Notre Dame’s outrage isn't about football, just historic and misplaced entitlement
Is it Catholicism, itself?
We’ve all seen “Spotlight.”
And if you’ve been reading the news, you might know the Archdiocese of New York is raising $300 million to settle about 1,300 sexual-misconduct claims involving priests and other church personnel dating back to 1952.
You might even be thinking the nation’s largest archdiocese may get off cheap, what with the Los Angeles archdiocese paying $880 million to settle more than a thousand claims and the New Orleans archdiocese agreeing to pay $305 million to about 600.
Not to mention, Oklahoma City’s archdiocese and the diocese of Tulsa only recently gave up trying to rewrite both the Oklahoma and U.S. constitutions, hoping to create a public Catholic school, a years-long effort that not only threatened separation of church and state in this country, but put them in league with Ryan Walters, too.
Talk about poor judgment and needing a shower.
Where does that kind of arrogance and entitlement comes from.
To condone and cover up the worst type of abuse; to decide, sure, why not, who cares about 236 years of American history if the state can pay us millions for what we’ve only previously charged individuals; to believe you belong in the College Football Playoff even though the system is the system is the system, just because you’re Notre Dame and beat a bunch of bad teams on your bad schedule.
Wait, where did you think this column was going?
Because it’s so unbecoming.
Or, just maybe, a small illustration of the too-righteous-to-be-wrong, too-great-to-be-questioned self-aggrandizing it takes to not only look the other way at molestation or challenge the constitutional order of a great nation, but to believe you deserve whatever you want on the gridiron just because everybody’s heard of South Bend, Indiana.
That last bit’s been Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua since the Irish were left in the College Football Playoff’s green room.
“Everybody was saying that we were one of a handful of teams that could win this whole thing and now we have a zero percent chance,” Bevacqua told the great Dan Patrick on Monday. “Even Nick Saban … nobody knows more about college football, maybe in the history of the world, than Nick Saban … said it yesterday, ‘How is Notre Dame not in this?’”
Saban didn’t actually say that.
What he said was, “I just think there was one team left out that I just don’t think should have been left out some kind of way, but there’s no way around it.”
There’s no way around it because, as mentioned, the system is the system and the Irish were left out because somebody had to be and they, more than others, deserved to be.
But Bevacqua did not stop there and here is where it became comical.
“We have no gripes about any of the schools in the ACC, but we’re mystified by the actions of the conference,” he said. “To attack their biggest business partner in football, and a member of their conference in 24 other sports … I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say that they have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame.”
Yet the ACC took no “shots” at the Irish at all.
Or, at least, no more than it took at James Madison, hoping to get Duke into the playoff after winning the ACC title game; and no more than it took at Alabama, hoping to plug Miami in front of the Tide after it lost the SEC championship to Georgia; the same way it attempted to elevate Miami over Notre Dame, given one of them might be the playoff’s last team in and the Hurricanes beat the Irish on Aug. 31.
It’s called campaigning and it wasn’t even negative campaigning, just contrasting campaigning.
What did Bevacqua expect the ACC to do? Not lobby for its teams?
Like he wanted all the advantages and all the goodwill of being an ACC team without being an ACC team, which the Irish surely aren’t, because lacrosse, field hockey, swimming and fencing … and basketball, too … are not football.
Sorry, Charlie.
While Bevacqua’s crybaby antics are unseemly, the disingenuousness attached to them is insufferable.
Because the case for the Irish couldn’t be more simple or incomplete:
We belong, we belong, we belong because we belong, we belong, we belong.
The scaffolding of which is no more stable than that presented in an unfortunate and viral psychology essay penned by University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky, the thesis of which was God-said-this, God-ordained-that, God-demands-this, all without specifically cited sources, just a gesture toward a good, if chronically disputed, book.
They’re arguments built on invisible houses of cards, counterpoints to nothing; because for Notre Dame to seriously proclaim it belongs, it must also tell us who doesn’t, but it hasn’t.
If it’s an injustice the Irish are out, it must also be an injustice somebody else is in.
Oklahoma, which can’t move the ball? Alabama, which lost a third game? Miami, who beat them?
But it hasn’t.
It’s all Notre Dame belongs because it’s Notre Dame, which is patently ridiculous, even under the Golden Dome; even under the gaze of Football Jesus; even though Paul Hornung won the ’56 Heisman on a two-win Irish team; even though Grantland Rice, 101 years ago, declared quarterback Harry Stuhldreher and running backs Jim Crowley, Don Miller and Elmer Layden to be the real Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse after a 13–7 Irish victory over Army.
As for Fulnecky, maybe if she’d presented, quoted or cited her source material rather than simply saying it’s so and remembered to mention what she was disagreeing with so strongly along the way.
“Everybody is just kind of confused and perplexed,” Bevacqua said, “and we don’t have good answers for our kids on our team.”
For Christ’s sake.
He’s not confused at all.
A fallible system, led by a fallible committee, that fallibly communicated through the latter half of the season — because a five-loss Duke team won the ACC title, and because Miami beat Notre Dame in August — when it was all over, spit the correct 12 teams into the bracket and somebody was always going to be the first team out and this time it was Notre Dame.
What’s so hard to understand?
“It raised a lot of eyebrows here that the conference was taking shots at us,” Bevacqua said.
But it wasn’t.
It was advocating for its teams, which should not only be easy to understand, but expected.
Unless you’re Notre Dame, bathed in self-virtue, blind to your own weaknesses.
The church that made the university possible is finally, finally, finally doing the right things.
Too bad that same self-awareness has yet to reach campus.