Hornung’s Comments Fall Into a Gray Area

This might come as a surprise to Paul Hornung, but Notre Dame’s football team has black players and lots of them. In fact, 55% of Notre Dame’s players are black, which is higher than the national average among Division I-A football schools. Of the team’s 17 incoming freshmen, 12 are black.

So the problem for Notre Dame isn’t attracting the black athlete, it’s attracting the elite athlete, the kids who can affect a college football game enough to put Notre Dame back up there with the Miamis and Florida States. And the reason is the team’s reputation for running an archaic offense that turns off kids who dream of playing in the NFL someday.

But Hornung, the Golden Boy, didn’t say that. What Hornung said in an interview with a Detroit radio station Tuesday is that his alma mater “can’t stay as strict as we are as far as the academic structure is concerned, because we’ve got to get the black athlete. We must get the black athlete if we’re going to compete.”

Immediately the hand-wringing started, because not many of us are comfortable with hearing what amounts to an assertion that black players aren’t smart enough to get into Notre Dame without easing admission standards and white kids aren’t good enough athletically to matter for a team with national championship ambitions.

By midday Wednesday, Hornung was apologizing all over the place for offending anyone, and there were plenty of takers, white and black. But if you’re looking for me to start ripping into Hornung for making insensitive comments, you’re going to be disappointed.

Through my mentor, Dick Schaap, I’ve gotten to know Hornung a little, been in his company over dinner several times and come to like him tremendously. It would be easy to dismiss a 68-year-old white guy from Kentucky, and someone who unfairly was awarded the 1956 Heisman over the more deserving Jim Brown, as being a product of a certain time and place. But that presumption would be dead wrong. Hornung is almost aggressive in his forward thinking and spirit of inclusion, pointing out black candidates for playing quarterback and coaching years and years before it became fashionable.

Part of Hornung’s progressiveness led to Tuesday’s comments. Yes, he’s been a broadcaster for 35 years, but he wasn’t exactly eloquent in stating this position.

Notre Dame’s problem, as Hornung has said many times in recent years, is that teams that predominantly run the option offense cannot attract elite high school players, who don’t see that run-based scheme as good preparation for getting to the NFL.

Notre Dame’s last national championship team had Tony Rice running the option for then-coach Lou Holtz. See, that’s not happening anymore, anywhere. You don’t even see Oklahoma running that junk anymore, do you? Hornung has known for quite some time that Notre Dame has to change. To attract elite high school players, Notre Dame has to play a pro-style offense.

One of the big reasons the school hired Tyrone Willingham to be the Irish head coach is he coached a pro-style offense at Stanford.

What do most of the skill-position elite players -- I’m talking about wide receivers, running backs and tight ends -- have in common? They’re black. Increasingly, the quarterbacks are black too. Hornung wants more of these kids at Notre Dame, which is understandable. Willingham wants them, and white kids who have the same talents too. But it doesn’t happen overnight, which is why the Irish had one of the worst seasons in school history in 2003. Playing the way Willingham wants to play takes an entire change in philosophy from the way Holtz’s and Bob Davie’s teams played. For that matter, what Willingham and Hornung want is a radical departure from what Notre Dame has done for 100 years.

Notre Dame didn’t even believe in the forward pass until the 1970s, even though Joe Montana and Joe Theismann played there. NFL scouts were so underwhelmed by Montana as a passer he lasted until the third round of the draft, and Theismann had to return punts and go to Canada. But the game evolved, and programs wanting to beat Notre Dame started throwing the ball. So why would Donovan McNabb, who grew up 90 miles from South Bend, go to Notre Dame when he knew they weren’t going to throw the ball? Admission and race weren’t the issue as much as philosophy of football.

But presuming his alma mater needs to lower standards to attract the next McNabb is flawed. A university spokesman, Matthew Storin, said of Hornung’s comments, “We strongly disagree with the thesis of his remarks.”

If Notre Dame, a private school with great academic resources, cannot identify black candidates who can qualify, then the admissions folks are lazy and probably, like so many other schools, are relying simply on SAT and ACT scores to figure who’s qualified. Figuring out who ought to be admitted based on something other than standardized scores isn’t lowering standards, it’s smart admissions work.

But presuming that white kids can’t play pro-style football is equally lazy. I don’t want to hear that McNabb, who was smart enough to negotiate his way through Syracuse, couldn’t have cut it at Notre Dame. And I don’t want to hear that Mike Alstott, a Chicago high school kid who starred at Purdue and in the NFL, wasn’t good enough athletically to play at Notre Dame.

What those kids have in common, though McNabb is black and Alstott is white, is that they didn’t want to play in some prehistoric offensive system.

The knuckleheads at Notre Dame who are already threatening Willingham might want to listen up. This man is having to reverse years of backward football thinking, and if supported properly he’ll do it for them. Or they can be really stupid, let him go after another year and watch him pull it off somewhere else.

As for Hornung, his heart is in the right place even if his mouth betrayed him Tuesday. There are enough smart black players to qualify for admission and enough athletic white players to cut it on the field to help Notre Dame, and anything you hear to the contrary is a mistaken belief or simply just plain stupid.