ATLANTA (AP) — Between Touchdown Jesus, “Win One for the Gipper," Rudy, and, yes, even the forward pass, there are those who believe football wouldn’t quite be football without Notre Dame.
With the Fighting Irish waking up the echoes and playing for a title again after a generation-long retreat from the limelight, now might be the perfect time to admit it — maybe they were right.
Ever since 1913, when an end named Knute Rockne helped a small Catholic school based in South Bend, Indiana, pull off a stunner by beating Army, Notre Dame has stood as one of the main shapers of college football.
“They were really the first ‘America’s Team,’” says Jack Nolan, the longtime radio personality for the Fighting Irish. “They were the first team that played on both coasts. I’ve told folks, and even told a couple of recruits, that Notre Dame is Broadway.”
Rockne started as a legend, then grew from there
Rockne didn’t invent the forward pass in that win against Army, but by catching throws in stride — up to then, receivers ran to a spot, stood there and waited — he introduced the pass as a dynamic, game-changing play that now needs no explanation.
Rockne went on to coach at Notre Dame, which featured a backfield famously nicknamed the Four Horsemen. Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley and Elmer Layden were immortalized by Grantland Rice in what is widely recognized as the best lead sentence in the history of sports writing: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.”
And it was Rockne who, after the tragic death of running back George Gipp, (maybe) uttered the words “Win one for the Gipper” to motivate his team. That line became more famous when an actor-turned-politician named Ronald Reagan recited it the 1940 movie, “Knute Rockne, All American,” then used it as a campaign slogan that helped propel him to the presidency in 1980.
When Rockne himself died tragically in a plane crash in 1931, it cemented a legend that already had taken on mythical proportions.
Notre Dame mythology went well beyond sports
Politics. Sports. Religion. The history of Notre Dame football covers all that. Especially religion.
Legend has it that the Big Ten’s rejection of Notre Dame in 1926 — resulting in an outsider status the Irish later embraced — was steeped in anti-Catholic sentiment held by Michigan’s athletic director, Fielding Yost.
Time marched on.
By 1964, with football firmly established as another sort of religion on campus, the school president, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, wanted to make a grand statement about Notre Dame’s singular standing in American education. He instructed architects to think big with the construction of a new campus library.
That’s how the “Word of Life” mural came into being. It’s a 134-foot-tall painting of Jesus with his arms upraised to bless a group of teachers and doctors below him.
That you could see the painting of Jesus from anywhere in the south end of the nearby football stadium is how the mural became known as “Touchdown Jesus” — as iconic a college football landmark as there is.
“Sometimes in practice, I’ll kind of look up and see that,” receiver Jordan Faison said. “And it reminds me of how far I’ve come, and how far some of my teammates have come on this journey, and that the place where we’re doing this is Notre Dame.”
Independent streak helped define Notre Dame's unusual role in football
Ever since the Big Ten turned down Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish have mostly gone it alone. Their status as an independent has always been unusual and, now, makes them virtually one of a kind in a sport dominated by megaconferences with 16 and 18 teams.
Exhibit A is media. Of all Notre Dame's media deals over the decades, the most famous is the one it cut with NBC that started in 1991 and still exists today. It places financial heft behind a program that doesn't benefit from multimillion-dollar media rights payouts from any conference.
The independent status also allows Notre Dame flexibility with its own schedule, giving it the ability to play games coast to coast — unheard of in the 1920s and ‘30s, and not as common until the last decade or so ushered in the era of conferences that stretch across three time zones.
In a nod to the realities of the times, Notre Dame does, however, play basketball and other sports in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and has a deal to play four football games a year against opponents from the ACC.
Notre Dame's independence also gave it a decades-long head start on the now-common art of recruiting across the country instead of just regionally.
“I think there’s long been a feeling of not wanting to just be a Midwest institution,” said John Heisler, a longtime sports information director at the school who has written 10 books on the Fighting Irish.
Lou Holtz: The perfect man for a program you either love ... or hate
Any list of the 10 most important figures in Notre Dame football history would have to include Lou Holtz.
The irrepressible coach is now 88 and still needling the opposition. His digs at the Buckeyes before last year’s game — questioning their physicality and throwing shade on coach Ryan Day — are taking on new meaning now that the teams are meeting for the title.
Just last week, Holtz was back on social media predicting a Notre Dame win on Monday night.
“Remember, we’re Notre Dame and they ain’t,” said Holtz, who plans on being in Atlanta for the title game.
Holtz, who spent a career putting chips on his players' shoulders and making every opponent sound like a world beater, and whose bromides — “When all is said and done, more is said than done” — were so darn true they bordered on corny, is the living embodiment of the reason there isn’t much neutral ground about Notre Dame.
You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em.
Facing irrelevancy: Notre Dame didn't win a ‘big’ bowl game for 30 years
Maybe worse than loving or hating the Fighting Irish would be if people just didn’t care.
That is the precarious place Notre Dame had been flirting with since Holtz led the Irish to their last national title in 1988, then left after the 1996 season.
Some say the days of “Catholics vs. Convicts,” the 1988 pseudo culture war between Miami and Notre Dame that is the subject of its own book and documentary, simply couldn’t happen anymore in this more professional-looking era.
And maybe neither could the ripped-from-the-headlines underdog tale that led to the 1993 movie “Rudy,” about the undersized Notre Dame walk-on who finally gets his chance to play, then gets carried off the field on his teammates' shoulders.
Regardless, since Holtz left and college football turned into a battle of once-regional programs taking their acts national, Notre Dame has bordered on becoming “just another program.”
With coach Marcus Freeman in charge, this year marked the first time since 1994 the Fighting Irish got a “W” in a major bowl game. This season’s run, which included a victory over Indiana in college football’s first-ever postseason game on campus, is sparking a frenzy of nostalgia and reigniting all those ancient feelings about the Irish.
“The further Notre Dame pushes into the playoffs, the more crowded our parking lot gets,” said Wren Martin, marketing manager for Notre Dame’s on-campus bookstore.
The cycle of Notre Dame always keeps spinning
This season is reminding us once again that, even as winning comes and goes, Notre Dame finds new spins on a story old as time.
The year was 1964, and the Fighting Irish, after struggling for about a decade in the wake of coach Frank Leahy’s departure, were coming back to life under the direction of an eager outsider — a Protestant of Armenian descent named Ara Parseghian — who had toppled Notre Dame four straight years while he was coaching Northwestern.
Some believe the “Era of Ara” truly kicked off the day the Irish beat Stanford 28-6 to improve to 5-0.
The great sports scribe Dan Jenkins was in town that week writing for Sports Illustrated. He kicked off his tale by noting that the school had recently regilded its iconic golden dome to keep it glowing.
Then, Jenkins wrote: “The dome on the main building seemed to be giving off beams of inspiration as it did in the days of Frank Leahy and Knute Rockne. Notre Dame is winning again.”
It was true back then. It's true again today.
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AP freelance writer Curt Rallo in South Bend, Indiana, contributed to this report.
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Eddie Pells, The Associated Press
