Irish Still Stewing

These are troubling days under Notre Dame’s golden dome, and with each ensuing setback similar to Tennessee’s 28-18 win here Saturday, football tradition turns to football turmoil.

For Domers, it is a season of tarnish.

Fighting Irish are becoming Frustrated Irish. A storied program is becoming a disjointed tale. Saturday, there was no blue-gray sky serving as a backdrop for Four Horsemen, and even if the sky had cooperated, rather than turning up bright and cloudless, there certainly weren’t Four Horsemen. Not even one.

These days, whether the odds be great or small, old Notre Dame will lose overall.

The odds to win for the seventh-ranked Volunteers were 71/2 points, so both the victory and the size of it were expected. That line was only significant in that teams coming into Notre Dame Stadium, even facing an Irish team with a 3-4 record, don’t usually get that large a spread. Apparently, even the guys with sharp pencils in Las Vegas are paying attention to the smell.

Notre Dame Coach Bob Davie called the game a microcosm of his team’s season, meaning that the Irish had played well for most of the game and then squandered chances and lost. But there was another sort of microcosm, a symbolic one. It occurred in the final minute of the game and played itself out a few minutes later as the teams left the field.

Tennessee had the ball, fourth down on Notre Dame’s one-yard line. It also had a 21-18 lead and a decision to make. A field goal would force Notre Dame to make a long drive for a touchdown and kick an extra point to win, but a Tennessee touchdown would clinch the victory.

At quarterback was sophomore Casey Clausen. He had already thrown a touchdown pass and completed 17 of 29 for 228 yards. But during the timeout on the sideline, Clausen told Coach Phillip Fulmer that he wanted the ball, that he wanted to make the play, even if it meant running it in himself.

There was more going on than an eager athlete trying to be a hero or take on the responsibility for his team. Clausen wanted to send a message, something he eagerly admitted to afterward.

As a high school quarterback at Alemany in Mission Hills, and as member of a Catholic family, he lived and breathed Notre Dame football. And as a high school All-American, he had some expectations of getting a shot with the Irish. As a youngster, one of his highlights was the family trip back here to a USC-Notre Dame game. In addition to that trip, Clausen made four other trips back here to various quarterback camps.

But in the end, Notre Dame--specifically offensive coordinator Kevin Rogers--rejected him. The message the Clausen family got, according to both Casey and his father, Jim, was that Casey was not good enough to play under the Golden Dome.

And so, with 35 seconds left and a message to deliver, the 19-year-old rolled right as 80,765 fans either screamed or held their breath. He had the option to throw but didn’t seem interested in that. There was a contingent of Irish players at the goal line and Clausen met them head-on, leaped and cartwheeled into the end zone. When he landed, an official stood over him with hands held high.

Message delivered.

Minutes later, after Notre Dame’s last thrusts were ended by Tennessee and the clock, Clausen found his way to his parents in the stands near the exit tunnel and pointed to his father. “We got him, Dad,” he said. Then he pointed toward the press box, from where Rogers worked the game.

“This was personal,” Casey Clausen said afterward. “I wanted the ball on that last play. People here felt that I couldn’t play here. I wanted to show them I could.”

Jim Clausen said that he remained a big Notre Dame fan and said that Davie had treated him and his son beautifully. But he also said that Casey’s success at Tennessee was “a tribute to every kid who can’t quite run a 4.4” in the 40-yard dash and isn’t the ultimate sort of athlete Rogers apparently is looking for at Notre Dame.

“Yes, this was personal,” Jim Clausen said. “This was a message about looking at a kid’s heart and desire to win, as much as the other stuff.”

Rogers denied he ever told the Clausens their son couldn’t play on Notre Dame’s level.

“I think he is a very good fit for the Tennessee program,” Rogers said, “and he was treated here with respect and dignity.”

Such is the state of affairs at Notre Dame these days. Storied programs don’t need to talk about recruits they rejected because storied programs don’t lose games to them. But these days, Notre Dame does.

And these days, despite signing a new five-year contract last December and despite the 160th consecutive sellout in Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday, the man responsible for carrying the torch of Rockne and Leahy and Parseghian and Holtz is a man under fire.

Davie’s record is now 33-24, and his current 3-5 season standing, while still allowing him to run the table and get to 6-5 and a possible minor bowl berth, does not cut it at Notre Dame. Recently, there have been fewer stories on his team than on who might be coaching it next year.

The leading candidate in speculation columns is the Raiders’ Jon Gruden, the 38-year-old smash success in the NFL who, besides being named one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, has brought the Raiders some postseason success the last two years.

Gruden is intriguing on many fronts. He played high school football here, at Clay, and while his father, Jim, was an assistant coach in the late 1970s under Dan Devine, a feisty young Jon Gruden was a diehard loyalist. He went to all the games and, at 16, overhearing a fan shout something negative at his father from the stands, punched the fan out and received a few stitches in return.

“He loved it there,” said his mother, Kathy, from Tampa, where she and Jim live and Jim scouts for the 49ers. “Those were great years for him. Our house was always open and the Notre Dame players were always coming over.”

Gruden has one year left on a Raider contract that, by various accounts, is easily escapable were he to go to a college team rather than another NFL team or is so ironclad that the litigious Al Davis would certainly go to court over any Gruden exit efforts.

Gruden himself will speak glowingly about Notre Dame and his years in South Bend but will never cross the line of saying publicly that he wants to be here, although friends report that he says privately he would “take the job in a second.” Kathy Gruden said that, recently when she asked her son about Notre Dame, he said, “Mom, I’m too busy trying to figure out how to get a first down against Philadelphia.”

Gruden, Raider coach for the last four years and still the youngest coach in the NFL, has been down this path. Two years ago, Louisiana State wanted him, then Ohio State and Miami last year. Now, talk of Notre Dame and California this year.

Bruce Allen, Raider senior assistant, remembers the Ohio State rush last year, and remembers sitting in his office with Gruden, talking about buying a guitar for Gruden’s son while watching reports from Ohio of Gruden being sighted at the airport in Columbus, where he had gone to sign a $25-million contract.

“We got a good laugh out of that,” Allen said.

So the Notre Dame conjecture may be more of the same. Kevin White, Irish athletic director, has taken the expected management stance all along.

“At the end of the season, as with all seasons in all our programs,” White said, “we will sit down and evaluate where we are. It would be inappropriate to do that now.”

Davie, whose contract is as mysterious as Gruden’s because Notre Dame won’t discuss how much of it is guaranteed, has taken the high ground recently. He doesn’t duck questions about his future here and merely says, in dozens of different ways, that he is frustrated, disappointed and confident that, given time, he can turn the Irish fortunes around.

The “given time” issue, of course, is the biggie.

Prominent for this game were T-shirts with big block letters reading: SAVE IRISH FOOTBALL. In smaller print underneath was an internet address: www.dumpdavie.net .

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Times staff writer Sam Farmer contributed to this report.