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Cheeseburger reflections
Although the Notre Dame Fighting Irish don’t play a game this week, it is nonetheless a sacred one within our community, as we celebrate the annual ritual of Cheeseburger Week. For the uninitiated, this tradition was born in 2006 when Charlie Weis’ 6-1, 11th-ranked Irish were jumped in the polls by the defending champion Florida Gators, who had a bye week while the Irish got a dramatic win over the gamey-though-unranked UCLA Bruins. Charlie took this personally:
“Another team [Florida] that jumped us wasn’t even playing. They were home eating cheeseburgers and they end up jumping us. That befuddles me.”
And thus a meme was born, which still echoes amusingly through the Irish fan base even after nearly two new decades, and two new head coaches. I love it, you love it, and I hope we hold on to it forever. It is, however, an interesting springboard for a larger, and I believe necessary, conversation about the continual hold the Weis years have on the Irish fanbase.
Maybe this is a personal thing for me because the Weis years were also my core coming-of-age years (approximately 11-16) and I am surrounded by Irish fans for whom that is also the case, but from what I can see the Weis years set a template for being an Irish fan that still hangs over the Irish fan base and makes us afraid to ask for more from the program than what it has delivered in recent years.
What do I mean by this? It’s what you hear expressed whenever you hear Notre Dame fans relieved to see the team finish 9-3; to see the Irish merely remain in the top 25; to win the games they are supposed to even as they lose the big ones. If you were basing your expectations for the Irish on the Weis era (particularly its later years) these would indeed be cause for pride and relief, because they would represent a drastic improvement over where the team had been not only under Charlie but his two predecessors.
It is impossible to overestimate what the Weis-led 2007-09 nadir, in which the team went 16-21 and suffered some of the more horrific losses any of us will witness in a very short span, did to Notre Dame fans’ expectations of their team. The scars from these games were so deep that they became a kind of canon for Notre Dame fans (the article that first introduced me to OFD was “Ranking Every Notre Dame Defeat of the Charlie Weis Era”). The emotional resonance of these years have led to their being invoked in defense of Notre Dame’s subsequent leadership against the charge that they could be doing more with the talent they have.
While I do understand this reflex and often go to it myself on difficult Saturdays for the Irish, it is in need of a reality check. The Weis years are long gone. Brian Kelly and Marcus Freeman have together coached 15 Notre Dame football teams. All but one (2016) have bested the marks of Charlie’s last three (for all their flaws, I feel confident including the 2024 Irish in this statement). “Better than Weis” is no longer the bar. It is no longer remotely close to the bar. Double-digit wins, the thought of which would have sparked nirvana in the Weis era, is no longer the bar; having been reached in seven of Notre Dame’s last ten seasons, it should be an expectation.
Why does this matter? Because Notre Dame fans should at this point allow themselves to expect more of their team than they did a decade ago, and I worry that a refrain of “it could always be worse,” while true, could stop us from embracing that expectation. This is not me saying that I’m bringing the knives out for Marcus Freeman; it is me saying that he and Pete Bevacqua and everyone else leading Notre Dame should not let themselves think that Irish fans will be content with being good-not-great forever, when they can and should be better.
Happy Cheeseburger Week, Irish fans – and here’s to better days ahead.
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