A Look of Concern

Notre Dame has won two consecutive games to square its record at 3-3, which is fine if you’re the University of Podunk but the last thing a school with 11 national titles and its own network television deal is going to celebrate.

Three and three?

In 110 years, Notre Dame has posted seasons of one defeat or fewer 48 times.

Clawing back to 3-3 at Notre Dame is good news only because it means you didn’t fall to 2-4. It is a reprieve, a commercial break during “Jerry Springer;” for the coach, a wave of nausea that passes.

Three and three at Notre Dame puts you closer to 4-3 but not far enough from the grisly reminder of what almost was.

You should have been here Oct. 2, when Notre Dame was 1-3 and trailed Oklahoma in the third quarter, 30-14.

“People were smelling blood,” Jim Gibson, a Notre Dame student, recalled. “Bob Davie’s neck was on the line. It could have gotten real, real ugly.”

Davie, the third-year coach, slipped that noose, as Notre Dame rallied to victory and bottled enough emotional runoff to whip Arizona State last weekend, 48-17.

But 3-3 is not why players play here, not why coaches coach here, not why the faithful flock to South Bend in recreational vehicles, not why they count the days until USC games.

It is not why some students go to school here.

“Three losses is not what I signed up for,” Gibson, a 21-year-old American Studies major, said.

Yet, in the perhaps most turbulent stretch in Notre Dame history, 3-3 is, absurdly, a starting point.

Yes, the team is up against it, Gipp, and the breaks are beating the boys.

“We want to be remembered as the team that had our backs against the corner and came out swinging,” receiver Bobby Brown said after Saturday’s win.

Notre Dame is down, Gipp, and half the country is hoisting banana daiquiris.

“We’re like the Yankees,” Athletic Director Mike Wadsworth says of the love-hate relationship.

The boys are up against it, Gipp, and the network bosses are mulling the overnights.

NBC blew the socks off the sporting world in 1991 when it made Notre Dame a weekly television show, looking like geniuses in 1993 when Florida State-Notre Dame drew an astounding 16.0 share.

But this is now.

Ratings for Notre Dame football have declined each of the last four seasons: 4.8 in 1995, 3.4 in ‘96, 3.0 in ’97 and 2.9 in ’98. That hasn’t stopped the network from re-upping on the deal, estimated at $7 million a season for the Irish, through the 2005 season.

“There has never been any rush to panic if the ratings start to slip a bit,” NBC spokesman Ed Markey said. “If you look at the history of the football program there, even when they’ve had down cycles, they’ve always come back with extended periods of success.”

Notre Dame is down, boys, and we have the numbers to prove it.

The Irish have not won a national title since 1988, have not been ranked No. 1 since 1993, have produced only one first-round NFL pick, Renaldo Wynn in 1997, since 1994.

With 42, the Irish still had more NFL players on opening-day rosters than any other college--a tribute to Lou Holtz’s talent hauls in the late 1980s and early ‘90s--but boast only seven top-100 choices in a four-year period from 1996 through ’99.

In 1998, the Philadelphia Eagles took cornerback Allen Rossum with the 85th pick.

He was the only Notre Dame player selected.

“The mystique is always there,” Chicago recruiting guru Tom Lemming said of Notre Dame. “But sometimes it is sleeping. I notice when I talk to a kid, the mere mention of Notre Dame gets them excited--not the football team--just the mention of Notre Dame.”

WHAT LUCK?

The boys are up against it, Gipp, and the clock is ticking.

The Irish are 19-12 under Davie. Gerry Faust’s first 31 games as Notre Dame coach? He was 17-13-1.

The leprechaun must have been snoozing during three excruciating losses this season, all to neighboring Big Ten teams. Notre Dame ran out of time against Michigan, botched two plays from the goal line in a last-second loss to Purdue and surrendered a long, late touchdown to Michigan State in defeat.

A joke culled from the Internet: Do the Irish have a two-minute offense?

Yes, but it takes four minutes.

Yet, Wadsworth preempted a stampede on Davie’s office by extending his contract two years through 2003.

Wadsworth said, “This is the coach we want, who brings the values we want and who will bring the success we want.”

Will bring? Since when has Notre Dame operated in the future tense?

This year, the Irish were eliminated from a $13-million bowl championship series bowl game on . . . Sept. 18.

Notre Dame is down, boys, and the NCAA is dangling like the sword of Damocles.

For the first time, the Irish face possible major sanctions by the NCAA over a tawdry affair during which a former paramour of some players, Kimberly Dunbar, embezzled money from her South Bend employer and lavished Irish players with trips and gifts.

The NCAA investigating staff recommended only secondary violations but the Committee on Infractions will have the final say. Last summer, the Chicago Tribune reported that Irish officials were bracing for the worst.

The Dunbar contretemps followed on the heels of Joe Moore’s humiliating trial in 1997, during which the former line coach aired hampers full of dirty laundry in his successful age-discrimination lawsuit against Notre Dame.

No matter what the NCAA decides on the Dunbar matter, or how tangential her illegal affairs may be tied to the facts at hand, the damage has been done.

“The off-the-field issues are deeply embarrassing to us as a university because they are counter to what values we believe in as a Catholic institution,” Wadsworth said.

COMING ‘ROUND THE BEND

Notre Dame is down, boys . . . but does it matter?

The people still come in droves, the Hanrattys, Youngs, O’Learys and Dwyres. They come in pilgrimage on home-game Friday mornings, in parties of three and five, in jackets of blue and gold.

They buy tickets to the coach-hosted noon luncheon at the Joyce Center and pick at petrified pork as they soak up soliloquies and inspiration.

They move upstairs to Notre Dame Sports Heritage Hall, and file solemnly by an exhibit of Knute Rockne that displays a wing piece and gas cap from the mangled plane, a TWA Fokker F-10A, in which the legendary coach was killed March 31, 1931.

They attend mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and take their kids, adorned in No. 3 Notre Dame jerseys, to light candles at the grotto.

No matter the state of Notre Dame, this remains the quintessential college football experience.

Mediocrity does not affect gate receipts. Saturday’s victory over Arizona State was the 146th consecutive sellout at Notre Dame Stadium, the 16th since it was expanded from 59,075 seats to 80,012.

But it’s almost as though an evil gremlin, like a computer virus, has penetrated the inner sanctum.

At last Friday’s luncheon, a highlight montage of Irish wide receivers was aborted when the video tape malfunctioned, leaving Davie to ad lib, “You’ll have to take our word for it, the receivers are playing well.”

At Friday night’s pep rally, before a crowd of 8,000 or so, the leprechaun mascot, hosting festivities, committed an unpardonable faux pas when he introduced the family of former Notre Dame coach “Ara Par-say-gun.”

IRISH WAYS

Notre Dame is down, boys, but maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.

Wadsworth denies it’s a slam-dunk that the NCAA will hand down major sanctions.

“That is rumor,” he said. “We don’t know what to expect. All we know is that it’s in the hands of the NCAA.”

Any close examination of the case leads one to believe that even if the NCAA hits Notre Dame hard, it will be in name only.

Whereas the Dunbar episode has been embarrassing, to say the least, university culpability is another matter. The Dunbar matter is only an NCAA concern because she bought a $25 membership in a now defunct Quarterbacks Club, which made her a “booster” in the eyes of the NCAA.

Wadsworth says Dunbar did some of her gift-giving before she paid her $25.

“There are elements of the story that have salacious details, which make it embarrassing but don’t necessarily have anything to do with NCAA issues,” Wadsworth said.

The case against Notre Dame doesn’t appear to warrant sanctions anywhere near those levied earlier this decade against Alabama and Miami, schools that were hit with heavy scholarship reductions and postseason bans.

The hedge is that Notre Dame may lose a few scholarships and some player visitation days.

The mystery is why the NCAA decision, which was expected last summer, has dragged on through the season. Jack Friedenthal, chairman of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, said late last month that the delay had nothing to do with the school involved being Notre Dame.

A final ruling from the NCAA has also been delayed because the Irish in September reported three more possible rules violations.

NBC says it is not concerned how possible NCAA sanctions will affect the network’s unique contract with the school.

“We stand by our partners,” Markey said.

Oh. Kim Dunbar, sentenced to four years in September 1998, after pleading guilty to felony theft charges, will be released from prison next Sunday.

STAR SEARCH

Notre Dame is up against it, boys, but it may not have one foot in the grave.

When Wadsworth arrived in 1995, he was shocked to find the Irish had only 72 players on scholarship--the NCAA limit is 85--because a number of players had transferred out of the program.

In 1997, Bob Davie’s first year as coach, 40% of the football-playing senior class was gone.

Wadsworth has denied the oft-told story that Notre Dame recruiting dropped dramatically because the university raised academic standards in the early 1990s.

“That’s an excuse,” Wadsworth said, “absolutely a myth.”

The talent level did fall off in Holtz’s last years and the school is just now getting back in the race.

Lemming, the respected recruiting analyst, ranked this year’s freshman class as fourth-best in the country.

“They still have more talent than 90% of the teams in the country,” Lemming said. “They lost to Purdue, but there’s not one player on the Purdue team that Notre Dame offered a scholarship to. It’s true. What does that tell you?”

Lemming says the Irish still aren’t landing the premiere players they recruited in the late 1980s, when they challenged Miami and Florida State for college football supremacy.

“They seem to be settling for real good players, but not difference makers,” he said.

The Irish have already received an oral commitment from Matt Lovecchio, a quarterback from Bergen Catholic High in Oradell, N.J., and are in the hunt on eight of the top 10 high school prospects in the country.

“But they may not get them,” Lemming warned.

END GAME

The breaks are against the boys, Gipp, but you know it’s not forever.

Davie’s team could have called it quits this season after a 1-3 start, but the Irish have gone forward despite heavy artillery fire.

“I’m not giving up on the guy,” Gibson, the Irish senior, said of Davie. “Everyone knows he’s upgraded the talent. I just want to see the sense that he loves Notre Dame. You know it’s important to him, but he’s got to show he loves Notre Dame.”

Davie, who can appear robotic, perhaps showed it best Sept. 19, the Sunday morning after his team had fallen to 1-3 in the home loss to Michigan State.

The season was already a disaster, and Davie had to ask himself the hard questions.

“Why did you lose? How did you lose?” he recalled of his soul search. “It was just not listening to a whole lot of outside conversation, just focus on your football team, and your coaches and players. Try to solve problems. . . .

“There’s no magic to it. It’s first of all having enough confidence, I guess, in yourself.”

In their last two wins, the Irish have not committed a turnover.

With a victory in South Bend against the Trojans on Saturday and another against Navy on Oct. 30, Notre Dame will be 5-3 before a showdown Nov. 6 against Tennessee in Knoxville.

A win there and, who knows, maybe Notre Dame is back in the football business.

Notre Dame is down, boys, but you might want to get your shots in now.

“We’re prime targets,” Joey Getherall, the junior receiver from La Puente Bishop Amat High School, said. “People like it when we’re in trouble. They want to see scholarships taken away, they want to see sanctions.

“But, you know, when things get going good . . . “

“Things are going to get good.”

USC vs. NOTRE DAME

Saturday,

11:30 a.m.

TV: Channel 4

RANDY HARVEY

How Paul Hackett is remembered at USC may depend on offensive line.

Page 2

FOSTER HURTING

UCLA tailback DeShaun Foster re-injured an ankle against Oregon.

Page 4