Notre Dame and its renowned symbols — the golden helmets to match the dome atop the Main Building on campus, the Touchdown Jesus mural overlooking the football stadium — are recognizable worldwide.
The program is soaked in lore, dripping with history and brimming with nostalgia. Waking up the echoes. Playing like a champion. Winning one for the Gipper. That whole “Rudy” thing.
Fighting Irish football fans are everywhere, and many have never stepped foot in South Bend, Ind. Or even the United States.
It’s all a bit much, really.
Notre Dame football occupies an exclusive place in the hierarchy of sports in this country, alongside the New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys and Duke basketball. The Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics share this space in the NBA.
For every Notre Dame fan, there is at least one Notre Dame hater — exasperated at the self-importance of the Fighting Irish, frustrated by how much attention they receive and convinced they are the beneficiaries of special treatment at every turn.
Yet something seems different during this College Football Playoff.
“First time in my life I am rooting for ND,” was the text that appeared in a group chat of my college friends during Notre Dame’s quarterfinal victory against Georgia in last week’s Sugar Bowl. Next up for Notre Dame is a date with Penn State in the Orange Bowl on Thursday in Miami Gardens, Fla.
Marcus Freeman’s Fighting Irish are winning over some people. Or maybe the coach and his team are just benefitting from the distaste many folks had for his predecessor and a growing desire among sports fans to see the SEC humbled. Who didn’t enjoy comedian and Irish fan Shane Gillis needling Nick Saban on “College GameDay”?
Regardless, for the first time in a long time, Notre Dame is, apparently, likable.
“I’ve gotten a sense of it, and it is deeply uncomfortable for me,” podcaster and former Irish football player Mike Golic Jr. said. “It’s been a weird adjustment for me to all of a sudden not have to be on the defensive all the time talking about this team.”
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There is a long history of hating Notre Dame, and its roots are nothing to joke about. Anti-Catholic sentiment was tied to anti-immigrant movements that flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. South Bend was the site of a three-day Ku Klux Klan rally in the spring of 1924, leading to a standoff between Notre Dame students and Klansmen.
When Notre Dame was rebuffed by the Big Ten in the 1920s, some suspected it was at least in part tied to prejudice against Catholics.
Being iced out by its Midwest neighbors set Notre Dame on its proudly independent path, traveling across the country to play football at a championship level. The Fighting Irish became an inspiration for Catholic immigrants from coast to coast, especially in the Northeast where so many settled.
There are no longer straps for standing riders of the New York City subway to grasp, but the spirit of Notre Dame’s strap-hanger alumni is alive and well. For years, the Yankees’ regional sports network, YES, aired replays of Notre Dame home games. In November, Notre Dame took its annual Shamrock Series to Yankee Stadium for a matchup against Army, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famed “Four Horsemen” game, and packed the House That Derek Jeter Built.
While no school celebrates its past quite like Notre Dame, a big part of why so many fans roll their eyes at the Irish is that so many of their greatest successes came in the days of black-and-white photography. Notre Dame claims eight national titles in college football’s poll era (1936-present), but half came in the 1940s.
There was a Berlin Wall but no World Wide Web the last time Notre Dame won the national championship, in 1988 under coach Lou Holtz.
In 1991, Notre Dame became the first school to strike its own television deal with a major network, and Irish home games have been broadcast on NBC ever since. At a time when only a few games were nationally televised each week, Notre Dame always had a prime slot — whether you liked it or not.
Not long after the NBC deal began, Notre Dame football began its descent into mediocrity. From 1994 to 2009, the Fighting Irish had twice as many losing seasons (four) as double-digit victory seasons.
“I think the TV deal was really annoying to people for a long time,” said Ryan Nanni, producer and host of the “Who Killed College Football” podcast and longtime co-host of the “Shutdown Fullcast” podcast. “The idea that Notre Dame had this exclusive deal with NBC, and they got to be on the network all the time, even if they were, you know, a middling football program that year.”
Of course, now, every middling team in a power conference is on national TV constantly. Iowa at Michigan State was a prime-time game on NBC in October, for goodness sake. A generation of college football fans has been easily able to ignore Notre Dame if it wanted to.
Former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn was part of one of those false-start Notre Dame resurgences, leading the 2006 team under coach Charlie Weis to a 10-3 season that ended with a 41-14 loss to LSU in the Sugar Bowl.
Quinn, from Dublin, Ohio, outside Columbus, didn’t really get the Notre Dame polarization until he joined the program.
“I always thought, you know, we’re a Catholic institution, a place that just wants to try to do good in the world,” said Quinn, now an analyst for Fox. “Yeah, clearly, there’s a lot of other people that feel like maybe Notre Dame gets some special treatment, or they don’t like the fact that we’re not part of a conference. And that became very apparent the older I got during my time there.”
After conference realignment overturned college sports the past few years, Notre Dame’s independence now seems quaint, an artifact from simpler times. Similarly, the pride Domers take in the rigorous academic schedule their players face is practically adorable as college football becomes more and more transactional.
“Mentally, it feels like we have eight or nine days (to prepare) because we don’t have to go to school,” quarterback Riley Leonard said about the lead up to the Orange Bowl. “Obviously, Notre Dame school is outrageous. In a good way. We all love going to class.”
Rick Reilly wrote for ESPN in the summer of 2012 that Notre Dame football had become irrelevant. Of course, one could argue the mere act of writing the column disproves its theory, but nevertheless, it was fair to wonder whether Notre Dame was a fading brand like Jordache jeans or MTV.
Notre Dame responded with an unbeaten regular season in 2012, turning Reilly’s column into a meme and providing the first sign the Irish had finally found a coach to fix the problems. The football problems, that is.
Brian Kelly became Notre Dame’s head coach in 2010 and spent 12 years re-establishing the program as one of the nation’s best. There were some fits and starts, but the Irish won at least 10 games seven times under Kelly, reaching the BCS Championship Game in 2012 and the College Football Playoff in 2018 and ’20.
But while Kelly significantly lifted the quality of Notre Dame football, his Irish also flopped on the biggest stages in spectacular fashion. Notre Dame lost the BCS title game and its two CFP semifinals by a combined score of 103-31.
Hell hath no fury like a football fan stuck watching a blowout in an exclusive TV window.
Additionally, fair or not, Kelly himself did little to raise the Irish’s Q rating. Even Notre Dame fans respected and appreciated Kelly more than embraced him. He was the face of the program, and more than a few times that face was caught on the sideline by TV cameras, reddened with anger and giving an animated earful to a player, coach or official.
“Yeah, it’s the Brian Kelly thing,” Nanni said. “And it’s probably not just Brian Kelly. Charlie Weis was not like a particularly likable dude. Ty Willingham, I think, was not unlikable, but he was flat, and he certainly underperformed. When (was) the last time Notre Dame had a genuinely likable coach across all parts of the spectrum?”
The 2024 Irish have addressed both of those issues, despite a baffling home loss to Northern Illinois in the second week of the season.
“This is a team that people feel like maybe has better high-end talent, whether or not that’s true,” said Golic, who was an offensive lineman on the 2012 team that lost 42-14 to Alabama in the BCS title game. “There are parts of it that I look back and say there were plenty of talented teams that just ran into generational squads that were going to go on to win a national championship and are maybe being a bit undersold in this. But I do think the quality of this team now relative to the rest of the field does make it easier for people to say, ‘Oh, no, this is building to something. We feel like they actually belong on the stage.’”
Last week’s victory against mighty Georgia, the SEC champion and winner of two of the last three CFP titles, served to prove remaining doubters wrong while also sticking it to the SEC and its legion of defenders who have become insufferably arrogant over the last month.
“I just think there’s a lot of college football fans who are rooting for anyone other than the SEC,” Quinn said.
“There is a big portion of this that is, hey, the enemy of my enemy is my friend type thing,” Golic said.
Then there is Freeman, who took over the program when Kelly bolted for LSU after the 2021 regular season. Kelly made it clear he moved on because he believed he had a better chance to win a national championship in Baton Rouge, La., than South Bend. Who could blame him? LSU has won three titles with three different coaches this century.
Freeman was elevated to head coach at 36 years old in no small part because the players so obviously loved him. He has learned on the job, and it has been bumpy, with losses to Marshall and NIU, plus a loss to Ohio State in 2023 in which the Irish had only 10 defenders on the field for the winning touchdown.
Still, Freeman exudes chill and seems to properly balance respecting all the Notre Dame … stuff … with adapting to college football’s new world order.
“If you want me to simply answer, why is Notre Dame so likable right now? It’s because of Marcus,” Quinn said.
That Freeman looks great in a tailored shirt and could be confused for a player — which my wife did earlier this year as he was being interviewed on TV — certainly doesn’t hurt.
Likability is hard to measure. More vibes than science. But when I took an informal poll on X this week, the results were, if not scientific, dramatically different from what I would have expected at almost any other point in Notre Dame’s history.
There are plenty of fans who are still firmly Never Notre Dame, but the closest you’ll get to America’s college football team right now is the one with the handsome coach and shiny helmets.
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