Notre Dame Has Yet Another Huge Opportunity To Show It Belongs
Here we are again, Notre Dame football was yet another opportunity to show it belongs on the big stage. When the Fighting Irish take the field against No. 1 Alabama in the Rose Bowl it will mark the third time in head coach Brian Kelly’s 11 seasons that Notre Dame enters the postseason with a chance to win a national title.
It is also yet another opportunity for Notre Dame to face one of the nation’s elite teams in hopes of putting together a performance that shows it belongs on this stage. Notre Dame lost the two previous matchups in blowout fashion, losing to the Tide by a 42-14 score back in the 2012 BCS national title game and 30-3 to Clemson in a 2018 semi-final game.
This game is an opportunity to put its previous embarrassing performances on a similar stage in the rearview.
Including this season’s win over then No. 1 ranked Clemson, Notre Dame is just 3-14 under Kelly in games against opponents that finished the season ranked in the top 10. Since the post-2016 makeover the Irish are just 1-4 against opponents that finished ranked in the top 10, thanks to its Nov. 7 win over Clemson. All five of those opponents were top five squads.
I include Clemson because the Tigers are guaranteed of finishing in the top 10 after earning a playoff bid. Of course, the win over Clemson on Nov. 7 now has an asterisk after the Irish were throttled by the Tigers in the ACC title game.
Georgia and Clemson are the only top 10 opponents Notre Dame has faced in the last four seasons, and the Irish have twice lost to the Bulldogs and have lost twice to Clemson. While both losses to Georgia were competitive (20-19 in 2017, 23-17 in 2019), both losses to Clemson were blowouts (30-3 in 2018, 34-10 in 2020).
Both losses to Georgia were early regular season games. The two blowout losses to Clemson were with something big on the line. The matchup in 2018 was a semi-final game and the loss last weekend was with the ACC title on the line.
Those losses on the big stage continued a decades long trend of Notre Dame getting embarrassed in the biggest moments.
It wasn’t that long ago that Clemsoning was synonymous with losing, and now the Tigers are in their sixth straight playoff and will look to win their third title in five years. Notre Dame will get over the hump at some point, and its trend of embarrassing big stage losses will end at some point. The question now is does it end with Kelly at the helm, and can it end now.
Notre Dame enters its matchup against Alabama as the biggest underdog in playoff history, at almost three touchdowns. No one expects Notre Dame to even be competitive in this game, much less win it. There is zero pressure on Notre Dame at this point, and the Irish are such big underdogs that simply being in a competitive game would be considered a great achievement.
The opportunity is there for Notre Dame to get the monkey off its back, but it will need a truly Herculean effort to make that happen. But if Notre Dame does in fact pull off the upset it will completely silence the critics of Kelly and quarterback Ian Book, and it will give the Irish something it hasn’t had in almost three decades, a huge victory on the game’s biggest stage, which would announce Notre Dame as a true elite program for what is doing now, not what it did in decades past.
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