Notre Dame Football Season Has Begun!
On Saturday, September 5, 2009, the Irish started out the new football season with a nice 35-0 shutout of Nevada. It's the first time that the two teams have ever played each other. There were those in the sports media (Mark May on ESPN) that were predicting that Nevada would win, but it didn't turn out that way. Lou Holtz has even gone so far to say that it will be Florida and Notre Dame in the national championship game. We'll have to wait and see about that. The Irish look like a very different team in the Hawaii bowl game and the Nevada game than they did all during the 2008 season.
Next up: a trip to the Big House to play Michigan this coming Saturday. UM beat Western Michigan 31-7.
posted by Harold Leyes @ Thursday, September 10, 2009
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I don't know why I always have loved Notre Dame football. Heck, I grew up as a Jewish kid in the 1950's in New Jersey in a neighborhood that was so tough, when I was in High School, the mafia had a table recruiting on career day! Never the less, I always look for the ND scores first. I read the following interview recently and found it fascinating, here it is:
For the ages
A Q&A with a historian of the Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry
By: Nick Friedell
The Notre Dame-Michigan Football Feud," which is widely considered to be the definitive book on the age-old rivalry. In anticipation of Saturday's showdown, I caught up with Kryk over the phone earlier this week, and we discussed a number of topics heading into the game. Whether you're a fan of the green and gold or the maize and blue -- if you enjoy learning about the history of sports, you will have a good time reading our conversation.
Michigan-Notre Dame is one of the greatest rivalries in sports.
I'm sure you've been asked this question a million times, but how does somebody like yourself become so interested in this particular rivalry?
John Kryk: It's funny because it's really coincidental. I became a big Michigan fan around 1976 [or] '77. I was about 12 years old, and there was a lot of buildup in 1978 to the resumption of the Michigan/Notre Dame series. They hadn't played since 1943, so it had been 35 years since they'd played, and Michigan had a pretty good offense coming back with a quarterback named Rick Leach, who is still very much an icon today for a lot of us 40-year-old Michigan fans. And Notre Dame had some quarterback by the name of Joe Montana. He had already led Notre Dame to the national title the year before, so it was a heck of a showdown going into that '78 season, and there had been some talk in the various newspapers, TV [shows], that they hadn't played in all these years, and I knew enough about American geography to know that these schools are pretty close, why haven't they played all these years?
As the series became instantly [competitive], as everybody predicted that it would -- it became hot and heavy, in 1979, '80, '81 -- there's some great games and so I just started [collecting information]. ... Just about every little story that I'd see on it, would just ask the question, rather than answer the question of why they didn't play much.
What makes the rivalry so special in your mind?
JK: I think that right now those teams are still kind of bouncing back from the down years. But if you recall in the 1990s, they called that ten-year series between Bo [Schembechler] and Woody [Hayes] the "Ten-Year War," well, Notre Dame and Michigan had a pretty good "Ten-Year War" from '85-'94. They played straight [through], and if you recall, it was the game in college football every September. In fact, I think Sporting News in 1993 rated all of the rivalries in sports, and in the Midwest [the magazine] put Michigan/Notre Dame above Michigan/Ohio State, if you can believe it. That's how hot and intense the rivalry was, because it was basically a national title elimination game for both teams all through those years. Whoever lost that game was gonna get off to a tough start, and in fact until both teams went into their recent little swoons, for Notre Dame, the Michigan game was their bellwether for the season.
Every year that they defeated Michigan, going into this decade at least, they were in the national title hunt into November. And every year that they lost to Michigan in September, they were out of it from the get go and usually started losing other games right away, so that's the big reason [the rivalry is special] from a modern standpoint. But I think what sets it apart more than anything is it's the oldest major college football rivalry of the major BCS teams, although very few of them had begun playing football when Michigan and Notre Dame started playing, way back in 1887.
they took up this new game football, which they had been playing at Michigan. Michigan was the first team anywhere outside of the east to play it, and so they said, 'Why don't you [start playing there]?' and they said, 'Why don't you come back here and teach us how to play it?'
And literally they go down [to Notre Dame] and explain the rules and taught Notre Dame football. And then from there in the 1890s, Michigan sent Notre Dame their first coach. ... And then the Notre Dame fight song was inspired by a Notre Dame student who watched Notre Dame lose at Michigan, and then on the way home, he thought, 'We need our own fight song, with Michigan as the victors.' There's all these close ties from Notre Dame's beginning that they really did pattern their athletic program and glory after Michigan's. They wanted to be as good as Michigan in baseball, they wanted to be as good as Michigan in football, and they really were the ideal that Notre Dame looked up to for 20-30 years. If you go back and read all those old Notre Dame student newspapers, you can see it plain as day, year after year, so that's how it got going at the beginning, and then Notre Dame became Notre Dame under Knute Rockne in the teens and in the 20s, and then it was almost like Michigan went, "OK, you're a little bit too good for us. We liked giving you your head start and giving you a little bit of help along the way," but then they kind of tried to blow them off the course a little bit, so that's been the rivalry throughout the years.
Can a Michigan coach be broken by a Notre Dame loss, or is the Ohio State game still king?
JK: I don't think they can [be broken] with a Notre Dame loss, because every Big 10 school, including Michigan, can bounce back from a huge non-conference loss, no matter how devastating, and still win the Big 10. In fact, Bo Schembechler made a career out of it in his last decade as coach all through the 80s. I think there were three or four times, maybe five times, where he lost to Notre Dame and when on to win the Big 10 and go to the Rose Bowl ... 1988 is a great example of that, Michigan lost in last-second losses to both Notre Dame, which won the national title, and Miami, which finished No. 2 to Notre Dame. Well, Michigan ended up finishing No. 4 that year and won every other game. So they started off the season 0-2, but they ran the table in the Big Ten, they might have tied Iowa, but they were undefeated in the Big 10, and then they defeated a very good USC team with Rodney Peete and all those guys and Junior Seau in the Rose Bowl.
When you're Michigan, you can bounce back from the Notre Dame loss a lot better than Notre Dame can, because Notre Dame's always looking for national championships, I think, because they don't have a conference championship to fall back on.
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