The Irish Experience

In just three hours, I will embark on the Notre Dame gameday experience. A friend called yesterday with an extra ticket, and with pleasant weather on tap and no real commitments I gladly accepted the honor.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am, at best, ND Football ambivalent. Being born and raised in Badger football country where expectations are tempered by painfully realistic assesments of talent and opponents and there is no such thing as a bad bowl game, the Notre Dame football culture is very different.

For many ND faithful the expectations are for a National Championship or at the very least a BCS Bowl Game. A "down" season of 8-4 or 7-5 (which Badger fans would have killed for in the late 1980s) gets the coaching seat mildly uncomfortable.

High expectations often lead to impressive results and confidence is an admirable quality, but I can't help but think back to Bucky's three Rose Bowl seasons where they were the Rodney Dangerfield of the Big Ten. ESPN's Craig James proclaimed UW's 1998 team the "worst team to ever pay in a Rose Bowl" just prior its 38-31 victory over a Cade McNown-led UCLA team. (Note to Chicago Bears: Cade McNown got outplayed by Mike Samuel in the biggest game of his college career. It's called an omen.) Everyone loves an underdog, and it a measure of a great team in how it faces adversity.

So I am going for the full-pull of ND football: Tailgating, the campus experience and post game hoo-hah. My previous college football experiences include Michigan at UW in 1993 where a couple of students received severe injuries when the fans stormed the field (I was seated two sections over, thank god), Wash St.-ND in the early 2000s, and UW-IU in Bloomington last year, which was a bunch of fun and a great atmosphere in a mid-major setting, kind of college football-lite.

More on this later.