Football? What about the lie that ND is a Catholic school?
Posted on 08/16/2012 5:23:43 AM PDT by C19fan
I once loved Notre Dame football.
My dad went to Notre Dame and flunked out and I still loved Notre Dame football. I loved Lindsey Nelson telling me "neither team advanced the ball so we move to further action in the fourth quarter" while my mom was yelling, "Get ready for mass!"
But I grew up.
I don't love Notre Dame football anymore. Notre Dame football has been living a lie, as Lou Holtz likes to say. Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, nothing happened. The echoes are in REM sleep. It has failed to advance the ball.
(Excerpt) Read more at espn.go.com ...
I grew up with that too. Every Sunday morning of the football season.
I went to Notre Dame, and I can attest to the fact that they’re full of themselves. Their donations plummeted when they invited Obama to speak at their commencement and awarded him an honorary degree, but they have yet to issue an apology. They’re not as liberal as many other schools, but they’re still mostly liberals.
That being said, Notre Dame has less than 10,000 undergrad students. They don’t have cushy majors for athletes to hide in, so the guys you see on TV are pulling down a legitimate course load in a legitimate major. The school provides tutoring assistance for the players if they need it to keep up with the classes. I was one of those tutors and can say that most of the players when I was there were taking the academics seriously. Not all of them, but most.
That used to be a good excuse for why the football team isn’t doing well, but the success of Stanford and Navy against Notre Dame put the lie to that excuse. If you lose to Navy, you can’t blame your academic requirements. If you lose to Navy, it’s execution and discipline that beat you.
I’m not sure this is even mostly Notre Dame’s fault. They don’t rank themselves, or force contracts on NBC, etc. The sports media over-covers them, overrates them, etc. This is a media problem.
Notre Dame isn’t a first rate program anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. I think most ND fans know that. Even Mike Golic, a ND alum with a couple of kids going through ND, said as much. But, it still draws a crowd of obsessed, if delusional, fans. Probably still worth the advertising dollars ... they just shouldn’t be ranked or covered until they earn it.
SnakeDoc
“That being said, Notre Dame has less than 10,000 undergrad students. They don’t have cushy majors for athletes to hide in, so the guys you see on TV are pulling down a legitimate course load in a legitimate major.”
Good! Just like the Ivies and how this whole student-athlete business should function.
If one wants to try their luck as a professional athlete, then form a set of feeder leagues like MLB or European soccer and give it a try. Just stop taking up seats from serious students and real student-athletes.
I agree with Golic. Notre Dame isn't forcing NBC's hand--no other school would turn down the offers that ND gets.
To be blunt Navy has been playing some games with their admission standards themselves; it's not as squeaky-clean as you might imagine, and a number of their players have been involved in some serious misbehavior as well.
It's by Rick Reilly, the editor of SI who saw fit in one issue a few years ago to share his views about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Naturally, he was against both. Reilly is the poster boy for shoddy sports "journalism."
I talked with a recent ND alum. They are full of themselves. It annoyed me. Once in a while I’d ask when they last won something big. Made me chuckle that He had to reply the 80’s.
My Dad used to say that if Notre Dame put 11 paraplegic nuns on the field as their team, some asshat would still rank them in the Top 10.
“That being said, Notre Dame has less than 10,000 undergrad students. They don’t have cushy majors for athletes to hide in, so the guys you see on TV are pulling down a legitimate course load in a legitimate major.”
Good! Just like the Ivies and how this whole student-athlete business should function.
If one wants to try their luck as a professional athlete, then form a set of feeder leagues like MLB or European soccer and give it a try. Just stop taking up seats from serious students and real student-athletes.
It’s ironic because I just read a post on another blog from someone quoting Mark Twain: “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon.”
This man never loved Notre Dame. Never. A shameless excuse for a piece of writing. Ave Maria. Go Irish!
I stopped reading Rick Reilly’s crap years ago.
His purpose is not to enlighten or entertain, it is to show how much smarter he is than everyone else.
He and Costas are cut from the same putrid bolt of cloth.
“Google”— “USNA lowers requirements for minorities” and see why Navy’s team has improved
Sometimes I love Reilly’s columns, sometimes I dislike them. I happen to think he is mostly right about ND.
He wrote a great piece on Tim Tebow earlier this year, “exposing” him as being even BETTER than his public image.
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/7455943/believing-tim-tebow
agreed. Reilly is such an idiot, even when he may be correct, he’s unreadable.
I grew up living and loving Notre Dame Football and Basketball. I always told my parents when I was ready for college that is where I wanted to go.
My parents would just look at me and say, “you realize you are Jewish?”
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