Tag: Dan Devine

Notre Dame swaps jerseys at halftime of 1985 blowout win over USC

Remember this game?

One of the most famous games in the Notre Dame-USC rivalry came in 1977. The Irish warmed up on the field in their regular blues, but they returned for the game wearing green, and they won that game.

Fast forward to the teams’ 1985 meeting. [autotag]Gerry Faust[/autotag] decided to do what predecessor [autotag]Dan Devine[/autotag] did, but he didn’t do it in the same way. Rather, the Irish played the first half in their blues before sporting green for the second half of a 37-3 blowout win. Faust explained his decision-making afterwards:

The victory came in the middle of a four-game winning streak, but all it ultimately did was make the Irish’s 5-6 season look better. Faust resigned at the end of the year and was replaced by [autotag]Lou Holtz[/autotag], who would lead the Irish to their most recent national championship in 1988. It was a reminder that even though a jersey swap might seem cool, people won’t care as much if you’re a so-so team.

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ChatGPT ranks top 10 quarterbacks in Notre Dame history

Do you agree with these rankings?

No position in sports is more important than the quarterback. Notre Dame is lucky that it will have a good one this season in [autotag]Sam Hartman[/autotag]. Though his services only will be for one year, the potential for him to have a history-making season is high. With that will come high expectations.

But how will Hartman measure up to the great Notre Dame quarterbacks of the past? For that, let’s turn to AI writing tool ChatGPT and see what it believes is a fair list for the top 10 men under center to play for the Irish.

Keep in mind that ChatGPT has this disclaimer:

“Ranking the top 10 quarterbacks in Notre Dame history is subjective and open to interpretation, as different eras and playing styles contribute to individual greatness. However, based on their impact on the program, statistical achievements, and team success, the following list represents 10 notable quarterbacks in Notre Dame’s storied history.”

And this one:

“Please note that this list is not exhaustive, and there are many other talented quarterbacks who have contributed to the Notre Dame football legacy. The rankings can vary depending on personal opinions and criteria used to evaluate their performances.”

On that, here is the list with some entries edited for clarity and accuracy:

Notre Dame Football: All-Time Losingest Coaches

The program has lost more than 300 times in its history. So which coaches are responsible for most of those?

Notre Dame has a long football history that fans nationwide flock to.  “Win one for the Gipper”, the Four Horsemen, and the “Play Like a Champion Today” sign are all parts of Fighting Irish lore.  In that long football history that has been played at the university since an 8-0 loss to Michigan in November of 1887, it hasn’t always been national championships and 10-win seasons.

In fact, Notre Dame has lost a total of 330 times in the more than 13 decades they’ve been playing football.  We know which coaches won the most of those games as Brian Kelly set that record before leaving in 2021.  But who has lost the most as Notre Dame’s head coach?

Marcus Freeman isn’t there – yet – but with five in 13 career games he’s already in the top 16.

We went ahead and listed the the top 13 in program history as that’s how many have lost double-digit games at Notre Dame.  Here they are, the all-time losingest coaches at Notre Dame.

Athlon Sports ranks greatest college football champs since 1968

Who is the greatest college football team you’ve ever seen?

Who is the greatest college football team since 1968?

Every college football fan has their own answer to that but for me it’s the 1995 Nebraska Cornhuskers.  They went 12-0 overall, weren’t challenged all season long as they won every game by at least 14 points, beat four top-10 teams by an average of 31.5 points per game.  Their style of play doesn’t fit what works in college football today but they were unstoppable in every sense of the word.

Athlon Sports recently ranked every college football team to win a championship since 1968 and as our colleagues at Cornhuskers Wire pointed out, they got the top overall team wrong.

I’ll make you click the link above to see the entire list but here are where Notre Dame’s champions since 1968 ranked (’73, ’77, ’88).

5 things about ‘Rudy’ that irk me

There anything that bothers you about the movie?

I spend too much of my life scrolling Twitter.  That’s something I’ve known for a long time but still continue to do it.  However, late last night I saw a tweet that it was the 28th anniversary of the movie “Rudy” being released in theatres.

I was in second grade at the time and my parents took me to see it that fall right as Notre Dame was in the middle of a national championship race that was only making my young Irish fandom grow by the week.  The movie only made me like Notre Dame football more and to this day if its on TV you can bet I’m not going to be changing the channel until it’s over.

That said, I’ve still got a few issues with it.

Joe Montana went through and detailed flaws with the movie long ago but I’ve got a few of my own I need to get off my chest and the 28th anniversary (+1 day) of it’s theatrical release is just the time to do it.

77 days until Notre Dame football returns (hopefully)

Notre Dame football returns to action in 11 weeks. Don’t miss the countdown today as we remember a national championship team!

There wasn’t a lot of great news in the world of sports on Friday as seemingly everywhere you looked, a professional league or college football team was announcing a handful or more of players had been hit with the coronavirus.

If you’re looking for optimism, it was a tough day in that regard, but good things happened in other avenues as Notre Dame’s football team celebrated Juneteenth by having an on-campus march that brought more attention to social injustices in the United States.

Today marks just 11 weeks until Notre Dame is scheduled to take on Navy in Week One of college football.

We looked back at a Notre Dame bowl record as we counted down the 78 days until kickoff Friday, now let’s remember a legendary season.

(19)77: Notre Dame Wins National Championship

Led by the likes of Bob Golic, Ken MacAfee, Ross Browner, Luther Bradley and some guy named Joe Montana, the 1977 Notre Dame team overcame an early-season loss at Mississippi and a large deficit at Purdue to win the national championship.

An October thrashing of USC in the iconic “Green Jersey Game” took the Irish from 11th to fifth in the national ratings, the same spot they’d hold while eventually meeting No. 1 Texas in the Cotton Bowl.

A 38-10 thrashing of the Longhorns on that New Year’s Day afternoon vaulted Notre Dame all the way to number one and gave Dan Devine a national championship in a truly magical year.

If you haven’t seen it before and have the time, the 22 minute piece Notre Dame put together highlighting the ’77 squad is very well done.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKGyQPufHVc&w=560&h=315]

In 77 days we get to watch Notre Dame football again.

At least we hope.

Let’s go!

Related – Way too early game-by-game predictions for Notre Dame football in 2020

Former Notre Dame Football Player/Coach Dies at 79

Former Notre Dame tight end and assistant football coach Brian Boulac has died at 79 after spending his life with Notre Dame.

Former Notre Dame football player and assistant coach Brian Boulac has died.  He was 79 years old.

Boulac arrived at Notre Dame in the fall of 1959 and played for the Fighting Irish football team from 1961-63, a run where the team went just 9-20.  The tight end would go on to become a graduate assistant at Notre Dame that kicked off a career in coaching and ultimately in the Notre Dame athletic administration.

Boulac would serve as an assistant coach under Hugh Devore, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine and Gerry Faust and was also the first recruiting coordinator for the Notre Dame football team.

From 1959 through at least 2009, Boulac either played in or attended every Notre Dame home football game as a fan.

 

Boulac was also the first varsity softball coach at Notre Dame and led the Irish to four 30-win seasons and a pair of conference titles despite having only two scholarships to offer.

To learn more about Boulac, check out the write-up about him from the 2009 Notre Dame vs. Boston College game program.

 

Don Shula – Was Notre Dame his one-time dream job?

I had no idea Don Shula once dreamed of playing and coaching at Notre Dame. I found that out today after the coaching legend passed away.

Don Shula passed away Monday morning at the age of 90.  He leaves as accomplished of football coach as the NFL has ever seen with a record 328 career regular season wins and a two Super Bowl titles to his name.

Shula attended John Carroll University where he played football before getting drafted in 1951 and playing seven seasons in the NFL. From there he went to the college ranks to get a start in coaching.

Shula headed the defensive backs at the University of Virginia in 1958 before doing the same at Kentucky in 1959.  From there he leaped to the NFL where he coached the Lions defensive backs for a year before running their defense in 1961 and ’62.

He would then become the youngest coach in the history of the NFL at the time when he got the head coach job of the Baltimore Colts in 1963 at 33 years old.

All Shula would do was lead the Colts to a 71-23-4 record in seven seasons, winning the NFL Championship in 1968 before suffering a stunning upset to Joe Namath and the New York Jets in Super Bowl III.

Shula was out of a job after the Colts went 8-5-1 but he quickly landed in Miami in 1970 where he’d stay until his retirement in 1995.  His 328 career wins are the most all-time and he led the Dolphins to a pair of Super Bowl championships while getting there and falling three other times.

In reading about Don Shula today though I was left wondering an all-time sports “what if?”

This from a lengthy Gene Wojciehowski piece in 2007 on ESPN.com:

A Notre Dame alumnus, presumably speaking on behalf of the university, once approached Shula in the late ’60s, early ’70s about coaching the Fighting Irish. It had always been Shula’s life ambition to play and someday coach at Notre Dame.

“But after I got into the NFL, I didn’t want to go back into college coaching,” he says.

I had no idea about this ever being a thing before reading and researching about Shula a bit today.  The timing is certainly interesting if you know anything about Notre Dame or Don Shula.

It wouldn’t have made sense for it to be late sixties considering Ara Parseghian nearly took Notre Dame to a title in 1964 before ultimately winning one in ’66 which put Ara on anything but a hot seat.  After Parseghian left in 1974 then was Shula the first choice to replace Ara instead of Dan Devine?

It would be next to impossible to ever bring a more hyped up coach than Shula would have been in 1974.  All he’d done in the three years previous was win the last two Super Bowls and appear in another.  I also get why Shula couldn’t go to the college ranks after the start he’d had in his NFL run – it’d have been like if Bill Belichick left the New England Patriots for Notre Dame in 2005.

Yeah, not happening.

I think it’s safe to say things worked out more than alright for Shula afterwards, even if he never did win another Super Bowl.  He’d appear in two more while heading the Dolphins and ultimately retire with more wins than anyone that ever coached the game.

And I know some people look back at the Dan Devine era as a disappointment but replacing a legend like Parseghian is a nearly impossible task.  Devine only lasted six seasons at Notre Dame but went 53-16-1 in that time, winning a national championship in 1977.

RIP to a football legend.

“Rudy” – Actual Story Sounds Better Than Hollywood Version

The man didn’t shack up in Notre Dame Stadium, instead he lived and worked in the Joyce Center where he’d mop floors and do janitorial work.  He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a result and once gave Elvis a t-shirt that “The King” would often wear around Graceland.

I don’t care about the predictability of the movie, some of the inaccuricies or how much effort it took the man it’s about to have it made, I’m a “Rudy” apologist.

Work hard, keep working hard, don’t take “no” for an answer no matter how many times you hear it and prove your doubters wrong no matter how long it takes.  Since I saw it in theaters in the fall of 1993 I’ve been a fan and that hasn’t wavered.

The only thing I don’t like about the movie is how they throw Dan Devine in front of the bus, run him over, back him over, run him over again and again and again.  I know every movie needs a villain but my goodness that seemed excessive.

But I digress from Devine, back to actual “Rudy” we go.

Ryan McGee of ESPN caught up with the actual Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger recently and wrote an extensive piece.

I won’t ruin the whole article for you, if you’ve got the ten or so minutes it takes to read at any point do yourself a favor and go read it.  I did have a few thoughts from it however.

The man didn’t shack up in Notre Dame Stadium, instead he lived and worked in the Joyce Center where he’d mop floors and do janitorial work.  He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a result and once gave Elvis a t-shirt that “The King” would often wear around Graceland.

There was no jersey moment on Dan Devine’s desk and it wasn’t exactly the whole team that carried him off the field after-all.  But for a former Holy Cross student that spent time beating up Notre Dame football players in the annual Bengal Bouts on campus, that story sounds even better than the one Hollywood came up with.

His friend didn’t die in a steel-mill accident, instead he died in a coal power plant incident where Ruettiger tried saving his life, somehow more intense than how things go down in the film.

I’ll forever be a “Rudy” apologist and you can call me corny as much as you like, but after reading the piece the actual story of “Rudy” sounds more like “Forrest Gump” than it does of a walk-on football player and that’s perfectly OK.

Notre Dame Football Well Represented on ESPN’s Top 150 Coaches List

Knute Rockne was the highest former Fighting Irish coach to make the list, coming in at three. He trails only Paul Bryant and Nick Saban on the list.

In honor of 150 years of College Football, ESPN and other publications have been releasing their lists of greatest all-time everything this year.

Earlier we went over the 150 greatest games list and the incredible games Notre Dame contributed to that list both good and bad.

Today ESPN released their rankings of the 150 greatest coaches in college football history.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Notre Dame is again well represented.

First up – “Rock”

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