Notre Dame has been playing football for 135 years and along the way some momentous decisions were made to shape the history of this storied program now entering a daring new phase of college sports. This off-season, we look back at the 10 best decisions made for the Fighting Irish in the decades past.

#9
Stealing the Play Like A Champion Today Sign

A couple summers ago I wrote the controversial yet so brave article wondering why the Notre Dame football locker room stairwell hasn’t been refreshed and updated. While that raised some eyebrows it’s nothing compared to the belief that Notre Dame might’ve/probably/maybe likely stole the Play Like A Champion Today sign.

Back in 2021, ESPN writer Dave Wilson tackled the subject with a thoroughly entertaining article. The cliff notes version:

  • Lou Holtz asked maintenance shop worker Laurie Wenger to paint the sign ahead of the 1986 season after seeing it in a book from the library from (in his Holtz’ memory) a 1930’s era picture somewhere in the Notre Dame football facility.
  • No one at Notre Dame has been able to track down the book or a surviving picture of the sign from this era.
  • Bud Wilkinson hung the PLACT sign in either 1947 or 1948 at Oklahoma.
  • The Wenger family applied for a trademark of PLACT in 1993 that went unchallenged by Notre Dame. Oklahoma claims they were unaware otherwise they would’ve challenged it legally.
  • Athletic apparel company Champion finally challenged the copyright in 1995. The Wenger’s dropped their claim in 1997 but continued selling PLACT merchandise with the blessing of Notre Dame.
  • The Wenger’s applied for a new trademark in 2006 that was granted in 2008.
  • A group Play Like A Champion Today LLC, led by Lou Holtz, took over the trademark in 2020 after the Wenger family transferred ownership. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Did Holtz just have a fever dream about the sign? An interesting theory–brought up in Wilson’s article–is that the sign originally came from Minnesota. That’s where Bud Wilkinson played in the 1930’s and it’s possible Holtz then saw the sign in a book while coaching the Gophers immediately prior to coming to Notre Dame.

Either way, the point remains that Play Like A Champion Today (much to Oklahoma’s chagrin) remains synonymous with Notre Dame all over the world.

As former Irish quarterback Rick Mirer (also part of the group who recently bought the rights) mentioned:

“As a student, I’m touching the sign, and I didn’t know it hadn’t been there 50 years. That locker room was sacred, that stairwell was sacred, that tunnel was sacred, and the sign’s a very big part of that.”

Only at Notre Dame could a sign hang in a stairwell for a few years and garner international fame in the sporting world. But it’s incredibly true, for thousands and thousands of people in the world when they think of Notre Dame it’s the PLACT sign that comes to mind first.