Notre Don't

Notre Dame vs. Rutgers: Playing Holier Than Thou

By HARVEY ARATON
New York Times
Published: April 29, 2008

For self-importance on the grandest of delusional scales, there is no entity in sports quite like Notre Dame football, winner of three games last season, routinely whacked like a piñata in recent bowl games and not a national championship to its name in 20 years, or since the Gipper was about to hand off the presidency of the United States to George H.W. Bush.

How humble of Notre Dame to have visited Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden at the White House on Jan. 18, 1989, resisting all temptation to call for a meeting at a neutral site more to its grandiose liking.

As you may already know, the university is a member in good standing of the Big East Conference for athletic competitions it does not consider to be part of the religious experience. For the divine game, football, league opponents were long ago brainwashed to bow and accept the Notre Dame credo: Too sainted to play in your conference, too special to step into your house if it does not meet our dimensional specifications. That is, until Rutgers stood up last week, walked away from a proposed six-game series, refused to move its home games an hour north to the Meadowlands just for the privilege of playing in a stadium that would be half-filled with Notre Dame fans.

This way to Piscataway, Rutgers said, or don’t bother coming to Jersey at all.

“We feel Rutgers home games should be played on campus,” the university’s athletic director, Bob Mulcahy, said in a statement.

Mulcahy briefly expounded on this touchy subject on Monday, saying in a telephone interview, “Notre Dame has been very helpful to the conference, but we are in the position of undertaking a $100 million expansion on our stadium, and if we are going to play a major nonconference game, we feel it has to be played there.”

Mulcahy, who understandably has conference relationships to tend to, can’t say what still needs to be said, even if he doesn’t necessarily agree: the nerve of the Irish to make this demand when Rutgers, a publicly funded university, is trying to justify the stadium expenditure in perilous budgetary times.

Keeping politicians and taxpayers from revolting isn’t Notre Dame’s problem, but would it kill the Irish to play three actual road games in what is projected to be a 55,000-seat stadium by 2009 to lend its Big East brother a hand? Isn’t that what the spirit of college sports is supposed to be about?

Everywhere, apparently, but Notre Dame, where there is continuing belief in past as prelude and where Grantland Rice is forever immortalizing the Four Horsemen against the blue-gray October sky at the Polo Grounds (where, in fact, 55,000 spectators watched the Irish upset Army, 13-7, on Oct. 18, 1924).

•

“In general, we want to play in those metropolitan, particularly Eastern, markets in large venues so that more of our fans can have access,” Kevin White, the Notre Dame athletic director, told The South Bend Tribune. “It makes sense to us because we have a zillion fans out east.

“We love Rutgers,” White said. “We’re really close to them. It doesn’t make sense for them. It makes sense for others. So we just moved on. I think we had somebody else in 10 seconds. We had an instant verbal, as they say in the business, a euphoric verbal.”

A euphoric sucker, born every minute, to help perpetuate the myth of Notre Dame’s storied transcendence, largely sustained these days by reruns of “Rudy” and a lucrative network television contract. Despite some in-state pressure by objecting politicians, Connecticut, also of the Big East, has agreed to play Notre Dame in a six-year series without the luxury of a home game at its publicly funded Rentschler Field.

Notre Dame may love Rutgers, but as soon as Mulcahy asked for a competitive campus edge every other season, a true partnership, Notre Dame went looking to leverage someone else.

•

Makes you wonder why the overcrowded Big East puts up with Notre Dame in the first place. If it regains its football prominence under Coach Charlie Weis, who reportedly has a throwback recruiting class to soothe the pain of the 3-9 debacle last fall, the Irish will have no reason to question the viability of remaining independent. If the losing continues to the point where a conference affiliation becomes the ultimate concession to contemporary reality, the Big Ten and its natural Midwest rivalries will be impossible to resist.

Good for Mulcahy, then, for not giving in, for getting this one right, even if he didn’t have much choice, considering he still has a stadium to upgrade.

On the ethical front, the team he calls the athletic department’s “flagship” also scored last week in the N.C.A.A.’s Academic Progress Report, as one of six Bowl Subdivision colleges to be rated in the top 10 percent of the study’s four-year cycle. The other ones were Duke, Stanford, Rice, Air Force and Navy.

“Good company,” Mulcahy said.

Notre Dame excluded.