Notre Dame Football Brand Is Resilient, but Can It Last?

In a little over two weeks, the Notre Dame football team will open another new chapter in its coaching history books when new head coach Brian Kelly leads the Irish out of the tunnel.  The stories of Kelly’s most recent predecessors have been short, tumultuous reads and none of them concluded with “happily ever after.”

The 13 years between Lou Holtz and Kelly have been most unlucky for the Irish, encompassing four head coach hirings and firings.

During this time, many in sports media began to question with increasing regularity whether Notre Dame football was still relevant in the national sports landscape or an increasingly out-of-touch institution.

The media coverage frenzies that ensued around each coaching search, especially the most recent one ending with Kelly’s hiring, signal that the question still remains unanswered.  And the fact that it remains unanswered suggests there is still some relevance left in the tank.

But how much is left before the well goes dry?

At first glance, the ND brand is still powerful.  That the Irish still have a place in football conversations despite withstanding almost two decades of roller coaster turmoil (see chart below) is certainly a testament to the brand’s resiliency.

Through the ups (six seasons of nine-plus wins) and the downs (four seasons of five or fewer wins), South Bend continues to lure sell-out crowds every time it hosts a fall Saturday.

Big-name recruits are also still biting.  The Irish have produced three consecutive Top-10 classes (according to Rivals rankings) from 2006-08.  And love it or hate it, the school can still insist on a nationally televised audience for football week in and week out.

A deeper look, however, suggests that all is not well.  The quality of the attention paid to Notre Dame football is fast devolving into the Fading Pop Star Model of “any attention is good attention.”  The bipolar win-loss records sent fans into premature declarations of “Return to Glory” (2002, 2005) immediately followed by the unceremonious gut checks of 2003 and 2007, much to the glee of Notre Dame haters.

The consistent inconsistency is taking a toll on the fanbase, and it’s not unreasonable to think that much of the school’s historical capital drying up.  Fans preparing for another emotionally exhausting season, agonizing over whether the team will squeak by Navy, inevitably begin to question whether the patient investment of time, money, and energy will ever be rewarded.

Additionally, Notre Dame is on the verge of a “lost generation” of fans who never knew the team as one both dominant and feared.  The time separation since the last Notre Dame national championship season (1988) is approaching this limit, and this, while not a particularly scientific indicator, is at least a bellwether for fading national relevance.

The capital of past tradition simply doesn’t attract young fans who have no way to apply it to the present.

Witness the New York Yankees of the early 1990s.  They were in the midst of their longest championship drought—19 years between 1977 and 1996.  This is almost a direct parallel to Notre Dame’s current 21-year gap from 1988 to the present.

Those Yankee teams provide a template for what national irrelevance would look like for Notre Dame: Lowered (or lost) expectations of excellence, apathetic excuses that project blame elsewhere, and a flimsy sense of pride in the institution.

These signs are starting to creep into the consciousness in South Bend, and such a precedent makes it hard to object to the notion that Brian Kelly must succeed to keep the Irish relevant.  The generational gap would be very difficult to bridge, and if Kelly suffers similar three- to five-year failings as his last few predecessors, the Irish will clearly be on the wrong side of the divide.

As the Yankees also showed in the late 90s, the cause is never completely lost nor won.  Neither relevance nor irrelevance are permanent conditions.  Starting in 1996, the Yankees won four championships in five years, and clearly restated their dynastic claim to greatness.

This is not the first time the question of relevance has been asked at Notre Dame, but it is the longest it has gone unanswered.  The further into depths of irrelevance, the greater the effort required to return from it, and, for Notre Dame, the hole is still getting deeper.