Notre Dame fans, especially scheduling buffs like myself, are already very familiar with the recent chatter that the Notre Dame/Michigan football series, left for dead as recently as 2014 when ND won the final scheduled game 37-0 (#RememberThe6), looks to be on its way back. Both sides have expressed interest in scheduling a future series, with coach Brian Kelly even intimating that the next game could take place within the next five years.
(UPDATE: Several media reports, the first one coming from SI’s Ryan Krasnoo, say that ND and Michigan will announce a game for the 2018 season today. How’s that for timing??)
(UPDATE #2: It’s official – Sept. 1, 2018 at Notre Dame and Oct. 26, 2019 at Michigan, per @FBSchedules.)
While granting that this will certainly be an interesting development for the college football world at large, I submit that this isn’t the greatest idea for Notre Dame. A few reasons why:
– National pull. From my selfish and admittedly biased point of view, ND acknowledging Michigan’s existence by playing them in football doesn’t do much for ND, which can generate broad national interest by playing almost anybody.
You don’t need to look far for an example — an Irish road game against Temple (Temple!!) was selected for a national Saturday Night Football broadcast on ABC and hosted College GameDay last year. The Owls’ surprise emergence as a Top 25 team last year certainly helped make that happen, but even under those circumstances it’s hard to imagine a Temple game against another school, even a very good one, generating that kind of interest.
Meanwhile, Michigan, while considered a blue-blood program, generally doesn’t get much traction nationally unless they’re playing a highly-ranked Ohio State or Michigan State team. Even last year’s Wolverines opener against a very good Utah squad didn’t contribute as much as you might expect in the national conversation outside of Fox Sports 1’s desperate promotion. The game drew just under 3 million viewers, a solid figure for the network but still fewer than North Carolina vs. South Carolina drew the same evening.
The point is, Notre Dame can play several schools at or near the level of Michigan — Georgia, whom the Irish will play in 2017 and ’19, is a good example — and draw a bunch of interest. Michigan, frankly, can’t. Why help them out? Especially given:
– History. Now, bad blood between schools isn’t often a great reason not to play them — actually it’s quite the opposite. But then, that bad blood doesn’t usually include one school trying to stamp the other out.
It’s well-documented that Michigan essentially tried to smother ND football in the crib when the Irish began their emergence, for fear that their brand as “champions of the West” might be usurped. The Wolverines ceased playing ND after the Irish beat them for the first time in 1909, going as far as to cancel the next year’s game basically as the boys in blue and gold were boarding the train north. They also responded to ND’s attempts to join the Big Ten by strongarming the league’s other schools into refusing to play the Irish. (Imagine a world in which Michigan at that time realizes how beneficial ND in the Big Ten would be. Scary.)
Of course, as we now know, that strategy backfired spectacularly on the Wolverines. ND went on to adopt an attitude of ‘anyone, anywhere’, playing era heavyweights like Army and later USC. Those series, and the exposure they created, helped ND become a superpower that would transcend college football’s otherwise regional roots and whose popularity would forever outstrip Michigan’s.
Michigan would later consent to play ND in the early 1940s, but after the Irish won for the second time in the series in 1943, the Wolverines inexplicably accused ND of dirty play and again backed out of future games. The two teams would finally resume their rivalry in 1978 with only occasional breaks until the most recent stoppage. Those two prior withdrawals from the series make Michigan’s trumpeting of ND’s later “chickening out”, as Brady Hoke infamously put it at an alumni function in 2013, by turns patently absurd and hilarious.
If you need a more recent factoid to illustrate the irony of UM’s attitude towards the Irish, ex-Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon was on record a good year and a half before ND canceled the Michigan series — using a contract clause that UM had insisted upon, allowing either side to cancel with three games’ notice — that he was thinking about it himself.
In April 2011, he said of a then-hypothetical nine-game B1G schedule, “I can’t be in a world where I have four Big Ten home games and I’m supposed to play Notre Dame (in South Bend). I can’t live in that world.” With the nine-game B1G schedule becoming a reality starting in 2016, Brandon would almost certainly have canceled the series prior to the 2013 game if ND hadn’t beaten him to it.
The combination of Michigan’s petulant attempt to destroy ND football in its infancy and their remarkable behavior since then (capped by playing that stupid Chicken Dance song following the 2013 game between the teams) turned me off of ever wanting the series to resume.
– The Last Word. With the above being said, I’m sure when the time comes, I will savor an opportunity for ND to potentially deliver another beating to Michigan. However, it’s hard to imagine any game between the teams being the kind of perfect palate-cleanser the 2014 game was.
With no further games scheduled, the atmosphere at ND was fevered for the matchup, and the Irish delivered in a huge way, destroying Michigan 37-0 (#RememberThe6). The game was Everett Golson’s finest hour as he dissected the Michigan secondary. A young receiver named Will Fuller who hadn’t done a ton to that point made an acrobatic touchdown catch. The student section — organically — came up with the absolute perfect response to Michigan’s contrived Chicken Dance nonsense from the year before in the late stages of the game.
And when Hoke foolishly kept trying to score in the final seconds to avoid complete embarrassment, ND scored on a pick-6 as time ran out, setting off one of the most joyous celebrations in recent stadium history. The fact that the score was called back on an at-best-picky and at-worst-incorrect roughing-the-quarterback call was almost beside the point. The message had been sent — “Enjoy your beating and get the heck out of our lives.”
Now it appears that 2014 rout won’t be the last word. And in the end, I suppose that’s fine. However, I can’t say I wouldn’t have loved it if the Irish had just taken their ball and gone home.
As someone whose first game at Notre Dame was the ’88 Reggie Ho classic, I have no interest in a renewed series. Objectively, Harbaugh is doing a great job putting Mich back in the discussion. Good for him. However, there is no reason for us to help him. Andy documents the lengthy list of cons well. I think those of my generation who are nostalgic for the series fail to note it would be a step backwarda for this program.
*ducks head in*
I’m okay, just okay, with a 2-game series every 8 years or so.
*runs away*
I admit, I hate the idea less now than I did when I wrote this, especially since Swarbrick managed to keep our home game in the even year and even got UM to play us later in the season in ’19.
Mark my words, all will sour on this deal long before this iteration of the supposed “rivalry” is done. Especially with Harbaugh at the helm. It exists 90% as an aide to Michigan legitimacy and 10% to massage the nostalgic longings of my generation.
We could put Harbaugh in an institution, though.
At least UM paid $2 million for the privilege of playing us again.
I could take it or leave it, honestly. I enjoy the opportunity to put them in their place, but as Andy notes, there’s very little practical upside to it for us. I don’t remotely agree with those who say that “college football is better off” with the ND-Michigan series active; I think college football is better off with us playing Oregon, or Texas, or UCLA, or Georgia, or Florida, or TCU, or… Well, you get the idea. We earned our right to barnstorm with blood, sweat and tears – why should we put ourselves back in the box Michigan pushed us out of 100 years ago?
Also, summoning up the spirit of Clearwall… By definition, the quarterback is a defenseless player after an interception no matter where he is on the field or how he’s positioned. The rule book says that the only fair hit on a defenseless player is from directly ahead with a two-yard cushion; Redfield’s hit would’ve been legal on any other player, but on Gardner it was a by-the-book flag. Well worth it, though – that image of Gardner getting obliterated was a perfect microcosm of the entire game, and the perfect note to send them out on.
What’s funny though is throughout every debate about that hit, Clearwall never pulled out the “was illegal because it was a QB” until we’d argued it for like a month. He kept arguing it as if it would be illegal against any player, and only at the very end was like “uh, well, you can’t hit the QB, by rule…”
Ugh. I hate the Michigan series so damn much. Just such a miserably smug aura surrounding that program, which Harbaugh is only exacerbating.
My thoughts on Mish….mishiuh….michiguh…that school are well known, or were at least on TOS. I’m less than happy. But the key point here, besides all the history, etc., is that THIS HELPS US NOT AT ALL. All the talking heads who whined when we canceled the series that they remembered the great ND-Michigan “rivalry” from when they were growing up (despite us not actually playing when they were kids) never gave a rat’s keister. It’s a regional game, and only gets attention as a historical oddity, not a marquee matchup. It’s about as exciting nationally as Ole Miss vs. Auburn; that is to say, in recent years one or the other has usually been decent, and there’s a chance to make national noise, but neither are doing it in the same year, and people in other regions are only going to watch because they’re not invested in another game.
The point about Temple really drove it home. I hate everything about this game, and I hate that we’re giving it to them because they’re the ones that it will benefit.
I have to disagree slightly, because I think the matchup had taken on more national importance with relatively few marquee games early in the the season, usually none in Week 2. I think that is why the talking heads wanted to keep it, for their own selfish interests — what else are they supposed to talk about in Week 2? Alabama vs. Southwest Georgia Technical High School? Of course, it also hasn’t been rescheduled for that normally dead Week 2, so it probably won’t get as much national interest when everyone else is knee deep in conference schedules (2019) or when there are other big games on opening weekend (2018) .
That said, I didn’t miss the series at all — and I completely agree that it does not help Notre Dame in the least.
Apparently I’m still in the minority in thinking we should play Michigan every year 🙂 That said, so long as Harbaugh is their coach, Michigan will be a high-profile team every year.