The 2013 BCS National Championship. H. Brandt Ayers

Notre Dame

      The perfection and popularity of the forward pass—and the rise of Notre Dame as a football power—can be traced to a summer on an Ohio beach. There, a Norwegian immigrant and Notre Dame left end named Knute Rockne was lifeguard. He and his roommate, All-American quarterback Gus Dorais, spent the summer creating a forward pass tandem. Rockne’s path to fame was no series of summers on the beach. His father, a small-town Norwegian wagonmaker, immigrated to Chicago when Knute was five. To earn enough money to enroll at Notre Dame, Knute worked as a dispatcher for the post office until he was 22.

      That summer’s games of pass and catch between roommates was put to effective use in the fall. On Nov. 1, 1913, Coach Jesse Harper used the newly minted tandem against heavily favored Army. The threat of Dorais-to-Rockne deep passes kept Army from crowding the line of scrimmage. Dorais was 12 of 14 for 243 yards as a confused Army team went down 35-14.

      After Rockne abandoned a career in chemistry to coach the Irish, yet another Army game was transfigured into the hall of legends. The team had fallen behind Army 6-0. At halftime Rockne reminded the team of the fabled George Gipp, who died of strep throat in 1920, two weeks after being named Notre Dame’s second consensus All-American. Coach Rockne told his team what the Gipp had said on his deathbed: “I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are going wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.” An inspired team outscored Army in the second half and won 12-6.

      In Rockne’s 13 years coaching the Irish his record was 105 to 12, with 5 ties and three national championships. He was a national figure who, when he died in a plane crash at 43, was mourned by President Hoover and whose funeral was attended by a personal representative of Norway’s King Haakon VII. Yet, through some strange spiritual transference, his story is associated more today with actor-cum-President Ronald Reagan who played the lead in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. Reagan took possession of “The Gipper” nickname because of his emotional rendering of Rockne’s locker room speech in the film.

      Also now forgotten are the Notre Dame teams of Frank Leahy, 1941-53 with a won-loss percentage of .864, and Ara Parseghian, 1964-74 whose winning percentage of .836 had not been matched until now. A pall of mediocrity for two decades obscured Rockne’s successor teams. Notre Dame had not won a title in 20 years or ranked in the top 10 until the 2012 season. This year it joined the ACC, a conference noted more for its basketball teams, but maintained partial independence in football so it could still line up against such regional powerhouses as the Purdue Boilermakers.

      Notre Dame’s glory in the early decades of collegiate football has been rekindled by a new, winning coach hired in December 2011. The 47-year-old Brian Kelly was 34-6 in three seasons at Cincinnati, leading the Bearcats to back-to-back Big East titles and two straight Bowl Championship Series berths. Before Kelly arrived to boost Notre Dame to its No. 1 AP ranking, the flickering memory of the Irish of yore was kept alive mainly by a continuing NBC contract to televise its home games.