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Your least purposeful offseason series returns
Ladies and gentlemen, we are officially in the dog days of summer and apart from the constant mill of recruiting, little is going on in the world of college football or college sports in general. That means it’s time for the return of Things People Forget About Notre Dame football, your weekly dose of random Fighting Irish trivia as we work through these final, agonizing weeks before the season kicks off. Without further ado, let’s talk about three random nuggets that popped into my head in the last 24 hours.
You will recall that year’s game against Stanford was hosted on the Pac-12 Network, a bittersweet broadcast as it was the final football game hosted on that seldom-watched station. Remembering that got me reflecting on another famous “final” moment between the Irish and Cardinal out in Palo Alto – the 2005 matchup in which Charlie Weis’ first Notre Dame team played the last game ever at the old Stanford Stadium.
I have very fond and detailed memories of this game. It was the first Notre Dame game I attended in person, and ended up being a pretty entertaining one in which a BCS-bound Irish team narrowly thwarted a Cardinal upset bid.
But what is most memorable about this game to me was the spectacle that ensued after. As mentioned, this was the last game ever at the old Stanford Stadium prior to their move to their current pasture venue. To mark this occasion the Cardinal decided to break ground immediately after the game, inviting all their fans onto the field for a “ceremonial first dig.” The Irish, of course, did not cooperate with the celebratory mood and won the game. This left my family and I to watch in disbelief as the Cardinal faithful descended onto the field after a loss, in probably the only field-storming-in-defeat anyone will ever witness. Truly the most Stanford thing to ever Stanford, and I consider myself blessed to have seen it with my own eyes.
If you’re into video essays, I can’t recommend enough this recent one that chronicled the modern epidemic of ball carriers at multiple levels of football dropping the rock a yard or two early in the heat of (premature) celebration. The most famous offender in this category is Desean Jackson, who actually made the mistake a couple times a couple different ways over the course of his career and whose name itself became a byword for it. In what appears to be a strange case of reverse psychology bearing a lot of further study, Jackson’s high-profile and extremely embarrassing error actually yielded a massive uptick in mistakes like this over the course of the 2010s. Notre Dame played a part in this trend, whether or not you remember it.
Allow me to set the scene: September of 2010, Notre Dame is trailing the Michigan Wolverines 21-7 at home after a first half in which they lost starting quarterback Dayne Crist to a bizarre eye-gouging injury and the dynamic duo of Tommy Rees and Nate Montana tried and failed to fill his shoes. The Irish are desperate for a score. Crist, returning at the start of the second half, is rolling to his right. Looking downfield for a big play, he finds a wide-open TJ Jones, who evades one horrible tackle attempt and then confidently strides into the end zone for a 53-yard touchdown. Bang bang, the Irish are right back in it, and hey let’s make sure we kick that extra point right away because…
Whoopsie. Fortunately the Irish were not penalized for this because:
A) Rich Rodriguez-era Michigan players did not have the wherewithal to recover the ball in the end zone and force the refs’ hands.
B) As outlined in the video essay above, this happened early enough in the history of this trend that officials were not playing close attention to whether players actually held the ball running into the end zone.
Despite this gift, the Irish still came up short in their comeback attempt in the second of three consecutive heartbreaking losses to the Wolverines bridging the Weis and Kelly eras.
On a lighter note (but still within the same genre of 2010s NBC cringe-comedy) never forget that Parks and Recreation established both iconic mini-horse Lil’ Sebastian and his biggest fan, Ron Swanson, as Notre Dame fans.
Know your history, people.
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