Those Irish Eyes Are Not Smiling at Notre Dame

When C.J. Leak announced where he’d play college football, it was supposed to be a formality.

For months he’d been touted as the next great Notre Dame quarterback, the latest to follow in the cleats of John Lujack, Paul Hornung and Joe Montana. The Irish were so confident he was coming they didn’t bother with a backup.

But when Leak went to a podium in February 1999, he stunned Notre Dame. He held up a Wake Forest jersey and announced he was going to be a Demon Deacon.

“Notre Dame’s a great school. There’s nothing wrong with it,” Leak said earlier this month. “But I felt something special at Wake Forest.

“I wanted to be a part of something special.”

Leak’s choice of Wake Forest, a school whose tradition is in basketball, over the home of Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen was an unbelievable snub. It also was another sign that Notre Dame had lost what the Irish faithful believe is their rightful place at the pinnacle of college football.

Since finishing a close second to Florida State seven years ago, Notre Dame has been rocked by tawdry scandals, the school’s first major NCAA penalty and won-loss records that are mediocre at best.

The Golden Dome still gleams, but the gilt has been tarnished.

“Everything that happens at Notre Dame, people see,” said Bob Davie, who might be coaching his last season after going 21-16 in his first three years. “Things are made out to be worse than they are when they’re going bad, and things are made out maybe to be better than they are when they’re going good.”

The reasons for Notre Dame’s woes are as varied as they are complex. There’s no debating the talent has declined. The Irish haven’t had a first-team All-American since Aaron Taylor and Jeff Burris in 1993. They’ve produced only two first-round draft picks since 1995.

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In 1994, 10 Notre Dame players were drafted. This year, there was one--one fewer than Arkansas-Pine Bluff.

Academic standards are part of the problem. Always tough, they’ve gotten stricter in recent years. Partial qualifiers like Tony Rice, academically ineligible in his first year, are no longer accepted.

But the bigger problem is a change in college football itself.

For most recruits it’s no longer enough to show them a scrapbook of Notre Dame’s storied history and tell them they’ll be on national TV every week. Florida State has some impressive history of its own. So does Nebraska. And with the explosion of TV sports programming, just about everybody is on television these days.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to say that Notre Dame can just walk in and take their pick of who they want to recruit from,” Davie admitted. “That day is over. That day has long been gone.”

Players like captain Grant Irons, who chose Notre Dame over Michigan, where his brother was an All-American, are exceptions nowadays.

“Notre Dame just has an aura about it,” Irons said. “I feel it the most when I’m running out of the tunnel. It’s the biggest adrenaline feeling you can experience. You’re not only representing yourself, you’re representing the people that have gone before you. That goes back to the Four Horsemen, Joe Montana, so many others.”

The Irish could have used players like that in the last five years.

With 11 losses from 1994-96, Lou Holtz lost two more games in his last three seasons than he did in the previous six. In his first year, Davie became the first coach since Joe Kuharich to lose four straight.

Notre Dame ended last season with a four-game losing streak and a 5-7 record, its first losing season in 13 years. The Irish didn’t even crack the top 25 in The Associated Press preseason poll, the first time that’s happened since 1986.

“I don’t think we’ve had the success that past alumni like me wish we had,” said Lujack, who won the 1947 Heisman after the Irish went 9-0 and won a national championship.

With a .567 winning percentage, Davie is closer to Gerry Faust than Holtz, Rockne, Ara Parseghian and Frank Leahy. Though his contract runs through 2003, there’s speculation he’ll be fired if the Irish wallow through another season.

Mike Wadsworth was forced to resign as athletic director last spring, and rumors flew this summer that Jacksonville Jaguars coach Tom Coughlin was already in line to replace Davie.

Davie said new athletic director Kevin White hasn’t told him to “win X games or else,” but he knows he’s still under pressure.

“Do I feel a sense of urgency because of how last year finished? You’re darn right I do,” Davie said.

The scandals are even more galling for the Irish than the losses. While other schools’ images were sullied over the years by boosters and NCAA investigations, Notre Dame’s reputation had been pristine.

“We hold ourselves to a higher standard,” White said. “When things go awry here, it does generate a real sense of wonderment and, at times, concern.”

Notre Dame’s perfect image began crumbling with former assistant Joe Moore’s age discrimination lawsuit. Then came accusations that former booster Kimberly Dunbar had lavished more than a dozen players with gifts, trips and money--paid for with the $1.4 million she’d embezzled from her employer.

Both cases revealed lurid details the Roman Catholic university would have preferred to keep secret: Davie questioning Holtz’s mental stability; players watching cheerleaders having sex on road trips; Dunbar’s sexual relationships with several players.

The cases might have been minor compared with those at some other schools, but they were huge news across the country. Notre Dame is a national school like no other, and its history and tradition brings unmatched attention.

“They’re more than just in a fishbowl, there’s a big lightbulb going on there,” Parseghian said. “I sat in that chair, and I would read about other schools--major schools that I won’t name--with violations that involved women, dorm incidents, that kind of thing, and you hardly heard about it outside the state the school was in.”

When the NCAA finally handed down penalties last December for the Dunbar case, they were relatively minor: Two years probation and the loss of two scholarships. To Notre Dame, though, it was as bad as the death penalty.

Just how deeply Notre Dame was affected was became clear two months later, when the Rev. Edward Malloy, university president, shook up the athletic department. He stripped the Rev. William Beauchamp of his role as overseer of the department, a job he’d had for 13 years.

Malloy forced Wadsworth to resign and hired White, who has a history of cleaning up programs. He helped resurrect Tulane’s basketball team after a point-shaving schedule, and dealt with another point-shaving scandal at Arizona State.

While White believes Notre Dame is a special place, he’s also a realist.

“We’re going to have turnovers in college athletics, unfortunately, as it relates to compliance,” he said. “There are too many units, too many transactions, the lights are too bright and the money has grown beyond comprehension.”

The stigma from the scandals has already begun to fade, but Notre Dame’s image begins and ends with football. To remain a powerhouse in college athletics, it must field teams that can go 12-0 or 11-1 and compete for the national title.

The Irish name is not enough anymore.

“Football is very important to this institution. We need to be very, very good in college football,” White said. “We will be committed to that, from the trustees all the way down to the people that are going to prepare the field for game day.”

Parseghian can’t help but chuckle at the talk of Notre Dame’s problems. People forget that the Irish hadn’t had a winning season in five years when he arrived at the school in 1964.

“One good season will get you back in the great tradition and the history,” Parseghian said.

It won’t be easy, though. Notre Dame plays one of the most brutal schedules in the country. This year, it opens against Texas A&M;, No. 1 Nebraska, No. 14 Purdue, No. 25 Michigan State and defending Pac-10 champion Stanford.

Next year, Tennessee goes on the schedule. The year after that, Michigan and Florida State.

“The only place we can go is up,” Irons said. “We’re really looking forward to playing the way Notre Dame is accustomed to playing. There’s a sense there’s some great things in store for this upcoming season.”