The Downside of Being An ND Fan

I've been a Notre Dame fan all my life. Barring the immediate canonization of Jimmy Johnson and the hiring of Dennis Erickson as University President, I always will be an ND fan. I grew up in a small town in Michigan as one of the only Irish boosters in town - and the rest were pretty much all in my family.

Upon leaving Alma, MI, for the ivy-covered confines of Notre Dame's campus for my collegiate experiences, I lifted myself out of the mire of constant deriding for my NCAA favorites and joined an, I feel, elite group of sports fans. Notre Dame is nearly unique in the world of college football by being an independent and loving it. Naturally, it's one of the few schools that can afford to be independent by nature of its history on the field. As the team with the greatest winning percentage in the history of the game, the money does keep rolling in for this program, whether from boosters who love the school for academic or spiritual reasons, or from $12 million bowl game payouts.

I love Notre Dame football exactly the way it is. I would NEVER want ND to join a conference and remove itself from the ability to basically pick its own schedule. Notre Dame has a set of rivals that has grown over time and history. Southern California, Michigan, Michigan State, Navy (yes, as lame as that rivalry is these days, there's still a lot of history behind it), Miami, all these rivalries grew out of Notre Dame continually trying to find the best schools against which to pit its young men. Some of them go into and out of fashion, depending on who the top teams at any given period of time are (example: Miami), but some will last forever - USC and Michigan being the two most fierce.

But that very independence is what makes it hard to be a Notre Dame fan, as well. As they have rightly shucked aside attempts by the NCAA to force them into a conference, the only thing ND fans have to root for is the mythical national championship of college football. And when that possibility goes away, the rest of the season is left feeling a little bit empty. Sure, we can hope for a top 10 finish, and a major bowl game at the end of the season, but other teams have other things to shoot for as well: conference championships and the like. It can help to turn what might seem like a disappointing early letdown into a win of sorts when a team can lose early and then rally in their conference season to win their group's title.

Don't get me wrong, nothing will stop me from watching more ND football - ever. But without that title to shoot for.... is something missing? Perhaps.

And perhaps that loss of a goal stems from the fact that the college football championship is just that: mythical. There's not any true playoff with which to whittle away at the teams who survive at the end of the long season. Teams can pad their schedules with the likes of Northern Illinois, Cincinnati, Vanderbilt, Alabama-Birmingham, etc., and get into a bowl game. If a conference is weak, then that just makes it easier for a team to move on, a la West Virginia this season.

Tough to say. Anyway, I spent the evening after the ND loss to Michigan on Saturday watching old Justice League cartoons ad nauseum and that cheered me up somewhat. Now I'm thoughtful and melancholy about the situation, rather than just a brooding bastard.