From the list of overachievers: #2 Boston College, which isn’t located in a prime recruiting area, is in a colder climate than any of the other teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference and has high academic and admission standards. But it has at least eight victories in each of the past five seasons…. We keep hearing that southern-based programs have an advantage. Yet the northern-most school in the south-heavy ACC has challenged for championships even though New England won’t rival Florida when it comes to producing prospects. BC also has usurped Notre Dame as the dominant Catholic program in college football, quite an accomplishment in itself. The Eagles are 47-17 over the past five years, and they’ve won their bowl in each of those years. In that span, BC has non-conference victories over Penn State (twice), BYU (twice) and Notre Dame (three times).
From the list of underachievers: #4 Notre Dame: Outstanding facilities, a nationwide fan base and its own TV deal. So how is it the Irish are coming off a three-win season? Yeah, the Irish won 10 in ‘06 and nine in ‘05, but then they were beaten handily in bowls by Ohio State and LSU. In South Bend, two losing seasons in the past five, a .500 finish in ‘04 and a 33-28 record since 2003 is akin to a straight-A student getting a “D” on a report card. That’s astonishingly poor for a program that posted no fewer than nine victories a year from 1988-93 and is the most celebrated in college football history.I look forward, with great eagerness, to the predictable posting explaining how Rivals.com is biased and their logic is flawed, etc. etc.
16 Comments until now
If you’re gonna reference an article and call out underachievers, at least include my alma mater at #2 when you point out that Notre Dame was #4:
2. Syracuse: The Carrier Dome isn’t the greatest venue and the fan support can be iffy, but the Orange went 10-3 as recently as 2001 and posted 15 consecutive winning seasons from 1987-2001. Yet in the past five seasons, Syracuse is 19-40 and has failed to post a winning record. The Orange’s lone bowl appearance in that span resulted in a 51-14 loss to Georgia Tech in the 2004 Champs Sports Bowl.
What do you want me to say, Bob?
This article is absolutely correct.
BC, by winning ZERO conference championships and playing in ZERO BCS Bowls and beating teams like Navy and Michigan State in the NobodyGivesACrap.com Bowl is WILDLY overachiveing.
Meanwhile, Notre Dame beating teams like Tennessee and Michigan and going to back-to-back BCS bowls has been a huge disappointment.
Really says a lot about each program.
Oh, since we are exploring teh Rivals website, let’s not forget to take a look at what they do best: recruting.
Notre Dame #2
BC #33
They are right, ND is underachieveing (should have been #1) and BC is WILDLY overachieving (they should be around 50).
Shoudda, coudda, woudda, huh?
So what you are saying is that using their reputation and resting on their laurels, the Flailing Irish are still suckering kids into spending four years a rustbelt cow pasture, but they are not getting results.
I guess we agree at last.
A buddy of mine sent this story to his relatives and then sent me an email regarding their responses in which he said “It amazes me how educated, grown men can become so vehement and defensive towards their son/nephew/cousin over a school that they did
not go to”.
And last I checked, ND hasn’t won any conference champaionships … oh, that’s right, the loyal members of the Big East don’t play in the Big East in their biggest draw marquee program. Why? Because they have their own TV contract.
But as BusinessWeek noted in article entitled “NBC: Blindsided by Notre Dame “NBC’s television ratings on these games have fallen so precipitously that negotiations for Notre Dame’s next TV deal may be affected. NBC currently pays the Fighting Irish $9 million a year to televise their home football games. The five-year, $45 million pact started with the 2006 season and runs through 2010. In the first year of the deal, when the Irish went 9-3, the average Nielsen rating for the broadcasts was 3.6. Last season, although Notre Dame improved to 10-2, the ratings slipped to 2.9. The Golden Domers lost nine of their first ten games this season. This year, with the Golden Dome tarnished to the tune of a 3-9 mark, the ratings were a humbling 1.8. According to the article, “NBC has had to give loads of free ads (known as make-goods) to companies like Allstate and Proctor & Gamble to justify the $55,000-$80,000 rates for a 30-second ad.”
I also got a laugh out of the “my team has lost better bowls than your team has won” argument. That’s a hoot. Gotta love that 13-15 bowl record. I guess that comes from using overblown public relations and a deluded fan base to get into bowls in which you have no business playing.
I guess every sports blog has a deluded Notre Dame fan.
Cruiser- would love to hear your thoughts as to why BC is 5-0 vs ND since ‘01. was that “overachieving” as well?
Wow Bobby, I knew Fredo fans were obsessed, but this is downright pathological obsessin/inferiority complex. Not a week goes by that you don’t post a thread or respond to one and go out of your way to rippingf ND. Do you stay up at night thinking about the school you calim to not care about?
The answer to your question, actually, is no. ND doesn’t get into better bowls than Fredo based on overblown PR and deluded fans. It gets in for two reasons. First and foremost, ND gets in based on being the most popular team in amateur sports, period. Second, they get in because they are usually better than BC. BC comes in 3rd or 4th in the worst conference in America (old Big East or new ACC) while ND goes 9-3 against a top-15 schedule.
eagles04, welcome to the party. The 0-5 record is certainly regretable. I’m not going to make excuses. Fredo has had the better team all 5 years. I do notice that BC wasn’t on the schedule both years we went to the BCS under Weis, so timing has had something to do with it. Also, Tom O’Brien was a great coach who got all he could out of BC despite its “limitations”. ND, meanwhile, was under the stewadship of our two worst coaches in decades, Davie and Willigham. We’ll see what happens this year. Let’s also not forget that BC has an all-time losing record against ND. Despite winning 5 in a row, I laugh at Bobby’s claim that BC has surpassed ND as the dominant Catholic program in America.
I laugh at Notre Dame’s 3-9 season and that fantastic bowl streak. Get a life domer.
I never understood the Fredo reference from Notre Dame fans. It somehow pertains to a lack of loyalty to a conference that Notre Dame doesn’t fully belong to in the first place?
Mike/Cruiser, you wrote “I laugh at Bobby’s claim that BC has surpassed ND as the dominant Catholic program in America.” That wasn’t my claim, it is the opinion of Olin Buchanan, the Senior College Football Writer at Rivals.com. Both the BC and ND paragraphs are direct quotes. Feel free to laugh at Rivals.com if you want, but you seem to agree with them when they say good things about the school in the cornfield.
As I have said before, generally, actual alumni of BC and ND have a lot of respect for each other. The only disagreement I think BC folks have with domers is their misguided belief that everyone deep down really wanted to go to school in the middle of Indiana. It’s the non-alumni fans we think are nuts.
When did I say I “don’t care” about Notre Dame? I do care about them. I think the preferred treatment they get based on factors unrelated to performance is unfair to everyone else in the sport. I think the $9 million gift from NBC that allows them to snub the Big East and get treatment from the BCS unlike any other independent is unfair. You always talk about their schedule. Well guess what? Almost any top-25 program could assemble a great schedule if they got an annual $9 media gift rather than needing a conference payout. Hey, if they were good, you’d have a point. But as you point out, the Davie, Willingham and now Weiss eras seem to have dragged this return to glory out for 15 years.
Lots of people besides BC fans find the continual over-rating and over-ranking and hype surrounding Notre Dame football to be an irritant. It isn’t obsession and certainly is not an inferiority complex. It is difficult not to notice a faded-glory program that has ranged from awful to pretty good for two decades but still gets treated as if they were the power they were when coached by Knute Rockne in the 1920s, or former BC coach Frank Lahey in the 1950s. Everyone who is fed up with them is not obsessed or saddled with a pathological inferiority complex. We are just realists who happen to be college football fans. Even the character of Homer Simpson has made these same observations.
By the way, the more you write, the more you prove my points, e.g. “ND doesn’t get into better bowls than [BC] based on overblown PR and deluded fans…. ND gets in based on being the most popular team in amateur sports…” You say popularity, I say “overblown PR and deluded fans”, same thing.
Okay Bobby, call it what you want.
But I don’t hear fans of FSU, Miami, Oklahoma, Nebraska, UConn, UNC, Florida, LSU, Bama, Auburn, UCLA, Oregon, Minnesota, Penn State, etc harping about ND . . . only Fredo.
And I agree hat everyone who isn’t an ND fan is jealous of the special perks and advantages ND enjoys, but no other group of fans/alumni are so singularly possessed. If I go on any BC blog or message board at any time of the year, there is ALWAYS a thread about Notre Dame, always. Not true for SC, Michigan, Ohio State, etc.
Also, YOU, who on this blog at least represents Fredo, post more about Notre Dame than you do your own school. This is my point entirely.
As for what you call “overblown PR and deluded fans,” that’s your jealous opinion. The FACT is that most ND subway alumni are sons and grandsons of Notre Dame subway alumni. They are Catholics from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago who experienced anti-Cathlic bias and bigotry, and gravitated to the teams of Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian, and Holtz as symbols of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.
Your “team,” meanwhile isn’t even the most popular college or football team in its own city, can’t fill a JV-sized 44,000 (chuckle) capacity stadium, and doesn’t have enough fans to support the team farther south than North Attleboro.
As for the Fredo Newbies, it appears Bobby has invited some of the Blue Blazer crowd from the Heights to visit our little blog. Welcome boys, but be warned, we usually only discuss teams that win an occasional championship.
Actually, I had nothing to do with the new readers and I don’t know who they are. As usual, Friar Mike Cruiser makes statements and accusations first, and checks facts later — or never.
To my fellow members of what our Notre Dame-loving alumnus of Providence College calls the “Blue Blazer crowd from the Heights” (gee, that sound like jealousy, huh?), welcome.
You have probably already guessed that Friar Mike is a non-alumnus ND fan. All BC students and alumni have to endure these prototype clones in droves so I am sure you will find a lot of “deja vu all over again” going on here.
Although Friar Mike has pompously announced what “we” discuss here, he is not the arbiter of this sports forum. In fact, he makes most of the regulars nuts, and is ignored by several. Personally, I am amused by the eternal argumentative spirit and never-ending depth of passion that non-Notre Dame alumni have for Cowpasture College’s football program.
Speaking of Friar Mike’s custom of not checking facts — a weird habit for a lawyer (then again maybe not) — Boston College is by all quantitative measures (TV ratings, attire & licensed products sold, ticket sales) the most popular college sports program in metro Boston and eastern New England. There are two NESN television shows “Boston College Sports Weekly” and “Boston College Football Weekly” with major corporate sponsorship, sports radio segments all over the place, and Fenway Sports Group manages the program’s promotion. We’ve been down this road before. Even in the Providence market, more people watch Boston College sports events annually than either URI or Providence College events.
I’d suggest that he check the ratings, but facts never actually have a bearing on his passionate ill-informed arguments. He always argues that Boston College is inferior because it shares one of the nation’s great sports cities with the World Champion Boston Red Sox, and perennial Super Bowl contending New England Patriots — instead of being the only game in a rust-belt crime center, or the only team in an insurance capitol with a third rate TV market. If you look at TV ratings, no one in southwestern Connecticut, which is in the New York market, gives a damn about UConn.
Finally, the idea of a Providence and UConn alumnus making fun of BC’s Alumni Stadium is comical. PC doesn’t have football and UConn built its stadium by giving a whopping tax write off to a corporation for the land and sticking the taxpayer with the bill. Alumni Stadium is located in Chestnut Hill, second only to Stanford and Palo Alto as the most expensive location of a college in America. The fact that BC could build a stadium with better scoreboards, sound and concessions than Notre Dame on multi-million dollar an acre land without public funding is testament to the passion of its fans and donors.
Getting back to Blue Blazer jealousy, Providence may not have a Brooks Brothers, but they have a Nordstrom’s now. So if the Friars are jealous of the Eagles’ sartorial choices, maybe Friar Mike might direct them to the Providence Place Mall.
By the way, this isn’t true eithe: “Also, YOU, who on this blog at least represents Fredo, post more about Notre Dame than you do your own school. This is my point entirely.” I presume that counting is a pre-requisite for both PC and UConn, so you might try it next time.
I post about BC all the time, I have only posted a handful of items about ND, but I do respond to your flawed arguments regularly.
Okay Bobby, whatever you say. You are so often wrong, contradictory, and hypocritical, it’s comical.
Kep on sounding your trumpet for the littel football team who couldn’t. I’m sure it makes you very happy.
I’ll just keeping watching my team and hopefuly we’ll beat you guys this fall.
Meh. Same stuff as usual.
As a ND grad, I need to say a few things:
1) It is a rivalry. ND doesn’t treat this game like Stanford, and BC doesn’t treat this game like UMass.
2) ND fans/alumni need to cool it with any superiority thing when we’re down. Just tone it down a notch and let the results do the talking. Save the big stuff for when we’re on top again.
3) Boston College fans/alumni try way too hard to make it seem like they’re *not* in competition with Notre Dame. No need for the charade; it’s plenty obvious. It may not apply to all, but it applies to 3/4 of the population.
Add your Comment!