This year’s college football bowl season consists of 41 games, including 11 that are part of the playoff system that first began in 2014. What schools makes it in and what teams are left out is a matter of perennial controversy, especially this year’s snubbing of the University of Notre Dame.
The lackluster and lopsided results of last week’s first round playoff games did little to quell the uproar, but those of us Irish fans still smarting from the injustice can take heart from an otherwise forgotten message from the university’s longtime president, the Reverend Fr. Theodore Hesburgh.
It was December 1951. “Fr. Ted,” as he was affectionately known, was speaking at the team’s annual football banquet. The Irish had finished the season at 7-2-1, ranked 13th, ending with a win over USC. As was school policy up until 1968, they declined playing in a bowl game.
“By now, the last whistle has sounded,” Fr. Ted began. “The cleats are cleaned and stored away … But there is something left after this season that is very much a reality … Not just a pile of bricks, not just a system or a practice, not just a feeling or an abstraction, but something very real, a person. You might call him the forgotten man, although he is really what remains when all is said and done about football.”
Invoking the “forgotten man,” Fr. Hesburgh was borrowing a phrase from a President Franklin Roosevelt radio address in 1932. FDR was referring to the individual at the bottom of the economic ladder – but Fr. Ted was stressing the multi-dimensional nature of the student-athlete.
“Because he is strong, he can be drilled to greater stamina or allowed to get soft and lazy; he can be trained to join skill to strength or can be asked to use strength in a wild unreasoned way like a bull … In a word, football players are to be trained and respected as men, not as circus animals.”
During his 35-year tenure, Fr. Ted was sometimes criticized by boosters and accused of deemphasizing football in return for improving the university’s academic reputation. In reality, he believed the two endeavors were inextricably linked, saying, “There is no academic virtue in playing mediocre football and no academic vice in winning a game that by all odds one should lose.”
Notre Dame won’t be winning any bowl game this season, but its student-athletes have already won an even greater prize. As Fortune, played by Charles S. Dutton tells Rudy Ruettiger, the ambitious but undersized walk-on, played by Sean Aston, in ‘Rudy,’ “You’re gonna walk out of here with a degree from the University of Notre Dame. In this lifetime, you don’t have to prove nothing to nobody except yourself.”
Over the years, the University of Notre Dame has consistently led the way in graduating athletes in football. Known as the “Graduation Success Rate” (GSR), the Irish scored a 99 rating this year, edging out Boston College, Cincinnati, Duke and Stanford, all who scored a 97. It’s the 19th consecutive year the school has held the top spot.
Fr. Ted closed his remarks that cold December night by saying he hoped the Irish players “leave us matured in mind and heart and soul as well as in body. We hope that you who come to us strong in body will leave strong in your attachment to the values that matter in life.” He then added, “We hope that all you players find your intelligence growing towards Christian Wisdom during your four years here at Our Lady’s University, that you leave here better men, prepared to work hard and intelligently and honestly as you played the game.”
Traditionalists and purists are understandably uncomfortable with the way NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) money has upended the game. Yet when so many dollars are being generated over a sport, it’s difficult to keep some of it from the players responsible for bringing it in. But Theodore Hesburgh’s words are a good reminder that the whole genesis of student athletics is first the student and then the sport.
Thanks to head coach Marcus Freeman and the University of Notre Dame’s continuing high standards both on the field and off, bowl or no bowl, that mission will be accomplished for those players who, like Rudy Ruettiger, will leave South Bend with a college degree in hand.
To quote the last line of the “Notre Dame Victory March,’ – “March onto victory!” indeed.
Photo from Getty Images.
