Notre Dame Fighting Irish Slappy Awards: Best Play of 2018-2019
By Paul Walsh
In the next edition of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Slappy Awards, we take a look at the most exciting plays of the 2018-2019 academic year.
The Slappy Awards mean a great deal to the writers of the famed Notre Dame website, Slap the Sign. So far, the following awards have been doled out: Best Individual Performance by a Male Athlete and Best Male Athlete.
This Slappy Award is for the Best Play of the 2018-2019 Notre Dame athletics season. This is a tough one to determine for a few reasons. It is difficult to look at multiple sports and find the one play of all of them that could be deemed “best.” It is also difficult to determine what is meant by “best.”
I would like to outline the criteria I utilized before unveiling the winner. Rather than using the definition of “best” that would provide for the play that may have created the most spectacle (a one-handed catch, a diving stop, a crazy goal, a trick play, etc.), I opted to use the definition of “best” that is a bit more wide-reaching.
For the purposes of this particular award, I looked for plays that had some part spectacle but largely because of the situation in which the play occurred. This is how I determined the “best” play of the season. In other words, I looked at the context of the game in which the play occurred as well as the pressure that would be present on the players to execute the play as a result. Was this a last second play that resulted in a win? Did the play occur during the playoffs? Did the play act as fuel for a team to complete an undefeated regular a season and playoff bid?
In this way, the following four plays were chosen as nominees for the Slappy Award for the Best Play of the 2018-2019 Notre Dame athletics season. The winner will appear on the final slide of the article.