Unless you’re current Clemson or Oklahoma you’re not realistically going to compete for a national championship every season. With that said, the longer you stay in contention the happier and more engaged your fan-base tends to be on a regular basis.
For conversation sake let’s say that your talk of playing for a national championship officially ends whenever you suffer your second loss of the year seeing as LSU in 2007 is the only team in this time-frame to win a title with two losses.
How long has Notre Dame lasted before suffering that second loss of the year?
The first decade of this century saw it take the Irish an average of 5.8 games played to suffer their second loss of the year, roughly mid-October.
In Brian Kelly’s decade on the job we’ve seen his teams start extremely slow and it taking just a combined five weeks his first two seasons to find the two-loss mark. On average Kelly’s teams have taken until week 7.9 to find loss number two but if you shake off those first two years where they struggled mightily to get going in September, Kelly’s Irish have averaged taking 9.2 weeks to suffer two losses over the last eight years.
It hasn’t resulted where Notre Dame fans ultimately want it to but you can’t tell they haven’t taken a significant stride.
Owning USC Now the Case