It sounded like everything a Notre Dame regular season finale should be. Just imagine your favorite baritone belting out: “Here come the Irish, riding an unprecedented winning streak into an important road clash with national title hopes hanging in the balance! Coming up...next.”
But if there’s anything the men of Troy taught us, it’s that you shouldn’t trust gigantic wooden horses that just show up at your front door because they’re not always what they’re cracked up to be.
Of course, drawing a parallel between Greek mythology and college football hype is a stretch; but if we can have a Silicon Valley Classic Bowl (remember the good old days, when a PC was just a pipe dream?), then we can have a Trojan Horse for illustrative purposes.
So what about that Irish winning streak? A modest three games, their longest run of this season. The important road clash? 5-6 Notre Dame at 5-6 Syracuse, dubbed the “.500 Bowl” on a sign held by one Syracuse student. So where were the national championship implications? Well, the BCS, bless its computer geek heart, does factor in strength of schedule. USC, entering play on Saturday as the number two team in the BCS rankings, had, of course, embarrassed the Irish earlier this year, 45-14.
LSU, meanwhile, sat right behind USC in third place in the standings, looking to make up its 1.93-point deficit to the Trojans any way it could. One way would be strength of schedule, where USC’s slate ranked 37th in the country versus the Tigers’ at 54.
I mean, this is all so ridiculously intuitive, I don’t know why we should even try to figure it out.
Anyway, a Notre Dame loss would hurt USC’s strength of schedule and take one step toward knocking the Trojans out of the National Championship game whether they won or lost on Saturday. Thus, the modern-day Trojans, wiser than their predecessors, hoped the Irish wouldn’t lay an egg inside that gift horse of a 31 point win from earlier in the season.
But lay an egg they did, to the tune of a 38-12 whoopin’ at the hands of a team who couldn’t handle the State University of New Jersey (aka, Rutgers) the week before. Granted, Syracuse does play better at home and they gave Miami a run in South Florida, but that type of rationale should probably be reserved for losses of seven or less.
The Irish, on the other hand, got a little too familiar with the business end of the blowout this season, losing four of their seven games by twenty-six points or more.
Things had looked to be heading in the right direction. A win Saturday would not only have allowed Notre Dame to finish the season at .500, but would have also given them a four game-winning streak to build on heading into the offseason. After a 2-6 start, that would be a strong testament to the team, the coaches, and the program as a whole.
With a 57-7 dismantling of Stanford last weekend, such a testament seemed about to be written. The Notre Dame offense, young but gaining experience, had found its trusty Louisville Slugger, slamming opposing defenses with Julius Jones like a little kid hitting a pinata. While Jones assaulted the Notre Dame record books, the Irish found their scoring totals going up each week, from 27 to 33 to 57.
But then came Saturday, another long day at the office for Tyrone Willingham. One running back did shred a defense, but he wore orange. Walter Reyes carried the ball nineteen times for 189 yards and scored all five Syracuse touchdowns. To say Jones’ college career, which he fought so hard to get back, ended unspectacularly would be an understatement: twenty carries for 54 yards, no touchdowns, and a fumble in the Syracuse red zone.
This loss, then, became a double disappointment for a team that came in seeking not only to win, but notch one of its own next to the best single season rushing total in Notre Dame history. Instead, last week’s momentum was halted by a slow limp, both figuratively and literally as the Irish injury totals mounted, into a long offseason.
While the Irish program regroups, some will call for Willingham’s head after just two seasons, which is ridiculous. With that as background noise, Coach Willingham must get his guys to focus on the positives of this season and build from there; although I don’t think he’ll be finding too many bricks for that foundation from Saturday’s trip to the Carrier Dome.
Irish fans, however, are a little luckier. In the wake of this loss, I received an email from an old roommate, venting his frustrations about another sub-par season. He concluded his rant with just one simple wish: “I want the miracle scenario in which USC wins and still gets [left] out of the national championship game,” with “left” being substituted for more appropriate expletive laden terminology reserved for the most despised of rivals.
Well, USC did beat Oregon State 52-28 on Saturday. With Oklahoma’s shocking 35-7 loss to Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship game, the Trojans rose to number one in both the AP and Coaches’ polls on Sunday. But, as we discussed earlier, the Notre Dame loss, along with that by another USC opponent, Hawaii, allowed LSU to pass the Trojans in the strength of schedule rankings. Furthermore, the computers and their foolproof formulas dropped victorious USC in four of the seven computer polls. LSU, which beat Georgia 34-13 in the SEC Championship, rose in five of the seven.
Translation? The Trojans are the consensus number one team of every voter with a pulse and still won’t be playing in the BCS Championship game, which will instead pit Oklahoma, still the BCS numero uno, versus LSU, the new numero two-o. USC will be forced to beat the living daylights out of Michigan in the Rose Bowl and try to claim the AP crown.
So what does all this prove? Three things, I think.
One, the BCS is a travesty.
Two, just when Trojans think they’re about to win, something manmade that hides the truth will screw ‘em.
And three, even in a 5-7 season, some Irish dreams still come true.
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. 
