and pivot towards accepting the best people. The idea, as I understood it, was to allow the academic merits of incoming classes to plateau in exchange for building a strong, kind culture. Describing it to a friend, I said, “Notre Dame has gotten smart enough.”
I was invigorated by that news. It signified a refreshing rejection of the rat race. Harvard and Princeton and Stanford could play their games. Notre Dame would try, I believed, to be the best Notre Dame it could be.
The problem, of course, is that there is an entire industry built around training high school kids (or their parents, in many cases) to apply to college, and that this industry is robust and efficient. There are seminars and workshops and handbooks on essay-writing, and there are tutors for the SAT and the ACT and the SAT again but this time the subject matter tests, and there are rules of thumb on extracurriculars, including how many sports to play and how seriously to take those sports. High school students, all too often, are told to do things neither for their own fulfillment nor their own betterment as people. They’re told to do things for the sake of the college application. This is the wolf admissions offices like Notre Dame’s must continuously outrun.
Is Notre Dame staying ahead of the wolf? I don’t know. I don’t know that Notre Dame’s character is getting worse or better. I don’t know that Notre Dame’s admits really did plateau academically, though the school’s overall trend in the national rankings implies they did not. What is clear is that Notre Dame is changing, and the deletion of interhall tackle football stems from that change. Not from something specific to football itself.
There’s an argument to which I don’t know the answer which asks whether Notre Dame should A) simply admit the strongest applicants and let the market shape the school accordingly or whether Notre Dame should B) use admissions to attempt to cultivate its culture. Should Notre Dame admissions be fair, or should they be used to support Notre Dame’s preferred identity? I think my answer—and I suspect this is the same for many—is that if the preferred identity is a good one, Notre Dame is justified in pursuing that outcome. If I don’t like the preferred identity? It’s hard to argue with fair.
It’s possible what’s happening here is that I just don’t like the current Notre Dame administration’s preferred identity for the school. It’s possible I’m grumpy. It’s likely I’m being too subjective. It’s undeniable that I’m biased towards my own values. But at a school that talks such a big game about serving the world, it’s suspicious when the Center for Social Concerns is overhauled in a direction which drastically reduces its off-campus service opportunities. For a school that talks such a big game about fostering community, it’s suspicious when the admissions office seems to stop prioritizing whether kids participated in one of the most effective commonly available trainings in how to live and work with people different from yourself. For practical purposes, Notre Dame is still clearly stronger academically than Michigan and clearly weaker academically than Harvard, the same as it’s been for years. I’m afraid, though, that its personality is standing out less and less from those rankings-chasing schools.
Barring a dramatic and successful change in the sport itself, interhall tackle football was never going to survive forever at Notre Dame. The trend is too clear: The sport is declining at the youth level. But its demise in South Bend was hastened by a culture pivot away from one of the things that made Notre Dame unique. Things go away over time. Things become outdated. But were the swim test and physical education removed because they served no purpose, or because they were scaring off kids with perfect scores on the SAT? Was Frosh-O gutted and dorm identity bludgeoned to a nominal state because it was itself a problem, or because Notre Dame failed to rein in overzealous disciplinary rectors and failed to guide its students to moral treatment of one another?
For what shall it profit a man, and whatnot.
Quick Hitters
The basketball program added Greg Miskinis as its strength and conditioning guy. Miskinis comes from, take a guess, Penn State, where he worked for fourteen years. Analysis? If a program just overachieved dramatically in the Big Ten playing a brand of basketball centered around one player’s buttocks, you want that program’s squat regimen. Elsewhere, Bonzie Colson won a ring in Israel, and Daquan Davis (2024 four-star point guard) will now announce his commitment decision this Saturday instead of this Sunday. No word on anything in the transfer portal, but a bunch of West Virginia guys might be hopping in after Bob Huggins’s DUI-prompted resignation.
On the football side, Marcus Freeman notched his second commitment in the 2025 class this weekend, securing Nate Roberts, a four-star tight end out of Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Phil Steele’s Preseason All-Americans are out and Joe Alt, Benjamin Morrison, and Michael Vinson were all on the list. Alt made the first team. Morrison and Vinson made the second team.
The volleyball team announced its schedule. They’ll open in Lubbock on Friday, August 25th at an event where they’ll play both Texas Tech and Wichita State. The Wichita State game is the new next–game–on–the–schedule for the athletic department as a whole, but I believe soccer will change that, along with possibly some other sports.
Lastly, congratulations to Penn High School on the state championship in baseball one week after taking the crown in softball. Love that. Disappointing to not hear about either title from Notre Dame itself on the socials, but maybe there’s a recruiting rule around that.
