It wasn’t until I woke up on a gloomy, both weather and otherwise, Sunday morning in South Bend after Notre Dame’s 37-0 loss to Florida State the day before that I realized how bad things are.
Forget the three thirty-plus point losses and being shut out twice in eight games. Disregard the mind-boggling numerology of not picking up your second first down vs. FSU until your third possession of the third quarter. And never mind four red zone possessions vs. the ‘Noles that at their best yielded a blocked field goal.
“Now they’re comparing him to Brennan and Kuharich,” a friend informed me as soon as I stepped into his kitchen that morning, the “they” being columnist Jason Kelly in the South Bend Tribune and the “he” being Notre Dame head coach Tyrone Willingham.
That’s just not good.
Unless you’re a Notre Dame fan, you probably don’t know those names, and for good reason. They are two of the last three Irish coaches to start a season 2-6, Brennan doing it in 1956, Kuharich in 1960. (Hugh Devore, who coached the team to a 7-2-1 record in 1945, led ND to a 2-7 record in 1963, the year before the arrival of Ara Parseghian.)
In fairness to Brennan, that ’56 campaign was his only losing season, and he did finish with a better Notre Dame winning percentage (.640) than both Gerry Faust (.535) and Bob Davie (.583), the two coaches Kelly, and most younger Irish fans, cite as the modern day harbingers of football doom.
Nevertheless, the mere mention of a link to those Kuharich years, four seasons where a “good” season was 5-5, should make anyone associated with this team a bit squeamish.
For the third time this year, the Irish did not look like they belonged on the same field with their opponent. The most glaring line on the stat sheet is the 0-for on the red zone chances. It started with that blocked field goal after taking over at the FSU ten trailing 10-0 in the first quarter and ended with Leroy Smith going 90 yards the other way on an interception return for a touchdown to notch the final points in the fourth.
But attitude can’t be summed up on a stat line or even a post-game quote. When Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix flung a desperation pass towards receiver P.K. Sam, corner Dwight Ellick looked like a man just watching and waiting for the inevitable.
Ellick would stand behind him while Sam camped under the ball like a centerfielder. Elick would make the tackle after the forty-eight yard gain. The ‘Noles, their fans, and their band would celebrate. Ellick and the Irish would again be left to wonder where last year’s “Return to Glory” has gone.
I don’t say that to pick on Ellick; rather, as Kelly also points out, it’s just a microcosm of what seems to have happened to Tyrone Willingham and his team. No one gets the feeling that it’s just a matter of tweaking this or fixing that, and I won’t buy the argument that these guys aren’t talented enough to be a major player in college football each year.
But instead of making plays and causing others to react to them, as they did most of last year, the opposite seems to be true now. Where they were a step faster, they’re a step slower. Where they were seizing momentum, they’re now being rolled over like a Mac truck rolls over DOT workers or the Oklahoma Sooners beat up on North Texas, whichever you find scarier right now.
Their schedule certainly hasn’t done them any favors. Of the eight teams Notre Dame has played, all but one is currently ranked in the AP Top 25. I break that schedule down into four types of teams: the elite, the very good, the good, and the above average.
The Irish are 0-2 against the two elite squads they’ve played, USC and Florida State, both of whom beat them by more than thirty in South Bend and are ranked second and third in the country, respectively.
Notre Dame is 1-1 against the “very good” teams they’ve played, beating the currently twelfth ranked Washington State Cougars at home and getting pasted by now number eight Michigan on the road.
The “goods” would be Michigan State, Purdue, and Pittsburgh, currently ranked fourteenth, sixteenth, and twenty-fifth. Notre Dame has gone 1-2 against those schools, who are a combined 20-6 on the season.
Boston College is the lone member of the “above average” club, and they dropped ND 27-25 in Chestnut Hill. All told, the teams the Irish have encountered thus far, all of who are from BCS conferences, are 56-16, a winning percentage of .778.
Not quite Rockne or Leahy numbers, but pretty good, nonetheless.
And if Notre Dame fans, in the wake of the sudden greener pastures of last year, were losing patience with a team that was 6-2, 5-3, or even 4-4 this year against that schedule, that wouldn’t be justified. The 2002 Irish did outperform expectations, the schedule seems to have made a mad dash out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, and some of last year’s leaders, like Shane Walton, and the attitude they brought are gone. So maybe the hopes of the Notre Dame nation were a little unrealistic, as they often are.
But it is certainly realistic to expect that the Irish would at least be able to compete in every game, not have the worst record of the four 1-A independents, and not get embarrassed on their own field two times in a half a month.
The way this Notre Dame season has spun out of control, not even the schedule emerging from one of Dante’s circles of hell and offering a final four of opponents that are a combined 17-16 seems encouraging.
At least the Irish aren’t alone in getting punked 37-0 at home by Florida State. FSU beat North Carolina by the same score to open the season in Chapel Hill.
Of course, being compared to the Heels in football isn’t something you want to make a habit of in South Bend.
Incidentally, the Irish lead that all-time series 15-1.
The only loss? Some guy named Kuharich was the coach, but no one really remembers much else.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Ted Fox delivered play-by-play of Irish football and men's basketball for three years as a student. He wrote a weekly sports column for the Notre Dame student newspaper for over three years and has been a contributing writer to "The Wolverine", the official publication of University of Michigan athletics. Ted recently finished working in production at ESPN and is currently pursuing an on-air and writing career. 
