Fighting Irish are hitting all the right spots
Just like when everyone busies themselves discussing an oncoming strong weather system, getting carried away about any team’s unbeaten season is best left until someone of verifiable substance is beaten.
That’s what the Irish did this past weekend, taking care of Oklahoma University on Saturday night with a definitive 30-13 victory, their eighth win of a flawless season.
Now all the talk is about them reaching the National Championship title game in January, an outcome which was unthinkable before the season started. There are four more games (relatively straightforward) before that can happen followed by some discussion on high — their fate will be decided by opinion rather than a more logical play-off knockout phase.
Brian Kelly, the current coach of this iconic American Football team which fights out of South Bend, Indiana, may not have loved travelling across the Atlantic Ocean on the first weekend in September but now it is assured that the widespread, passionate fanbase and the current student body won’t forget for a while the season that began in Dublin.
Ever since they beat Navy at the Aviva Stadium, the Irish have become one of the biggest stories in the game, be it the college version or its professional big brother.
Not since the early 1990s have they been relevant and it has taken them almost a decade to beat a team as highly ranked as Oklahoma, the side they beat in Norman on Saturday night in front of a national TV audience.
But it was the manner of that win over the Sooners — who had been ranked eighth after one loss for the season — which has validated Notre Dame after what was the first true test of their credentials.
They flew into Norman as the fifth-ranked team in the country and woke up Monday as number three, just behind the pair of incredibly powerful teams playing out of the Universities of Alabama and Oregon.
Kelly was taken on as someone who would shape a team for the long-term when he first took over two seasons ago, trying to bring the storied institution back to the days when they were America’s team.
“My focus was on finding a program builder, and that’s what he’s been,” the man who hired him, athletic director Jack Swarbrick, told Yahoo! Sports during the summer adding that he was “on the coolest seat in the nation”. By saying that, Kelly was safe in the knowledge that no amount of the sort of setbacks which have become routine for the Irish would ever threaten his role.
But now, a little ahead of schedule, they are a force to be reckoned with and the College Football powers-that-be might be facing a situation where they have to grapple with a tough choice between the teams who will get the right to face Alabama (probably) in the decider.
At risk of going over old ground, the reason that the showpieces of this level of the game are decided so subjectively is that the current top four (Kansas State University being the other) will not actually meet each other and will almost likely finish the season undefeated.
The problem about how to quantify their respective abilities has always been decided after rather than during game time. The ranking of every team is decided by how impressive their victories have been, taking into consideration the opposition they have overcome among other factors.
If Notre Dame do — as expected — end the regular season without a defeat, the interesting subplot that will emerge will be what influence the television paymasters have over the final decision.
A Notre Dame National Championship game will be second only to the Super Bowl in terms of viewership.
As for the football itself, it’s a defensive throwback, adding to the allure of their story.
Their star player is a huge and astonishingly mobile linebacker of Samoan descent from Hawaii called Manti Te’o. The fact that his job is to anchor this powerful back line by frustrating his opponents makes it all the more incredible that he could be in contention for the Heisman Trophy, the player of the year gong which is routinely awarded to attacking players like quarterbacks or running backs.
Notre Dame were heavy underdogs at the weekend and began the season in Dublin unranked where their impressive demolition of Navy did little to convince anyone that a season like this was possible.
The success of The Gathering-themed visit of the Fighting Irish could mean Brian Kelly will have to deal with more awkward logistics in the seasons to come. But if that’s the price of the team’s unexpected return to the top of the collegiate game, he may be a little more willing accept the inconvenience.
