Ok, Let’s Consider “The Program”

MJD over at AOL’s Fanhouse has a weekly post called “The Debriefing.” And this week, he’s chosen to focus on the state of the Notre Dame Football Program. MJD is generally considered one of the better sports bloggers around. And normally I’d agree with that, but he is employed by AOL’s Fanhouse, that bastion of victims of failed lobotomies like Brian Cook, so I guess he’s probably not perfect. And today we got a great example of him striking out while swinging.

So, follow the link if you’d like (he gets a link because generally I’m not annoyed by his work and I don’t think this piece was written with any real malice), but I’ve got the contents of his post right here. My comments are in bold.

The Debriefing: the Very Slippery Slope Towards Normal

One of the cool differences between college football and pro football is the concept of “the program.” In the NFL … if you suck, you suck, and that’s the end of the story.

Yep. I remember the Patriots just ruling the world back when I was growing up.

Take a team like the Dolphins, for example. They have a history, they have fans all over the country, and they’ve got something of a tradition and an image … but at the moment, all anyone cares about is the fact that they’re 0-8, and not as good as their record indicates. Tell someone you’re a Dolphins fan, and they’re either going to laugh at you, or pity you. The Dolphins are a joke because they suck, and that’s all there is to say about them. Nothing else is relevant.

But it’s different in college football. You can be a bad team, but still be a good “program.” It’s difficult thing to define … it’s some kind of unevenly weighted sum of historical success + tradition + size of fanbase + national recognition + recent success.

+ commitment to winning by the college or university’s stake holders + expectations for success on the part of the school’s alumni. In fact, the 2 pieces I just mentioned are probably much bigger pieces of the pie than the ones you mention.

It’s the one thing that Notre Dame can cling to at the moment. Tell someone you’re a Notre Dame fan, and they won’t pity you. They might laugh, but it’s a spiteful, vengeful laugh … Notre Dame still has too much going for it for the laugh to be dismissive.

The notion of the “program” is all that separates them from being the college version of the Miami Dolphins.

It is possible to have the worst offense in the nation, lose to Navy, and still be considered a good program. The Irish still have everything but the recent success, and that buys them time.

Yep. 2 BCS bowl appearances in the last 2 years isn’t very recent success.

It’s not an unlimited amount of time, though. With a handful of average seasons, an elite program can be downgraded to just a good program. String together some subpar seasons after that, and a good program can turn into merely a normal program. And if they’re a really bad team over more than a few seasons … they can become an irrelevant program.

That’s what Notre Dame has to figure out … how to not slide any further. Too much time is spent trying to assign blame for the current 1-8 record … “Oh, this is because of Tyrone Willingham’s bad recruiting classes! Yeah, but Charlie’s guys suck, too! Yeah, but Charlie’s guys are still young! Yeah, but … well, okay actually, you’re right, let’s blame it all on the guy who isn’t here! It’s Tyrone Willingham’s fault that Notre Dame is in a dark, dark place!”

Forget about all that. The Weis vs. Willingham culpability arguments are among the dumbest and most pointless things to ever happen on the internet (though I credit Mark Ecko for trying to change that). Forget about the recruiting class rankings (which are pretty useless themselves), forget about whose guys are doing what … what’s happening right now is not an issue of talent.

We can all agree that Notre Dame has at least enough talent that they shouldn’t be ranked dead last in the country in total offense, can we not? They shouldn’t be 120th in total offense, they shouldn’t be 119th in points scored per game, and they shouldn’t be 89th in points allowed per game. There’s some talent there.

Maybe it’s not as much as you’d like, and maybe it’s not as much as exists in other places, but whether you want to pin it on Weis’s recruiting, or Willingham’s recruiting … both brought in better athletes than Navy. Both had the ability to recruit from among a group of kids who didn’t also have a strong desire to spend time on submarines.

I don’t care if you’re the least talented offensive team in the country … I don’t care if you’re recruiting only high school football players who also want to be in the show choir. I don’t care if you start running commercials on weekday afternoons on Fox Sports Net begging for football players, much in the way that the DeVry institute begs for truckers.

The fact is this: if your coach is what he says he is, you’ll be better than dead last in total offense in the nation.

Not if he makes some mistakes.

This can’t be an issue of talent. Who the players are, or where the players came from, it doesn’t matter … draw any conclusion you want about the players, and Notre Dame is still way worse than they should be right now. That is what should have Notre Dame concerned.

As of right now, they are, while being a terrible team, still a good program. Not an elite program like it used to be, and like USC, Ohio State, LSU, and Florida currently are … but still a very good one.

It’s time to wonder, though, how long that’s going to last. Because if they continue to have teams that perform this far under the level that their talent dictates that they should, the status of the program erodes further and further.

There are no concrete stats out there, but you have to figure that the number of people who are Notre Dame fans, yet have no connection to the school, is dwindling. Notre Dame still gets a lot of media attention, because a lot of people in the media grew up when Notre Dame was an elite program – perhaps the elite program.

If you’re a teenager right now, though, and you’re picking a favorite team, exactly what does Notre Dame have to offer you that a few dozen other teams don’t? The people who see Notre Dame as a special place, and a landmark of college football greatness … they’re going to be dying soon.

Oooh. Bad news, MJD. See, many of the ND fans (most?) are Catholic. The “no connection” thing holds little water because a lot of those fans, even if they didn’t attend Notre Dame, feel a close connection to the university because ND is the only university participating in major college football that actually identifies with Catholicism. Trust us. Half of Boston doesn’t know BC is “Catholic.” And being Catholics, we’re probably not dying at near the rate that we’re procreating. We’re like rabbits that way. Brain-washing, #3 baby jersey purchasing, Victory March as a lullaby singing rabbits. Oh sure, some wander away from the flock, but not most.

Regis Philbin, the face of that movement, is 76 years old. Science and wealth can probably keep him alive and annoying for another 50 years or so, but that’s not the case for everyone. If things continue as they are, the only title Notre Dame’s going to be able to claim is the most popular team among dead white people.

God Bless Regis, but he’s not the face of any movement. He’s a very enthusiastic, extremely ill-informed Irish fan. Our movement is much younger than you think, pretty well-informed, rabid, and we’ve got high-speed DSL.

It is possible for a program to lose its status. Alabama was once elite, and now (or at least until Nick Saban arrived) they were just another team. Penn State was once elite, and now, if they get to the Outback Bowl, the season’s considered a grand success. Nebraska used to be elite, and now they’re just a poor Big 12 team that Bill Callahan killed.

Despite being 1-8, things aren’t that bad for Notre Dame just yet. They’re not yet Nebraska. It takes more than one embarrassingly bad year to kill a program’s status.

What might do the job, though, is choosing to stick with a coach who can go 1-8 with the amount of talent that does, or should, exist on that roster. It’s a decision like that, if the wrong choice is made, that can send a program tumbling down to “just another team” status.

Right now, they’ve got a guy at the helm who is redefining “underachievement” with every game that he coaches. And it looks like they want to stick with that guy for the duration of his way-too-long contract. I fear that if they do, they’re going to wake up one day and say to themselves, “Uh oh … we’re Pitt.”

And ultimately, MJD, that’s where you just don’t “get it.” See, Notre Dame fell from “elite” status to “good” before Weis ever came back to ND. It all started when the president of the school wanted to deemphasize football and become some sort of Stanford/Harvard Hybrid of the Midwest. You should read the stories sometime. Makes for good research. The success of a program really comes down to the commitment to that program from the academic institution that supports it. For a time there, ND wasn’t committed to winning. ND allowed their facilities to fall behind. ND hired Bob Freaking Davie to follow the footsteps of Lou Holtz. ND hired an athletic director so inept as to not do basic due-dilligence on the resume of a new head football coach. And ND hired Ty Willingham. All told, that’s at least 8 years of fumbling and bumbling by Notre Dame with its football program, but all that has come to an end. The president of the school, who wanted so badly for the school’s students and alums to care less about football because he thought that somehow hurts the academic integrity of the school, is gone. The new president, while perhaps not perfect, not only reemphasized football, but cares about the program dearly. The alumni have an excellent grip on the purse-strings, and the fans have tasted how much fun a high-powered, winning football program can be over the last couple of years thanks to Charlie Weis. And we’re hungry for more.

Should ND be this bad? No. Of course not. And we’ve already pointed out several times that Weis has made mistakes this year. He’s going to make mistakes. But the guy is a tireless worker, and his players love him, and he is learning from his mistakes. But, really, all that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we, the fans, alumni, and stakeholders of Notre Dame have learned from our mistakes that we began making almost a decade ago. Here come the Irish.