Dan Devine is the one I really feel sorry for. He was nice enough to let Rudy (who wasn’t even a real player) into a game, and what was his reward? To be presented as the villain in a movie!
To be fair Rich didn’t get the chance to coach most of the high ranked guys. Henne, Jake long, Manningham, Arrington, Breston,Hart, Mallet, Shawn Crable,and Justin Boren were the heart of those high Lloyd Carr rankings. The only good recruits Rich got to use were Donovan Warren, Branden Graham and Steve Shillings were the only high recruits left and They were used to the best of their abilities.
There isn’t a program in the country that should accept “we want to be in the top 20” as a goal.
Nobody does. This is a completely new thing for all of us, but simmer down, have a latte, and show some patience.
As a goal, sure. As an expectation, though? That’s the point.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have “we should be in the top 10 consistently, and be in a position to challenge for the Nat’l Championship every couple years” as an expectation for Irish fans.
As realistic as that might be, chance being what it is, there’s not much point in a football coach managing expectations like that, anywhere really, but especially at a big boosterish program like ND. If a coach was to set a public goal like that he’d take a load of criticism off the bat and then would not really buy himself anything on the back end if he is not a wild success.
Big-time college programs run on hope plus the fuzziness that is introduced into the definition of success by conferences and the rankings and BCS. But it’s hard to imagine a preseason top-25 coach that would say, yeah, you know we hope to finish with less than three losses to ranked teams. Does it ever happen? What would be the point?
I do.
What are your expectations for Michigan every year?
To do the same as they have , for they get amazing athletes and perform well.
How do you define or evaluate “perform well”?
And that speaks volumes to where Notre Dame thinks it is compared to where it is. Other smallish schools with competitive academics would probably see that as a reasonable long-term goal. They know they are not going to compete for titles every year because they can’t get the same caliber players year in and year out. Notre Dame has more money and tradition, but the fact that Knute Rocke coached there decades ago is not winning them games today.
Their record without Lou Holtz does not reflect that. They have been in the year-end top ten only one time in the last 15 years. Part of that is bad hiring, but part of it is that they do not occupy the kind of dominant position that would let them reach the top ten or better every year. Why didn’t Urban Meyer go to Notre Dame a few years ago, and why are some of the other coaches who are supposedly in the running for this job staying put? I think a lot of it is that they don’t want to get fired in a few years for not reaching unrealistic expectations.
Well, they win football games. I’d prefer them to win more of those football games than they lose.
Yet I didn’t mention once in that statement whether ND is meeting that goal, or is even close to that goal. It doesn’t speak a single syllable as to where ND thinks it is. ND and their fans know very much where they are right now. It seems every blogger and sports writer out there is more than happy to overinflate what they think ND thinks or its fans think without actually providing any quotes.
My favorite has to be the dozens of “Notre Dame is irrelevant” articles I’ve seen. Yup - nothing says “irrelevant” like constant attention.
You understand the difference between expecations and results, right, and how they rarely coincide? Ever heard the phrase “aim for the stars you might hit the moon”?
So at the end of a 7-6 season you’d be happy? That’s your only expectation of the Wolverines? “Welp, it’s been a good season. Too bad Texas is going to overtake our all-time winning percentage and all-times win record in a few years - but we went 7-6, you just can’t ask for more than that.”? Really?
Yep.
No, I’m completely fucking with you. I want to see Michigan win every game, but that doesn’t happen for anyone, even Michigan.
Notre Dame is largely irrelevant as far as national championships go. It’s relevant because the old people that are writing about it and bitching about its relevancy still remember something about Notre Dame. The recruits? Not so much.
Point is that that’s a logical or even lofty goal for a lot of programs. All 119 schools could say they want to win multiple championships, but wouldn’t that be bullshit for 80-plus percent of them?
Your point is well taken. It’s fine to set this as a goal. If they decide anything less than those results is insufficient, that would be unrealistic.
Of course not. But what are your reasonable expectations at the beginning of the season? I had (what I believed to be) reasonable expectations of the Irish going 9-3 this season. A loss to USC and possibly Pittsburgh, and something random happening. No one saw us losing to Navy (again) or UConn. Before the season began, losing to Stanford was out of the question as well.
Any given year, there are only, at most, 7 or 8 teams that are relevant as far as national championships. But an argument can be made preseason for at least 20 of them (12-15 of those arguments being of the “a lot needs to happen for Texas Tech this year…” variety). It is not unreasonable to put ND in that 20.
Hence, our disagreement. Notre Dame might get a year or two or sneak into the discussion, but I don’t buy that they can become a perennial top-5 or top-10 powerhouse. I respect the reason that I feel that way (their academic standards), but it shuts them out of getting a lot of prospects.