The risk associated with composing a pre-national championship panegyric on the University of Notre Dame’s football team in a Jesuit publication is above average. I know that some Boston College (where I received my doctorate) alums would take umbrage at such praise. They would surely interject, “Hey fighting Frenchmen, we’re the real Irish Catholic university.” They’re not completely wrong. (Although, let’s remember, imaginary interlocutor, that Boston College isn’t entirely in Boston, is it?)
The other risk is to over-spiritualize a football game. Whatever happens on Monday, Jan. 20, is not akin to the redemption offered by Jesus Christ. Nor, for that matter, will Jan. 21 spell the end of Notre Dame’s educational mission as a Catholic university dedicated to seeking wisdom grounded in Jesus Christ through teaching, research and community life. The sun will rise (well, the perma-cloud surrounding campus will get lighter), and classes will unfold as normal on Tuesday morning.
So why do so many people, including this professor, care? My own Notre Dame fandom was not given to me at birth (contrary to my wife, who wore an N.D. cheerleading outfit as a little girl). In fact, when I began to explore going to Notre Dame, I had to look it up on a map. I wasn’t impressed. This Tennessee boy asked himself who would live that far north on purpose. But my visit to campus in the fall of 1999 changed everything—this is where I wanted to go to college.
I matriculated in August 2000, filled with indifference toward the Fighting Irish. I went to my first game against Texas A&M on a sweltering August day because that’s what people did. The tailgates, full of families and friends. The band. The gold-painted helmets, intended to look like the Golden Dome of the main building on campus. All of this began a slow conversion in me: Maybe I at least liked Notre Dame football.
But it wasn’t love, at least not yet. I rarely watched away games. I missed the biggest football game of my freshman year to attend a retreat. From 2000 to 2004, Notre Dame also lost. By a lot. Often. There were better things to do.
But I fell head-over-heels in love with Notre Dame, the place I would eventually call my alma mater twice over. The professors, priests and campus ministers at Notre Dame changed my life. I was a first-generation college student, who never imagined being in a choir like the Notre Dame Glee Club. Who never thought that he would spend a semester studying in Europe. Who never realized that one’s religious life could flourish most through the act of intellectual contemplation. Who fell in love and married a fellow Domer.
It was during graduate school that I finally began to follow Notre Dame football. Sticking around at Notre Dame to pursue a master’s degree, I found myself either in the stadium or glued to the television on football Saturdays. I was filled with gratitude for my alma mater. When I moved to Boston, this feeling intensified. Hundreds of miles away from South Bend in one of the greatest cities in the United States, I always felt homesick on football Saturdays. I wanted to be back in South Bend, at Notre Dame, under the shadow of the Golden Dome.
Unexpectedly, I got that chance: In 2010, I was hired at Notre Dame. The magic of Notre Dame changed for me as I transitioned into a faculty position. The Dome was no longer exclusively a shimmering beacon of Marian devotion but atop a place where I had meetings. The magic of Notre Dame was transformed, now best expressed through the students whom I was called to teach and the church I was invited to serve through my faculty position.
For me, it’s the undergraduate students in particular that are now the most important thing about Notre Dame. They reawaken in me a forgotten joy at reading a text for the first time, of that initial navigation of a life ordered not only toward success but ultimate meaning and of learning from mistakes along the way.
Midway through my second decade as a faculty member at Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish are playing for a national championship. And they have a coach who understands his role first and foremost as an educator. Despite the difference in our salaries (something I’m willing to negotiate), Marcus Freeman feels more like a colleague than a head coach.
He is teaching these young men about what ultimately matters in life. It is the pursuit of excellence in football and the classroom alike for its own sake. It is the recognition that this game isn’t the only thing that matters. We are made for something else, for gratitude, for faith and for communion. Whether you’re making bank from a deal related to your name, image, or likeness, or you’re likely to be confused for an investment banker: You have a role to play.
I’ll be watching from my basement near South Bend (unless anyone has a great deal on tickets) on Jan. 20, rooting once again for my alma mater. I want to see a new national championship banner adorn the tunnel of Notre Dame Stadium before I die.
But I also want to see my students finish what they started. I regularly teach members of the team, and I know how strange their lives are. They’re quasi-celebrities on campus who still need to flourish in a required theology course on marriage, all the while figuring out what they want to do after football. When they lose, their fellow students and “Subway Alumni” boo them. When they win, they’re like gods walking among mortals.
In fact, they’re all just young men who are growing up—falling in love, learning and becoming the kind of people their parents and professors would be proud of.
Whatever happens, and I hope it involves a substantial beat down of “The” Ohio State University, they’re my students playing for my alma mater. It would be a treat to celebrate with them. (Also, women’s basketball, you’re on deck.)
Nonetheless, what though the odds be great or small, we’ll still be reading Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism the following week in class.
