Tradition can be a tricky thing. It can come in many different varieties and for football at the University of Notre Dame it acts as both the driver of a successful American institution but also as a tremendous burden for a program coming off its 28th year in a row without a National Championship.
This tug-of-war relationship in South Bend has always been fascinating.
On the one hand the tradition has been a millstone at worst and at best a distraction for the modern student, athlete, fan, and administrator. There’s a reason why I’ve joked in the past if Notre Dame were to put script in its end zones (but what about our site name then!??) they should simply write “Tradition.” Everywhere you go the ghosts of yesteryear haunt campus.
On the other hand, I’m not sure there’s a greater force helping Notre Dame remain in the spotlight than tradition. The Irish have been punching far above their weight in recruiting when juxtaposed with their wins on the field and that’s with a revolving door of poor-to-mediocre recruiters taking up a decent chunk of office space through the years. Over a quarter century after its last title there are still dozens of families raising top football prospects that grow up loving Notre Dame.
Other programs would only be so lucky. Say what you will, but even in 2017 Notre Dame’s most redeeming quality may be that so many people still care.
The administration at Notre Dame has been accused many times through the years of taking advantage of this deep amount of devotion. If they’re not outright ambivalent or antagonistic about football success they’re at least primarily concerned with milking the cash cow, so they say.
However, I wonder how much trust the administration puts in the tradition of Notre Dame not when it pertains to the fans and making money but when it pertains to themselves.
I was thinking back to the mid-1990’s in a time when so many crucial decisions were made which have shaped the current landscape at Notre Dame. Obviously, the most impactful was the “retirement” of Lou Holtz and within the dozens of stories that have been told over the years it’s often said that the leadership at Notre Dame “didn’t care” about football success and even grew combative towards the good, bad, and ugly of winning so many games. There’s also the old adage that no one—not even National Championship winning coaches—can become larger than the school.
This is definitely a case of apathy but is it more a variety of “I don’t care” or is it a “things will eventually come back to winning we just need to readjust without Holtz” mentality?
I’ve become convinced that in the months and years leading up to the departure of Holtz it was strongly a case of reigning in the program, yes, but also a belief that ‘Notre Dame makes the coach’ and that the school’s tradition and place in college football hierarchy was so strong that winning could be achieved without having to deal with some of the excesses of the Holtz years.
Bottom line, I don’t think the school thought it had to bust its tail to find the best coach, to create the best facilities, or to nurture the best strength program in the country.
Just think about what the mentality must have been like at that point in history. The program opened the Loftus Center in 1988, debuted the landmark NBC deal in 1991, and announced stadium renovations and seating capacity increases in 1993. Most importantly, there was evidence stretching back 30 years that the last 3 out of the 4 head coaches were wildly successful on the field. Faust was the lone exception, but wasn’t that just a blip on the radar?
We know better now with hindsight, of course.
Notre Dame effectively shut down for a decade (~1995 to ~2005) which was an enormously grave sin during a time when programs embodied in Oregon were pushing the game to previously unseen levels in off-the-field support and growth. At Notre Dame, facilities were neglected, upgrades turned down, and outfits like Res Life owned an antiquated amount of power over the program. It seems outrageous to say even today but if you were there at the end of the Holtz era you can at least understand why the school went into a shell. It was a terrible decision based on fear but it made sense to some people.
Of course, there were plenty of others who saw the downward spiral coming bit by bit. Recruiting started becoming very peak and valley (for Notre Dame’s lofty standards, at least), national population changes were beginning to shrink the Midwest talent base, the triple option offense was being left behind at both high school and the college level, while television revenues began re-shaping the greater landscape much more than the NBC deal benefited Notre Dame.
An interesting dynamic today is that tradition can be largely seen through the prism of The Quest for the Elite Head Coach. As discussed, we can imagine how the administration could’ve thought the rich tradition of the school meant the future would be peachy. They may have concluded, enormously falsely, that mere “good” (to put it kindly) coaches could come in and keep the train running. Yet, there were plenty of people screaming, “No, a massive effort needs to be made to bring in the best head coach possible.”
Not that the head coach isn’t the most important piece to the puzzle or that those clamoring for the right person in charge weren’t invested in the school’s deep reservoir of tradition but the school itself seemed much more devoted to the sappy customs as the new century began. Several years ago, the administration came out of their slumber and started to innovate once again, or rather catch up with the times. They looked around and said many areas surrounding the program have to improve.
When game week Mass was moved to Friday night
The school has received some major blowback to numerous changes, and with a healthy mix of nostalgia, cries of traditions being trampled upon have been heard for years. We’ve seen a deep relationship between the Quest for the Elite Head Coach and the defense of tradition. In fact, I’d argue this is the defining characteristic of the criticisms today.
This is a situation where, according to skeptics, no one has the right to make any changes to tradition unless you win on the football field. How many times have you read, not necessarily that some change is bad, but that Brian Kelly has no business being able to pull off such a decision?
The optimist can say the school isn’t letting itself become a prisoner of tradition anymore while the cynic can say Notre Dame is more concerned with its brand than winning.
It’s safe to say that skeptics have practically buried everything Notre Dame has done in recent history and that’s a dangerous mindset. Not that you have to love everything that changes but at some point you have to realize there’s a distinct separation between the program and the head coach. Brian Kelly won’t be the coach forever and he’s not the only coach who would favor having the best facilities and support possible. We can perhaps agree Notre Dame may never lead the nation in these categories but it can put forth a legitimate effort.
I get why the skeptics feel that way but it comes from a place of hate just like the school going into a shell in years past came from a place of fear–both put way too much importance on the fickle mistress that is tradition. Tradition has its place and can still be enormously important but so is acting like a major program even if some traditions have to fall to the wayside.
Don’t coaches think the same way, after all? I’d argue Notre Dame spent decades of its existence being the anti-caterer to coaches. “Here’s a list of 200 non-negotiable aspects of tradition you’re not allowed to touch now come coach here because you love the place and we’ll judge you harshly on your public love for this place in addition to your win-loss record.”
That approach worked pretty well in the past but is far less effective when some of Notre Dame’s traditional advantages have been weakened through the years. If you’re truly, deeply concerned about the Irish attracting the best coach possible it’s always seemed hilariously foolish to parade around this golden image of Notre Dame that can never change—take it or leave it.
And if a head coach decides to leave it guess who gets blamed?
Yes, tradition is the battleground through which we’re questioning how you build Modern Notre Dame. This was never going to be an easy process at a school that (in some sectors) takes pride in thinking the un-cool is cool and that has a fetish with not changing with the times. In fact, by the mid-1990’s Notre Dame had made a cottage industry out of being old-school only to suddenly wake up and realize such a backward looking outlook was terribly self-defeating.
It was always going to be a difficult process which is why you often see criticisms of the football program leaking over into other areas. For example, the school has apparently lost its Catholic identity and the campus has become an unrecognizable mess. Would you believe everything is wrong with Notre Dame?
Here’s a real quote, for reference:
“It was simple, basic football played by a team wearing simple, basic uniforms in a simple, basic stadium, and it was beloved by all who were privileged enough to be there.
…Perhaps the turf, the ‘tron, and the jock rock are necessary accommodations to the times. Trying to use those gimmicks as a distraction from subpar football, however, should never be acceptable.”
You can see how the tradition of the past is romanticized. For as much as today’s situation is described as selling something plastic this look back is just as puffed up and glossed over. The times were “simpler” and everyone agreed on all the issues of the day. It was a “basic” time, free from dissent and disagreement. This isn’t a school’s constituents who popularized a “Dump Devine” campaign in the middle of a National Championship season, after all.
One could argue that Notre Dame benefits from history but suffers from tradition. The school’s long history of winning has been at the forefront of college football for multiple generations but as that winning has slowed down there’s a cause to protect the school’s traditions to an even greater degree.
That’s why when traditions change there’s an immediate call-back to winning. The insular attitude doesn’t see change as a way to move forward and even help winning down the road. The insular attitude views change as an excuse—as a ploy to comb over a lack of winning.
No school suffers from this mindset more than Notre Dame. The crossroads of the game, results on the field, the past, and the culture of the school have created a unique attitude unlike any other in its passion and yearning for yesteryear.
The funny thing is that it’s so ingrained that not even winning will fundamentally change this culture, at least not for quite some time. This is the inevitable outcome from the slow-turning wheels of progress as Notre Dame marches forward into the middle of the century with historical ghosts and baggage full of tradition clinging on for dear life.
Strongly agree on the need to keep the program and traditions dynamic (is dynamic tradition an oxymoron?) even though the past achieved epic success. Sometimes the 1995 – 2005 years looked like Stuart Smalley was guiding the program. “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.” Div I college football is a cutthroat world that evolves rapidly. The Smalley approach is one of stagnation and false affirmation. It took years of (relative) humiliation for the university to figure it out.
Change is hard, people naturally resist it inside and outside of an organization. But “good enough” for yesterday’s world seldom will win tomorrow’s battle. ND still could use more of a dynamic edge; hopefully the existing admin and staff can find it without compromising the university in other ways.
Wow, love the Stuart Smalley analogy. That’s so well put.
1 comment and 1 question.
Comment: I believe that it is ND’s mission, not its tradition, that sets it apart from other major college football programs. Take a look at two of our biggest rivals, USC and Michigan. Both are excellent undergraduate institutions (although most Michigan alums will have you think that their alma mater is just short of Harvard in its excellency), but both schools draw from a much larger recruiting pool than we do, have “athlete” majors, and do not suffer nearly as many academic casualties as we do. This difference in approach is a product of our mission to produce real student athletes. Both of these programs have a rich tradition and history, just as we do. But what sets us apart is mission, not tradition and I think people confuse the two. Yes, the history and tradition at ND was an important factor in me choosing to attend Our Lady’s University, but what I care more about is that we continue to hold true to our mission, even if we must change some dusty, old traditions.
Question: my Notre Dame fandom began in 2010, so what exactly were the fears that caused the administration to push Holtz out and scale back the program?
I agree if we’re talking Tradition and less so the smaller traditions.
As for your question there were a lot of issues that added up. The AD’s office not being on swell terms with Holtz, some admissions issues that made no one happy, the (mostly) yellow journalism from Under the Tarnished Dome book that the school took way too hard, ditto for the Kim Dunbar fiasco. Institutionally, the school has had a long history of fearing the football program getting too large and then taking steps to rein it in.
Yes capital T Tradition is what I meant.
I think its ironic how some of the more passionate corners of our fanbase have such an adversarial, venomous attitude towards the administration (an administration that has clearly taken some strides to hamstring the football program in an effort to avoid separation and glorification of its student athletes from the general student body) and then bemoan when that same administration wants to spent a little money upgrading the Gug, complaining that these efforts will facilitate said separation. You gotta either hate the administration for not caring about football or for caring about it too much, you can’t cherry pick your complaints.
Yes, totally. That dynamic certainly is interesting isn’t it?
All of the things Murtaugh mentioned are part of it, but the “Lou” chant during the 1812 Overture really freaked out the administration. i wouldn’t be surprised if that was the actual definition of “becoming bigger than the University”. 😛
Which is ironic since the university has made millions basically selling the likeness and names of Rockne and Leahy – two larger than life coaches and personalities in their day.
Regardless, while the stars of the NFL are it’s marquee players, college football’s biggest draw is the coaches. You have to be willing to live in that world to be competitive.
I agree so much with this. It is why I don’t think I will ever see ND win a NC. We could, 2012 showed that, but we are playing on a completely different playing field. I am fine with this. I would rather ND go the path of the Ivies than of Bama/tOSU.
Notre Dame can’t afford to go the path of the Ivies. We just dropped $350mm on stadium improvements. Have you ever seen an Ivy League football crowd? That ain’t paying the bills.
PS – It’s hard to win a national championship in anything these days. ND Lax has been one of the more dominant programs in recent years but has come up empty. People (not unreasonably) talked about Alabama’s team this year being the best ever…yet they didn’t win. You may be right that we will never win a Natty again, even if we have top 5 recruiting for the next ten years. Win some big games, throw together some exciting seasons, that’s all I hope for.
I’m with you. And I don’t mean actually join the Ivies (just value academics as #1), although looking at how easy seats would be to get, kinda makes me like the idea.
Harvard stadium is a pretty fun time. I work with the former goalie of the Boston Cannon’s (MLL) and used to go to a few games a year there. Probably larger crowds than that picture of Harvard Football (or is that Bama in the Shula years?).
I went to “The Game” there once but never made it out of the tailgate. I assert that the swerve I displayed on the way to the porta-potty outclassed anything happening on the field.
The way that they sold the $450 million price tag was not that it would pay for itself through football revenue, but that the project made better use of prime real estate. As the VP said, the student union will have 180,000 visits a week through the entire school year, while the stadium as it is now has seven functions a year. So, the stadium upgrades are (or at least, were sold as being) ancillary to the main focus of the project.
Furthermore, I’m convinced Swarbrick was entirely serious when he said that ND will go the way of the Ivies before they will allow ND student-athletes to unionize and demand salaries. We fans tend to forget that Notre Dame’s athletic revenues are a small fraction of their $10 billion endowment. Taking the athletic program in a semi-pro direction to remain competitive in the NCAA is simply penny wise and pound foolish: if 1% of the donors pulled their endowments because they didn’t like it, they would lose as much money as the football program brings in.
From a purely business standpoint, cutting off the revenue supply by getting rid of athletic scholarships has less risk to the bottom line than having even a small percentage of donors get the impression that student-athletes are university employees who happen to be getting an education on the side, and that the university has changed its core values to the extent that it embraces this.
For these reasons, I disagree with your opening statement.
Why in the world would you assume that donors would be *less* happy about the football team going semi-pro (and presumably remaining competitive) than not and going D2-ish? That seems, uh, unlikely.
“Assume” is not the word I would use. “Presume” is, and here’s my reasoning.
I did a little more checking, and I find that ND’s operating budget is about $1.5b. 59% of that money comes from tuition, fees and auxiliary enterprises. One of those auxiliary enterprises is football, accounting for $81m–or about 5%–of that $1.5b. The rest comes from the endowment pool of about $10b, which is funded by donors, foundations and corporations. Last year, these funds amounted to $390m, $246m of which was direct contributions from alumni.
I think one may reasonably presume that most of that $390m was given for reasons other than football, since that’s about 5 times the cost of running the entire program. Meaning that most of them aren’t going to pull donations if the team doesn’t remain competitive. However, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to surmise that an important reason for the gifts is the value that the donors place on the quality of education at Notre Dame. Now, if you start paying students to play football, then it’s hard to say that their academic performance is a higher priority than their job performance. And what happens if they unionize and start trying to negotiate academic concessions?
In that light, it becomes a question of risk evaluation. Do you want to risk giving a lot of football fans (including plenty of donors, it is true, but again, football fandom isn’t likely to be the primary motivation for their donations) the impression that you have gutted the great Notre Dame Football Machine, or do you want to give a lot of donors the impression that you have sacrificed on the altar of almighty football Notre Dame’s core principle of providing a great Catholic education to students? Would donors start pulling donations because ND pulled athletic scholarships? Maybe a few. Would they because ND allowed players to get paid, the players unionized, and then tried to negotiate, say, fewer credit hours per semester than other students? Maybe more than a few. Which would create a bigger stink? I’d bet my $390m on the latter, if I had to choose.
So. That is why I think it’s reasonable to surmise that donors *might* be less happy about the football team going semi-pro. Feel free to provide your argument as to why that seems unlikely. 🙂
I don’t think that’s implausible; I just think it’s unlikely. The short version of my argument is that what makes Notre Dame special (as compared to the other schools in the ~15-30ish range in the USNWR) are (1) its Catholic character and (2) the campus atmosphere, which is in no small part a result of the emphasis placed on athletics, particularly football. I have a hard time believing that donors would prefer to significantly alter #2 just because they don’t like the idea of unionized college athletes or a formalized system of two-tiered ND students (as opposed to the only kind-of informal two-tier system that exists now).
Personally, if academic prowess were the only thing affecting my higher-education donations, I’d give money to my grad school and not ND, rather than the other way around. I could be projecting my feelings onto other, more rich people than myself, but I give to ND specifically because of #1 and #2 above, and having that athletic tie to the University (where I can see my school prominently on TV a number of times each fall/have a good reason to come back to campus and get together with my friends/etc.) is big part of it.
But I could be wrong!
Well, I can see your side of it too. Mine is perhaps colored by my own experience. My father started teaching at ND Law School in 1956, and was still teaching there 57 years later when he fell and partially paralyzed himself on his way into his office in 2013. (He spent his last year in rehab, taught himself how to type again, and finished his last book a week before he died.) He willed a substantial amount of money (paying into the ND retirement fund for 57 years will allow you to do that, it seems) to a fund he had helped to set up, which pays off the student loans of students who go into certain areas of law that are underrepresented because they don’t pay enough to afford to pay back the loans. So, he’s one donor I know very well.
Dad was very much a soccer fan, after watching George Best score six goals in a game back in 1970. He would regularly go watch ND play what passed for soccer back in those days in the USA. But he was not a football fan at all; I don’t think he ever went to a game. In fact, we didn’t realize that we could get season tickets until one of my brothers found that out his freshman year at Notre Dame! So, Dad wouldn’t have cared much one way or the other about how good the team was. But if he felt that Notre Dame was compromising on its academic ideals, he would be very disturbed. I still remember him refusing to stand up and clap when Reagan came to ND to speak at my brother’s commencement back in 81, because the Church didn’t support what we were doing in El Salvador and he felt that ND shouldn’t either. He saw it as an issue of integrity, and was deeply upset by it.
This sort of passion for integrity and mission is pervasive at Notre Dame (at least in the faculty), and it’s what shapes my opinion on this. But while I know the faculty there pretty well (or at least did when I was younger), I didn’t attend Notre Dame and it may well be that the average faculty member is more idealistically oriented than the average alumnus. (Insulated from the “real world” and all that.) And the average donor is an alumnus rather than a faculty member. So, maybe you have a point.
But again, Swarbrick said that they would go the Ivy League route before they would pay the players, so whether that’s a good or bad idea, it’s probably what would happen.
That’s a lovely story, and I don’t want to take anything away from your remembrance of your father here, but this is not representative of the alumni base. You’re correct that the faculty have one view; the alumni have another. Of course the faculty at the school have little to no interest in the football program; few of them, I assume, were undergraduates at Notre Dame. Those of us who go to undergraduate programs where major sports are an integral part of the undergraduate experience (be it ND, a Bama, an Oklahoma, a USC…public, private, big, small, whatever) don’t really understand that way MORE students graduate from schools without those programs. The typical “academic” is even less likely to come from those–certainly it happens (I mean, here I am working on it…) but at both of my graduate programs–one at a state school (Hawaii) and one Ivy, I can think of ONE professor I know who actively cheers for a CFB program, and she’s from Bama so there you go. Thankfully my adviser, who did undergrad at Michigan and his PhD at Stanford, is a pro baseball fan, and has never brought up football. My point is, academia is self-selective, and the type of person who cares about collegiate sports in general, and football in particular, is not they typical person who is also inclined to spend several years in the library. I think framing it as “idealistic” is somewhat misleading, as if there is something inherently more moral for someone to care less about football. That’s a false dichotomy. It’s merely that the type of person who generally goes into academia for the long haul clearly has different priorities. Most of my friends here at Princeton would think I was joking if I suggested going to see a football game. And those few of us who do care, care about the schools we attended–as nd09hls12 says, generally our undergrad, unless someone went to a small liberal arts school with no sports for undergrad then perhaps they care about their grad program institution, like my dad who attended ND for his PhD program. Hypothetically in several years I’ll get a job as a professor at some university. While I may attend games with my kids, it doesn’t matter where I go, I will not be anywhere near as much of a fan of my employer school as I will be of ND. So back to the point, if your experiences is based off the feelings of faculty, then of course you don’t perceive sports (football) as the main reason for donation. But how many donors, excluding your father, are faculty? I think by far more non-corporate, individual donations come from alumni, many of which donate because of whatever memories and feelings they have from their experience. And at ND, football is inherently a large part of that experience, at least for undergraduates. There are likely more graduate students for whom that isn’t a large part of their experience, but I… Read more »
Bob, your father sounds like he was an amazing guy.
I don’t disagree that Notre Dame could eventually end up de-emphasizing football. Things could eventually get ugly enough that they would say, “no mas”.
However, I do think that the Crossroads Project implies that they are not contemplating that at the moment. You wouldn’t sink that kind of cash into the stadium if you were thinking that way. I get that the psychology department will now be in a single building, yada yada. But, let’s face it, this project is mostly about football.
I would guess that there were internal projections made about selling the premium boxes, naming rights, etc etc that would give the whole project a positive NPV. That NPV disappears if you don’t fill the seats. Certainly, Notre Dame could afford to make that decision if it needs to. I just don’t think they’d have embarked on the project at all if they saw that as even a remote possibility.
Thanks Charlie, I certainly think he was. He was much revered by his colleagues and students.
I’m just not convinced that the Crossroads project is primarily about football. The VP’s presentation for the project is compelling (Eric has it linked somewhere here). It seems that ND couldn’t cost justify leaving the stadium in the middle of the campus because the real estate was just too valuable, unless they repurposed the property to have multiple uses. That’s why they put all the “yada yada” buildings up there. Also, Swarbrick has said that most universities would build a new stadium further away from campus and tear the old one down to make room for new buildings. This solution costs a whole lot less while greatly improving the use of the real estate in a central location.
In part, I’m also not convinced because if the NPV is tied to football revenues. I’m no accountant for sure, but I can’t see the thing turning a profit. Present net profit is about $10m a year. If they borrow $450m at 3%, payments are about $23m a year for 30 years, or $18m a year for 50 years. I don’t see the investment generating enough extra revenue to service that debt. I suspect that if we went the other way, we’d lose the TV contract, and we’d lose maybe half our ticket sales. That’s maybe $30m a year. So while of course they don’t want to drop that kind of money if they don’t have to, I can’t see them depending on revenue increases it to justify the project either.
My feeling is that this is considered just as much an investment in enhanced student facilities as it is an investment in a stadium upgrade. For example, I didn’t go to ND (back in the 70’s) because I wanted to major in music, and IUSB had a much stronger music department. They’ve improved since then, but the new music building will allow them to significantly expand the music department.
My take on this is that the project gives them the flexibility to go in a lot of different directions, depending on how the CFB landscape evolves over the next 20 years or so. Combining stadium upgrades with overall infrastructure upgrades ties them less strongly financially to the specifically most profitable direction in athletics.
This, completely. I don’t understand why anyone would think the Crossroads project WAS just about football. It’s clearly not. And if they’re serious about continuing to upgrade academically to become truly top tier, they’ve got to make improvements in academic facilities, which this does–as you point out.
I would only add one caveat: Swarbrick also said he think players should get paid for their likeness. I took the two comments in tandem to mean he is against the semi-pro idea, rather than any of the money concerns per se.
Yes, very true.
FACK HAHVAHD
A lot of the shift also had to do with the ascendancy of Fr. Ed “Monk” Malloy to the presidency, who replaced Fr. Ted in 1988. Monk was never comfortable with the football team being so prominent. I’m pretty sure he’s the first Notre Dame administrator who publicly used the term “aspirational peer” to describe Stanford (significantly, this was back when Stanford football still sucked). He wanted to make Notre Dame into a Midwest Ivy, rather than let it be the sui generis thing it had always been. Football prominence was incompatible with that.
Holtz had also lost some verve towards the end, I think, and wasn’t keeping guys in line as much as he used to. He got risks like Tony Rice and Chris Zorich through admissions in the early going and they turned out great, but later on he got risks like Mike Miller and Leon Blunt through and, well, it didn’t turn out so great. That stuff made it a lot easier for the admin to push him out. And there’s all kinds of other stuff too, with Davie angling for the job by stabbing Holtz in the back (he reportedly told people around ND that he thought Lou’s mind was slipping), Malloy’s presence, etc. that ultimately I think made Lou just want to fold his hand. I can’t say I blame either side, honestly; I think Lou’s time at ND had run its course and it was time to move on. Now, it wasn’t handled well by the admin, and their decision making going forward was, charitably, awful, but I don’t think Lou was going to get back to his ND peak again.
Also, a quick point on the Quest For The Elite Head Coach… For a long time, ND coaches were paid below market, and in the case of assistants, sometimes well below market. The admin felt they could take a discount because the prestige of the job should be worth that much to the candidates. At some point it was, of course, but we passed that point a very long time ago. Whether or not Kelly was the right hire in 2009, it was the first time the program made a hire at market value (Weis’s extension was above market, but that was one jackass’s anomaly, not an institutional shift). Kelly also managed to drag the assistant salaries up to market, maybe even market-plus now, which if nothing else will be an enormous help to the next guy.
Finally, on the “pristine” stadium environment… Rockne was a Studebaker spokesman. There were big Studebaker ads in the stadium back in the day. Plus ça change, plus la même chose.
This. Of course, I’m the same graduating year as you, so we both saw the same things at the same times.
Rockne was definitely an innovator. The problem is when people do not continue to innovate or innovate just for the sake of innovation.
That’s one of my favorites.
“Notre Dame can’t afford to fall behind. Rockne set the culture of progress. It’s part of the fabric of our history.”
“Rockne had to back then, Notre Dame doesn’t have to anymore the school is established now.”
“You’re making my point for me.”
Great work, Eric. You’re a good writer and reflective thinker and I’m stoked to be able to read all this content on 18S for free! Thanks.
👊
I loved it Eric. You are a deep thinker and I don’t think you can get stuff like this on any other site.
Thanks, Russ. Can I call you Russ? I’m calling you Russ.
I agree with a lot of points about how ND football has got to this point in the past 20+ years or so. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m a “get off my lawn”, old-school traditionalist in terms of how I want the ND football program to be run. However, I would be more than willing to make changes to the program’s “traditions” if it actually translated to W’s on the field. It doesn’t matter if we have the nicest turf, jumbotron, alternate jerseys, etc. if we end up going 4-8. We could paint our field blue like Boise State’s tomorrow and I’d be (grudgingly) ok with that if it somehow translated to having a championship-level team on the field. I think the uproar is not soley due to “traditions” changing, but that it’s changing (for various reasons) while the team is still underachieving.
I don’t think you can ever buy wins, unless you’re Ole Miss. And even then…
The frustration is understandable. I don’t think what you’re saying is illogical, either. We could freeze all traditions or go crazy and change everything. Neither route can guarantee success. It’s pretty tough to take these 10,000 foot issues and judge them off one year but I get the feeling you’re saying like it’s not paying off.
Will it every pay off? I don’t know. I do feel like if we turned our back on changing we might be in a worse place today and in more of an uphill climb for the future. Particularly with the latter issue in attracting coaching talent.
I agree, the issue is coaching. The institution is good enough to get top twenty talent with mediocre coaching and recruiting. The trick is to create an atmosphere that a great coach, a guy that can recruit, develope talent, and call a game with the best of them, feesl confident that he can do so at ND. All of these schools have advantages and disadvantages, the advantages just have to offset the disadvantages.
These top coaches want to be great coaches. They can’t be great without winning a bunch of games. They have to at least see a path to sustained wins. ND already has the academics to overcome. If a tradition doesn’t have anything to do with great football or great academics, then it should be up for debate.
I realize the academics could be, and often is, an advantage. It definitely limits the pool though.
Here I come again, with a wordy post far too late for anyone to read. And I feel like I am missing about half the context within which M Murtaugh wrote this. But something about what he tried to say and the way you all responded makes me sure something vital is being bruited about, which I need to understand.
First of all, because ND’s Big T Tradition (I like that distinction) is not defined in the above, yet is something I have been imbibing since Granddad would take me down to St Joseph’s Lake and feed the ducks and tell me about teaching chemistry with the Rock, here is my understanding of its key elements:
1, Winning — lots (70+ %) but not all, occasional NCs, and fair amount of signature memorable wins. But with troughs (Hunk Anderson/Layden, then Brennan/Kuharich, then Faust, then BD/TW/CW).
2, Continual tension, for a solid century now, about the football program and the soul of Our Lady’s University — embedded in the CSC’s historic mission, and manifested in part by the tension over academics for the student-athletes.
3, The deep bonds between the student body and the team — Brent Musberger said it well at the end of the 1988 Miami game: “There is no love affair like that between the students of Notre Dame and their football team.”
4, The proud existence of what used to be called subway alumni – fellow fans who never went to ND but are part of the heart and soul of its Tradition.
5, Tied to that, but distinct, the fact that the base for this Tradition is nation-wide, not regional.
I hope I have them all.
As for the little traditions, I have seen them change and evolve so often over the decades that I can only stand 100% behind all good faith efforts to evolve them and keep them as current manifestations of the Tradition as per the above. (I confess to a desire to meld bits and pieces of the older better parts of the little traditions into newer expressions — and keep them authentic expressions of today’s students especially. Hence my abiding interest in who controls the Jumbotron and how.)
All this leads me to the sincere question — who is using what false attachment to any or all of these traditions (big T and little t’s) to impede our pursuit of returning to Element #1 (winning) ? I take it this is Eric’s concern – but I am not sure who are the toads in the road. Spell it out for me and I’ll go help squish ’em!
I read it. 🙂
There are definitely people in the ND community who don’t think that football excellence adds anything worthwhile to the university. I once traded emails with a professor with whom I was drawing similarities between athletic scholarships and music scholarships, and his position was that the athletic scholarships lacked the “intellectual component” to make them justifiable. I guess that’s an example of your “continual tension.”
Well, thank you, I appreciate that somebody did 🙂
And yes, that’s an example, and a good one. When I said that this tension has been around for a solid century, I was not exaggerating. Some professors at ND even in the 20s would say similar things, according to my grandfather, who caught some flack for being buds with Rockne; he used to have to remind those folks (who were hires as the University expanded in the 20s) that the Rock had been a chemistry teacher. And ND’s President in that decade was highly ambivalent as is well documented. Same at the height of Leahy’s greatest teams of all time (yes, greater than the Tide). And perhaps even more since then, as you are a witness. Father Joyce once talked about a certain “muscular Christianity” that having a top-rate football program engendered. But the most intellectually snobby profs will never buy into that; and our CSC leadership (and I spent four great years in a CSC seminary) continues to be very ambivalent. Whoever mentioned Monk Malloy above is right on the money, but it has not just been him.
PS I am still trying to figure out exactly where Eric was coming from; I get the feeling that it has something to do with those horribly negative folks over at ND Nation but I can’t quite get the connection with our Tradition.
My father was a law prof at ND from 1956 to 2013. He was pretty much indifferent to football. I do remember when Ara got hired, he mentioned that ND was deciding that Father Hesburgh had decided to make the football team good again.
Your dad spoke some truth there. Father Hesburgh said explicitly in later years that he was told when taking the helm as President to get Leahy and the program under control. So reduced scholarships, two poor hires as Head Coach, the program was mired in a down cycle. I think the role of Father Joyce was critical.
Yes, I think so too. I remember the story of Hesburgh refusing to pose for the cover of Time Magazine holding a football when he first took over.
I’m reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) Bear Bryant quote: “How many thousands of fans do you get coming to cheer a chemistry lecture?”
There’s a necessary balance that has to be found when a university has a football program. Now, I like football, so I’m clearly more open to the idea of the athletic programs being the proverbial “front porch” that brings prospective students (and donations) into the university, where it can then exercise its true mission of education. The problems are several: 1. you have to keep the front porch clean–Baylor’s athletic programs right now are a disgrace and not helping the image of the University (to be fair, neither is their admin) no matter what their women’s BBall coach says; 2. You can’t spend all your time on the front porch–you may have the nicest porch on the block (Bama) but you have to live inside the house (Bama’s a decent enough state school, but no one is confusing it with Stanford); 3. There comes a point (we’re not there yet, but who knows) where to keep up with the Jones’s (Clemson’s got a waterslide in their athletic facility!) you just get ridiculous. That’s the point where ND decides it’s just not worth it. And who knows, maybe we’ll get there.
The thing is, I don’t see any reason a university has to only have a nice porch or a nice interior. ND isn’t AAU (Association of American Universities, an exclusive invitation-only club of who’s who in research institutions). But they are an R1 (highest level of research university according to the Carnegie Mellon scale), so there’s no reason they couldn’t qualify for AAU status if they wanted it. ND has historically prioritized undergraduate education over grad programs, which is probably what has held it back. But looking at the non-state schools who are AAU, Duke, USC, Stanford all stand out as places that do both academics and athletics very well. (Northwestern, Chicago, the Ivies, Rice, Tulane, Vandy, Emory, etc….maybe not). So for all the negative talk some people associate with “aspirational peer” as a phrase, if ND wants to be in the same tier as Stanford, they can–if they prioritize both athletics and academics. I think the Campus Crossroads is kind of the touchstone for all this–when the stadium houses the Anthropology department, you’re integrating the two fairly well.
The problem is with cause and effect. Many of the “no jumbotron…no field turf” crowd don’t want it because that’s not what they associate with the “ND” they remember and love when it was winning. It’s not that those things will help us win (though the field turf certainly helps our players not randomly fall down, and the jumbotron will help us recruit because we won’t look like we’re stuck in the 50’s). It’s that there’s nothing about not having them that keeps us from winning. The “Harrumph” crowd won’t clearly articulate it, but for many of them, ND success = Lou and/or Ara, and so means simple uniforms, running the fullback, and grass, dammit. Personally we could bring back the Notre Dame Box and wear helmets decorated with flowers, I don’t care as long as we win, because the great “traditions” are not about what uniforms we wear, what surface we play on, or what formations we run. Our greatest tradition, and the one we’ve gotten away from, is WINNING without cheating. Do that, and we’re fine. If the rest of the stuff at least helps us keep up in the arms race, then whatever, so be it.
Nice to read you again, KG — and since your message here correlates to the #1 component in my earlier post about what defines our Tradition, I forcibly concur! Though I do think the other points make us also unique in fundamental ways.
The problem is, the “winning” part is so damn tough. As somebody says above, it does at some point boil down to coaching (if all the other elements are present) and that is just damn tough to get right, up at that driven hyper elite, 11 year burnout level where we have been with Jess, Rock, Frank, Ara, Dan, and Lou. (But not with the other 8-9).
That’s why I am in the tiny minority who is desperately nurturing the hope the BK can find his mojo after having suffered a meltdown (as has been done by other elite coaches, though as Eric pointed out a while back, never at Notre Dame).
Agreed, though I would also point out that every coach prior to and including Lou operated in a different world, with either no scholarship restrictions, or higher limits. Many of our self-imposed changes came immediately after Lou, but even Lou was operating in a different world than Ara or Leahy, and we’re in a different era still than Lou. It is what it is, but people tend to forget that Leahy could stockpile guys on his roster so much that immediately post WWII we could play a game against Army that had 4 eventual Heisman winners in it. Bama only wishes they could stockpile talent like Leahy’s teams did (Of course, Bryant did it as well in the 60’s). The 85-scholarship limit plus the fact that there is just more and more HS talent being developed earlier and earlier mean more programs are going to be good across the board. Demographic shifts have given the Southeast, Texas, and California an advantage. Social shifts mean that less kids are growing up wanting to go to a “Catholic” university in the same way that the sons of European immigrants did back in the day. So yes, winning is much tougher–and unless you have the perfect storm like Bama, or close to it like tOSU, with all the advantages AND a top coach, you’re just not going to be in it every year. Understanding that doesn’t mean one accepts mediocrity, it means you merely recognize the magnitude of the challenge. ND doesn’t play on a level playing field–what we really need to figure out collectively is what self-imposed restrictions really matter to our character (no greyshirts, no JUCOs perhaps, I can see an argument either way, no made up UNC classes, etc.) and what doesn’t really matter (field turf, jumbotrons, uniform designs).
Outstanding article Eric, very thoughtful. “…tradition is the battleground through which we’re questioning how you build Modern Notre Dame.” sounds like the exact motivation for the fecklessness of the last 25 years.
Thanks!