Word: dame
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from Indiana, I'm Roman Catholic, and I love football. That's not a lame personal ad; it just explains why, when it comes to the big-time college game, I root and always will root for Notre Dame. But I'm embarrassed by the Fighting Irish these days. Not because they just finished another disappointing season; but because their unseemly desperation to find a coaching messiah has begun to taint the image of one of America's best universities. Now that an expensive new savior has been anointed - Brian Kelly, who replaces the expensive failed savior Charlie Weis - here...
...Notre Dame's brainy standards are a big reason it can no longer recruit as many blue-chip players. Even so, diehard Irish fans argue it's important to the student-athlete ethos that top schools be able to compete in Division I football. But they're assuming a real student-athlete ethos still exists at that level, or that Division I football is still a respected institution. It isn't - especially when it chooses its champion via the opaque and convoluted Bowl Championship Series. That's why other prestigious universities that have Division I programs, like Stanford and Northwestern...
...know that sounds as heretical to Notre Dame fans as filet mignon on Good Friday. But here's another sacrilege for Irish ears: Notre Dame needs to act a bit more like the school it once disparaged, the University of Miami. That's right, the University of Miami Hurricanes, who used to symbolize so much that is wrong with Division I college football. Until a few years ago, the Hurricanes had an all too often deserved reputation for thugball - a brash, smash-mouth style that mirrored the Miami Vice era both on and off the field. Some recruits...
That's why the Catholics could learn a thing or two from the Convicts right now. By once more making such a hysterical search for the reincarnation of Knute Rockne - and by paying Weis an obscene $15 million or more to go away - Notre Dame loyalists risk looking like the petty boosters of a football factory instead of the thoughtful backers of an elite university that regularly cracks the academic top 20 today. And the country today needs Notre Dame the university far more than it needs Notre Dame the football team. That fact shone like the school's Golden...
...should Notre Dame's. It's great that NBC still broadcasts every Irish home game; it indicates a nostalgic hunger out there for a less cynical college football tradition. But Notre Dame today has an obligation to put its scholarly tradition on its highest pedestal - higher than even its football coach messiahs...