Word: champ
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Well, Notre Dame Coach Lou Holtz, for one. Even if, this year, the wire services actually named Miami, not Southern Mississippi, as the best team in college football. Holtz's "Fighting Irish," who were ranked first until a November loss to Miami, had just flogged the new champ, Colorado, in the Orange Bowl. Yet four polls gave top ranking to Miami, which had also lost one game. "You can justify why Miami won it," Holtz said. "What you can't justify is why we didn't." He pointed to the unique toughness of his school's schedule: Notre Dame played...
...sport where 106 Division 1-A colleges play a dozen or fewer games each season -- and in a system without an organized play-off structure -- controversy is bound to boil. If the national champ were determined by popular vote, Notre Dame would have won this year. Twice as many viewers tuned in to the Orange Bowl as to the Sugar Bowl, in which Miami defeated Alabama. An ABC phone-in vote for the top team, taken during the Sugar Bowl, rang up a 52% Notre Dame landslide...
Notre Dame had the toughest schedule, topped the polls most of the season and won the biggest bowl victory. So, naturally, Miami is declared the champ...
...little of that dreadful impact comes across in the film, which is too respectful of its subject to find more in it than noble cliches. Salamo Arouch (Willem Dafoe), formerly the Balkan middleweight champ, is interned with his family at Birkenau and soon ordered to take part in boxing exhibitions in which the loser will almost certainly be killed. This grisly dilemma -- each of Arouch's knockouts sends his opponent to the gas chamber -- is mostly evaded in Robert M. Young's bland direction. The film's only and considerable virtue lies in its documentation of the desperate strategies people...
...example, take the performance of sophomore freestylist Kevin Williams, who broke meet records in both the 200 and 500. In the latter race, the defending Eastern region champ was particularly impressive, dominating the race from start to finish...