Notre Dame Gets More Nostalgic As Alabama Wins Another Title

Can Notre Dame football ever get over the nostalgic hump they currently face?

Numbers of national titles, Heismans, winning streaks, Mt. Rushmore’s of coaches, and iconic wins fall off of our lips and burn in our hearts.

I watched Alabama win another title by outlasting Clemson 45-40, in the most unconventional of ways for a sports blogger. I let the kids watch a few movies as we anticipate at least a school delay due to a snow storm tonight, and I streamed the game on my phone and earbuds.

I had other plans of course. I had planned on watching the game on the giant screen in my house while tweeting and celebrating the end of another college football season. Another college football season that will find the Irish left wanting. It was the fresh ghosts of this past season and even that of 2012 that forced me to watch this game in an almost remote manner. The prospect of what was happening and what could have been was too great.

If you are a Notre Dame fan, there has always been this trumpeting and propangandizing of the Notre Dame football program as the greatest college football program in history by the Notre Dame establishment (an establishment that includes all of the new media- my self included). Numbers of national titles, Heismans, winning streaks, Mt. Rushmore’s of coaches, and iconic wins fall off of our lips and burn in our hearts.

Today there was a sense of pride as I came across a tweet that displayed a stat that I have thought about a lot over the past few years- basically since the 2012 title game.

But is was that sense of pride that led me to my iPhone and ear buds. It wasn’t jealousy as much as it was that feeling of being let down.

Notre Dame has truly only had 1 chance to win a national title in the last 20 years, and that was the 2012 stomping via Bama- our current King of the Sport. While we may dispute the number of titles Bama really has, we can’t dispute what they have done over the last decade.

A decade should judge what a college football program really is at face value- not decades as Notre Dame would push. And it certainly has no use for the Wall Street Journal’s list of most valuable teams (Notre Dame was #4) because WHO REALLY CARES about money that doesn’t end up in their own pockets?

Notre Dame Stadium was ranked as the #1 place to experience college football:

And while that may sound great and all, I see it as yet another nostalgic hoop that this program must jump through before it finally reaches the top of the college football world (after those hoops are the trials of the games themselves).

More and more, I feel like I am being setup to just enjoy what we have and be thankful for the past greatness. Well… I call bullshit on all of it. ALL of it.

Notre Dame can get back to the top as these cycles only need a couple of years of change to make the difference- but that takes a change in how business is done. Should Notre Dame slap a giant jumbotron in the stadium, lower academic standards, offer a previous National Title winning coach 15 million plus a year, and whatever else comes with creating a true football factory? Merely for our own enjoyment of winning?

Probably not, but until Notre Dame and the Notre Dame fanbase gets out of the business of nostalgia to make up for a few decades of futility, Notre Dame will only look and feel like a real player as opposed to being one- one which they are so very close to becoming. All they need is just a little more push.