Fighting Childish

I feel too young too reminisce, too ashamed for nostalgia, but there are things I will always remember. Like the hours spent in the basement carrying rolled up socks covered in electrical tape, shifting more times than a Rubix Cube to dodge invisible defenders. The water bottles always frozen by my mother the night before games, and the grass-stained knee-socks she used to get whiter than all those glasses of milk I used to come home to. The pass patterns I’ve been running since my father scripted them on his palm in the backyard years ago. The afternoons I played by myself as the receiver, the quarterback, and as John Facenda, bellowing my name in Super Bowl XXXXVII with that voice that could move boulders. The Triple Option Flea Flicker I invented on the back of my notebook when I decided I didn’t care too much for quadratic equations. The hours wondering what it felt like to drag down a brontosaurus of a fullback in the flat on third and three, even when splinters still gave me nightmares. I remember the only season of Pop Warner I ever played, and the fog that was never as strong as the lights.

I remember most of what happened when I first I decided Michigan was the greatest football team there ever was, back when teams only wore the right colors and the wrong colors, but I remember it because it was the same time I realized that if you liked Michigan, it was a good idea to hate Notre Dame just as much. I am older now, my love for women much closer to my love for Michigan than it was back then, and I have found that no one needs to be told to hate Notre Dame. There are plenty of reasons you should hate them on your own.

I hate humidity, women’s basketball, girls who fake it, and waking up before noon, but I’d endure a lifetime of them all if it meant never listening to another Notre Dame fan lecture me on collegiate athletics. I’m really not trying to pick a fight. The fact is, if you’re a Notre Dame fan, and you can’t get into an R-rated movie yet, chances are you’ve never seen them win a bowl game. And that’s much better than anything I could ever come up with on my own. This is just in response to something harmless written by Blue-Gray Sky – the third component of the EDSBS/MGoBlog holy trinity of college football blogs – with regards to Notre Dame joining the Big 10, and the discussion that followed. The discussion went bad – as they always seem to do when Notre Dame gets involved – inevitably turning into yet another carousel of Notre Dame rhetoric, its fans riding in circles atop their fatigued horses of whimsy, their famous axioms held in hand like swords: Notre Dame is above college football, they just participate for our benefit.

“Andy” writes in the comments section, “I can see Michigan dropping us, mainly out of fear,” which is both condescending and misinformed, and exactly the type of irreverent inanity that makes almost any cooperative discussion impossible. I suppose he’s basing that on recent events, you know, Notre Dame having won two in a row, three of the last four, those kind of inconsequential samples of data in a sport that’s history spans more than a century in both schools. Michigan was 4-3-1 against Notre Dame in the nineties, taking two of the last three, and three of the last four. But of course, when we’re dealing with the intellectual titans like Andy, we as Michigan fans are to immediately cower in fear behind our 9-3s as if Notre Dame hadn’t been – in relation to program expectations – easily the biggest disappointment of the 2000s prior to Weis’s hiring. You know that awful 7-5 season Michigan just had? For Michigan, it’s the worst season it’s had since 1984. For Notre Dame? Well, those Irish fans seem to have an answer for everything; I’m sure they’ll let you know. So I guess what I want to know, then, is what Michigan has to be afraid of. Losing to an out-of-conference opponent? Losing to a rival? Losing to an opponent with a less-talented roster? Excuse me, his name is Lloyd Carr, and I’m pretty sure he’d find away to fuck things up even without Notre Dame’s help.

I don’t know too many Michigan fans that have anything to say for the past 8 years besides “let’s all go find a sand dune big enough to fit all our heads in,” but that’s due to embarrassment and dejection alone; fear would imply a lack of hope. Michigan’s wounds are always self-inflicted (we could at least admire their bravery if they had someone else to blame), its bad habits prevalent and debilitating. But they have nothing to do with being in desperate need of anyone else’s help. Michigan falls off its bike a lot, but it’s because it rides too carelessly on dangerous terrain, not because it can’t afford a bike with durable pedals and ergonomic handlebars. Michigan sells more merchandise than any other school and is annually one of the top 10 most popular teams in the country. To say Michigan needs Notre Dame, whether in the same conference or merely on the same schedule, discredits the dynasty it established more than 100 years ago.

As for now, Michigan is a third-level football program, and Notre Dame is no different. If you’re talking about prestige, both of them are in the top 5 for good, but nothing could dispute that right now the two are merely name brands on unreliable products. The difference, though, is how each views itself. Michigan’s been far more statistically relevant than Notre Dame has in the last 5 years, but the consensus is that work still needs to be done, and that last season was a disaster. Notre Dame, on the other hand, wins fewer games than it did with a coach the whole fanbase hated, yet in an instant the name has revitalized itself. To me, Michigan fans are the old drunks sitting alone in a dark corner of a bar, chins on the counter, swishing the last drops of booze around in their glass. Notre Dame fans sit in rocking chairs on wooden porches, looking for people to tell stories to of how great they used to be. Yankees fans included, I’ve never seen a team and its fans so consistently combine high expectations with the subsequent dismissal of major failures as Notre Dame. And that’s why Ohio State will always be the team we’re supposed to hate, while Notre Dame is the team we enjoy hating.

I don’t like associating with them in anything, but I’m sure it’s for different reasons than Notre Dame’s fans have. I doubt Notre Dame, everlastingly basking in its independent, no-conference-pool of elitism, wants to really be associated with anyone, because deep down all of its fans would take it as a handicapping to its supposed superiority. If the motive was strictly financial – that suckling the money melon of NBC was so vital to the program’s operation – I wouldn’t be so offended. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. In a country where the president earns much less than the average Major League utility infielder, it would be incredibly naïve to think that power and such a defined superiority can’t, at times, have the same allure that money does. Being independent means being different, and being different means designing your own image. What kind of image would God’s team have being grouped with the likes of Indiana and Illinois, especially after it had spent so long championing itself as the face of college football? Not only that, how would Notre Dame squeeze in all those “rivalries” against Army/Navy/Air Force/Coast Guard/Boy Scout Troop 109 if Northwestern and Minnesota were clogging the schedule?

I suppose I could be stubborn and demand that Notre Dame conform, explaining how important it was for the economic equality of the sport; that they needed step down from their pedestal in creating conferential harmony. But that’s just stuff I don’t really mean. And when we all say it, we never mean it. It’s just the quickest way to crack the teeth of a team none of us like. There is always a futility in talking football with Notre Dame fans, but I can’t say I’d feel as justified hating a team that compromised. They're better the way they are, flawed and without charm. I remember a lot of things, and I'd like to remember that.