Questioning if Stanford deserves our presence
Ted Fox
Fox Sports ... Almost
We've already talked about Notre Dame football losses five times this year.
Doing so a sixth time might be a little much.
Unfor-tunately, it wasn't an unfamiliar story-line: the Irish playing hard the whole game, having a good shot to win the game down the stretch but then coming up short.
Like Boston College about a month earlier, Stanford blanked Notre Dame in the fourth quarter and came back for a four point win.
But who wants to talk about a 17-13 Cardinal victory that dropped the Blue and Gold to 4-6?
I want to know why this "rivalry" has been set up in the first place. These two schools have played in all but two years since 1988 and will keep meeting each other on an annual basis into the foreseeable future.
No, this isn't a knock against the Stanford Cardinal football team. They are an 8-2 group that's in the top 10 of the BCS and deserve a better bowl trip than Seattle in late December, which they'll probably be forced to accept.
Their head coach, Tyrone Willingham, even went out to check on an injured player down on the field, something I haven't seen any head coach do recently.
And as the Cardinal seniors finished their final home game, the half-empty stadium looking on, I couldn't help but think . . .
Wait a minute — there's the first reason this series has got to go. They have an 8-2, top 10 team, but the Stanford faithful only turned out to the tune of 51,534 per game this year in a stadium that holds 85,500?
Forget plenty of good seats being available. It's `Name Your Own Section' night.
Saturday's game looked a lot like two years ago, when Jarious Jackson played his last collegiate game in front of less than 58,000 seemingly uninterested spectators on the same field.
What a sad and undeserved way to cap off a career.
But hey, the Cardinal were only going to the Rose Bowl that year, so why would anyone want to see them then? (I can still hear that ABC commercial calling Notre Dame Stanford's "tune-up" for Pasadena. That's when I realized how bad the 1999 season was.)
And what's with this whole mascot thing they have going? They're the Cardinal, presumably a shade of the color red, which is fine. So why does that mean there needs to be a big dancing Christmas tree running around on the sidelines, too?
I spent the whole game hoping Leprechaun alum Mike Brown would emerge and put Smokey's best friend in his place.
That tree certainly isn't there to pump up the fans because, as we already established, there aren't too many. There were only three audible chants all night: "Let's Go Irish," "Go Irish" (with one section yelling "Go" and the other "Irish"), and "We are ND," the last particularly biting considering they really aren't ND.
Then there's the band. Oh, the Stanford marching band, those cute rogues that are banned from Notre Dame Stadium after a particularly offensive halftime show a few years ago.
Here's your multiple choice quiz for the day: the Cardinal band is slightly less classy than: [a] cutting in front of someone in a dining hall line [b] loudly playing your "Sandstorm" and Zombie Nation MP3s at 4 a.m. in a vain effort to capture the essence of Heartland [c] a guy burping in his girlfriend's face [d] all of the above.
I don't know which part of the halftime extravaganza I liked more: the big banner that read "CENSORED" that the band would only show to the student section or spelling out 4-6 when Notre Dame led 10-3 at the half.
Call me crazy, but I don't think they did that because they just really love their team.
As we left the stadium and wandered into an eerie silence for team that had just won its eighth game, I thought about the spectacle I had just seen.
It was one that would make Texas high school football collectively shake its head, not because of the game on the field, but because of the lack of everything else.
I'm not sure why Notre Dame keeps playing in that college football abyss, but I do know one thing: I'd rather go to a place with a 4-6 team where everyone cares than a school where an 8-2 team clearly doesn't get the support it should.
Of course, as was pointed out to me, we'll have to wait until next year to drop the Cardinal so the Irish can beat them and not look like sore losers.
As for me, I'm just happy to be back where the Rock isn't a geological formation and dancing trees are rare.
It was starting to get scary.
Email Ted Fox at tfox@nd.edu. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Sports Stories for Tuesday, November 27, 2001
