What Does it Mean to be Notre Dame Today?
Back in the last century, when tweeting was not yet an action and people were nervously awaiting Y2K, Notre Dame had cache. If you were a talented high school football star and wanted to be “somebody” you wanted a scholarship from Notre Dame.
The reason for this was two-fold. One, Notre Dame was a storied university with a rich history and National Championship pedigree both on and off the field. The other, probably more important reason, was that Notre Dame was on television. If a kid knew all their games would be shown nationally, that was a huge recruiting tool. Players hoping to make the next level wanted and needed to be seen to make a name for themselves. Before the Big 10 had its own network and the ACC televised all its games locally and pretty much any school worth a darn could be seen on cable, Notre Dame was televised, all the time, on network TV. That gave the Fighting Irish a huge advantage.
From Notre Dame’s point of view, nothing has changed. The Irish still have a rich history and all that nonsense. They are also still shown weekly on network television, NBC. The problem is everyone else has changed. For one thing, being on network TV hardly even matters. ESPN is the biggest sports channel in the country and it’s a cable channel. If network doesn’t matter then just having televised games is what’s important and Notre Dame is just one of hundreds in that regard nowadays.
So this begs the question, does the University of Notre Dame matter anymore? Baseball had the Yankees, college basketball had Duke or Kentucky and football was Notre Dame’s territory…now, not so much. Not only is Notre Dame an afterthought to most young college football fans, it isn’t even on their radar. The Irish have no conference affiliation; they have only one rival, if you can still even call USC their rival at this point.
The bottom line is there is absolutely nothing special about Notre Dame anymore. They are just one of many, a school fighting for a BCS bowl that probably won’t make one. Many things in sports are cyclical but this doesn’t seem like one of them. There is no inkling that the Irish will be able to regain any resemblance of their past recruiting prowess or prestige. Being Notre Dame just doesn’t mean anything.
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