In this time of uncertainty, we college football fans are probably spending more time than usual looking at the past. Part of this is opportunity – there’s nothing but time on our hands, and for sports fans used to filling that time with games, there aren’t any of those. Another is that plenty of folks with the power to do so are shrewdly filling that time with older games, some of which had previously been unavailable.
NFL Game Pass, a paid service which offers access to broadcasts of every NFL game since the 2009 season began, almost immediately lifted the paywall for the service through the end of July. (Because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, one of the things I used that to do was to watch each snap of Brady Quinn’s, Jimmy Clausen’s and DeShone Kizer’s NFL careers. Suggestion: Don’t do this.) The NBA and MLB quickly followed suit with their own paid services. Sports networks have been unleashing tidal waves of old games to fill the airtime.
Notre Dame wasn’t going to be left behind in this respect. In fact, the Irish program moved fairly quickly. By the end of March, just two weeks after lockdown began for most people, the school had started up weekly Saturday YouTube watch parties where fans can congregate virtually and watch great ND wins of the past. (In the NBC era, that is; ND hasn’t yet uploaded a game from prior to 1992. It’s possible they don’t have the digital rights to them.)
They started with the 2015 bludgeoning of Texas, in what seemed to be a one-off since it included Brian Kelly video chatting during the game. However, since then they’ve added more, albeit some without the video cameos: The Game of the Century against Florida State, the Snow Bowl against Penn State, the 2006 comeback against UCLA, the Ian Book comeback game against Virginia Tech last year, and two capital-L legendary Bob Davie wins: an exciting win over LSU in 1998 and the stadium-record comeback win over USC in 1999. (If you’re keeping score, they’ve released the schedule of upcoming wins to be shown as well.)
(In addition to this, NBCSN aired a few “From the Vault” Notre Dame games last month: The Fiesta Bowl national title win over West Virginia, the 1999 comeback win over Oklahoma, and – perhaps unfortunately – the Bush Push game in 2005. Next Thursday, May 21, they’re airing the 1992 Snow Bowl against Penn State and ND’s two Orange Bowls against Colorado, including the Phantom Clip game.)
Probably more interesting to fans like me, though, is that ND has accompanied those watch parties with mass uploads of each corresponding season’s home football games (even ones we don’t want to see). Some of these games had never, to my knowledge, been available on YouTube. I’m a completist by nature, so in general I can’t stand knowing an ND game is out there that I haven’t seen. So I’m no stranger to diving through YouTube to find old games (there’s a reason I know what games hadn’t previously been posted).
Needless to say, ever since the uploads began, I’ve been rolling through many of them, mostly ones I know I didn’t see live or am too young to have seen live. (I can’t be alone in this, but if I am, please don’t tell me.)
One of my favorite goofy things about revisiting these old games is hearing what the commentators talk about in between plays. For instance, I’d had no idea that ‘Ron Powlus might come back from his broken collarbone midseason and take Kevin McDougal’s job away’ was an actual storyline at one point of the 1993 season. Also, was ‘Cris Collinsworth hates Notre Dame’ a thing Irish fans talked about in the early 1990s? Because from what I’ve heard from him in the games I’ve made it through so far, it totally could have been. (Ironic, being that his son Jac later graduated from ND.)
It’s also funny to see NBC pump up their NFL slates for the next day, mostly because seemingly half the teams they talk about have moved (“Watch the L.A. Raiders take on the Houston Oilers!”).
The best thing to see, though, is the bludgeoning ND’s offensive line put on opponents during the height of Joe Moore’s time as their position coach. Despite that, from what NBC’s broadcasts showed, it sounds like ‘Lou Holtz doesn’t throw the ball enough’ was a common complaint at the time. This A) is wonderfully ironic considering the tenor of many complaints now about Brian Kelly, and B) just goes to show you that you can never make everybody happy.
In any case, if you’re like me and are living in the past as a sports fan because living in the present isn’t really an option, Notre Dame football has you covered.
Thanks for the heads-up on these. I watched the USC comeback with Jack Nolan, Reggie Brooks, and Tim O’malley. Neat idea, and I’m appreciative they are bringing these back.