Win Now, Win Later: Notre Dame’s on the Cusp and Full of Contradictions

Good morning from Austin, Texas, where locals are forgetting how bad things recently were. May we Notre Dame fans never make that same mistake.

Notre Dame begins its 2025 season tonight, a season that by reasonable expectations should continue into 2026. There might not be a playoff home game this year, and that might be a good thing, with a bye awaiting if these Irish take care of business. That’s easier said than done. Taking care of business means beating Miami in the humidity with a first-time starting QB. Taking care of business means holding off Mike Elko’s Texas A&M in his second year instilling what we should guess is a formidable culture. Taking care of business means giving USC another reason to complain about playing Notre Dame. Taking care of business means surviving Fayetteville and Chestnut Hill and a half-dozen other tripwires lined up along the route. We saw last year how small the punishment is for losing in this era of the twelve-team playoff. That doesn’t mean Notre Dame should try it.

In the spirit of not making that Texas-sized mistake we mentioned up top, a moment of appreciation: We are seriously talking about Notre Dame’s regular season being a disappointment if the Irish don’t go 12–0. Those are high, high standards, the kind of standards which make probability devotees recoil. It is hard to go 12–0. It’s going to be hard to beat Miami. But the standard has been raised in South Bend.

There are a lot of contradictions surrounding this Notre Dame team. The biggest one is this: There’s a difference between winning a national championship and being the best football program in the country.

Notre Dame isn’t particularly close to being the best football program in the country. It’s improving—we’re seriously recruiting five-stars for the first time since Charlie Weis—but the talent in Columbus, Athens, and Austin still leads the talent off Exit 77 in northern Indiana. Those programs are bigger than ours, faster than ours, and stronger than ours. We won’t pass them, either. We’re just trying to catch up. Texas will always have five-stars. Some combination of Ohio State, Florida, and Georgia will always have them too.

Does it take five-stars to win a national championship? There’s the contradiction. It used to, but Notre Dame could have won last year’s title. The Irish ended up two stops and two scores away. The zero-team and two-team and four-team playoffs all made it almost impossible to win a national championship as a program not loaded with first-round picks. The twelve-team playoff puts a higher premium on culture, on things like perseverance and resilience. It also introduces more luck. Last year, both those factors broke in favor of Notre Dame.

The trick for Notre Dame this year is pursuing a national championship while keeping an eye on the future. That’s what this season requires. Maximizing Notre Dame’s long-term championship potential means getting more five-stars through that door and then turning them into the best football players in the country. But that can’t mean letting urgency slide. We’re Cubs fans at this site, and coming out of 2016, the Cubs looked poised to be the best franchise in baseball for a long time. From 2018 through now, the Cubs haven’t won a single playoff game. We don’t know what tonight’s game holds, let alone the next few seasons. The needle Notre Dame needs to thread involves prioritizing immediate wins while continuing the long, slow process of assembling a roster that really can be expected to compete with the NFL’s 33^rd and 34^th teams. Those two things go together. It’s no coincidence that Notre Dame’s last recruiting class that sniffed these was 2013’s, immediately after Manti Te’o’s 2012 magic. Winning makes recruiting easier. But it’s easy to lose sight of one in pursuit of the other.

More contradictions:

• Notre Dame’s culture should be more ingrained this year, but it shouldn’t be as much of a strength. The magic around last year’s team will be impossible to replicate. That was the kind of season you can’t bottle.
• Notre Dame’s schedule is favorable, but its path will be harder. Good luck to us in finding an easier semifinal opponent than last year’s Penn State team, who nearly beat us. Good luck to us in finding an easier first round opponent—if we play that round—than Indiana. Good luck to us in finding a worse SEC champion than last year’s Georgia Bulldogs. The SEC has too many contenders for all of them to mildly disappoint again.
• Notre Dame has a better quarterback, but this team will be worse at quarterback. CJ Carr is set to be Notre Dame’s first long-term quarterback since Ian Book, and if this staff doesn’t fumble his development, he should be Notre Dame’s best quarterback since Jimmy Clausen. Even this year, he should be expected to play the quarterback position better than Riley Leonard played it. But again…last year was magical. Riley Leonard had a lightning that could win college football games. Carr will not replace Leonard’s intangibles.
• Notre Dame has the best running back in the country, but the second-string guy might matter more. Jeremiyah Love is better than anyone else’s best when it comes to running the football. But Jadarian Price is even more better than anyone else’s second-best.
• Notre Dame’s offensive line should be even better than last year’s, but it’s a concern tonight. It takes time for offensive lines to gel. This isn’t quite as scary against Miami as it was in College Station, but the noise is going to be real tonight, and Miami rarely lacks athletes.
• Notre Dame’s secondary is stacked, but we’re going to miss last year’s unit. Like Riley Leonard, Xavier Watts had that lightning. Xavier Watts effectively ended Caleb Williams’s college career. Xavier Watts ended the Indiana game before it could start. Notre Dame is a DB school now, which is wild, but expectations are dangerously high for Christian Gray, and nobody wearing a gold helmet should be expected to be as good as they would be with #0 in coverage behind them.

Maybe the biggest contradiction of all is that we’re only two-point favorites tonight, but we’re talking about 12–0 and talking about 2027. Inside that locker room, tonight should be the only game of the season. Out here, it’s hard not to notice Notre Dame’s rising sun. These next few years could be Notre Dame’s biggest since Ara Parseghian. To make sure that can happen, Notre Dame needs to win tonight.

Miami thoughts:

• The questions about Carson Beck are 1) whether he’s fully healthy and 2) whether he can make the reads and 3) whether he needs to win or only wants to. Miami did an amazing job with Cam Ward last year, but there were no questions about 1, 2, or 3. Cam Ward didn’t have Beck’s gifts, but we knew he was a football player.
• Beck and that offense are scary, but it’s also worth remembering how few receivers Miami returns. We need to stop the run. And more than usual: No dumb penalties. Even with brand new characters in the passing game, the explosiveness on Miami’s roster can make you pay.
• I think we’re all of the opinion that Notre Dame should try to make this an eight-possession game. By which I mean that Notre Dame should try to only give Miami eight possessions. Ground and pound, then ground and pound some more. Unless this offensive line has problems, we should be able to consistently get four or five yards. No need to show that CJ Carr can throw deep or anything like that. Save that for November.
• Going off of that, this is a parallel situation to last year at Texas A&M. The difference there was that for all Riley Leonard’s shortcomings, we knew he’d been through the pressure of a big game before. He knew what his nervous system would do. CJ Carr doesn’t know. CJ Carr hasn’t been here yet at this level. If he doesn’t thrive, it’s ok. It’s something that can be learned, and I think we all expect Mike Denbrock to dial up a lot of handoffs. But if Carr shows any signs of shaky hands, someone else is going to need to be the backbone in that huddle.
• College football’s best rivalries are the ones that are hard to schedule. We don’t need to delude ourselves about the character of Miami’s football players. Catholics vs. Convicts is funny. It is not a gauge of each football team’s character over the last 40 years. Where we should strive to have the high ground is how we outside the locker room act. We need to be a good people. We need to not be douchebags. Miami is a lame place to go to college. Their stadium’s half an hour from campus, even without traffic. Cool city, cool location, but it’s both wild and true that the more industrious kids in that area go to FAU. Whenever a private school isn’t that strong academically, it’s a big red flag. We need to be more industrious than FAU. We need to be less douchey than Miami. Marcus Freeman made us cool for the first time since Knute Rockne. Don’t blow it, guys.

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