Notre Dame. Ohio State. Two longtime Midwestern powers.
The Fiesta Bowl, located in the suburbs of Phoenix, could not ask for a better matchup, given that the desert metropolis is a magnet for residents of the Midwest, in much the same way that Florida cities attract New Yorkers and other residents of the urban Northeast.
Notre Dame. Ohio State. Such a familiar clash of foes from nearby states, right?
Wrong.
Even the casual college football fan in your family — one who likes watching the sport but doesn’t obsess over it (and probably had a fall wedding on a Saturday) — is generally aware that Notre Dame and Michigan (despite the discontinuation of their series) played a fair amount over the past few decades. Casual sports fans who might not have cared about TCU versus Utah in 2008, or who didn’t understand the importance of the 2004 California-Southern Mississippi game, probably did set aside time to watch Michigan and Notre Dame play in September for much of the past third of a century.
This week, those casual fans are very likely to include Notre Dame and Ohio State in their New Year’s Day plans.
The lamentation of those of us who grew up with college football is that these two schools never created the intimate relationship Notre Dame and Michigan forged for a period of time.
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It’s not as though Notre Dame and Michigan ever did establish an ancient rivalry with more than 50 meetings. As is the case with Ohio State today, Notre Dame entered the 1977 season having barely played the Wolverines — just a handful of times. However, the 1978 season brought forth the agreement, under head coaches Dan Devine (Notre Dame) and Bo Schembechler (Michigan), to play on a more regular basis. Subsequent Notre Dame coaches (Gerry Faust and Lou Holtz) took the torch from Devine, and the game continued in most seasons. A few two-year breaks littered the landscape (1983 and 1984, 1995 and 1996, and then 2000 and 2001 under Notre Dame’s Bob Davie and Michigan’s Lloyd Carr), but for the most part, Notre Dame and Michigan have played each other over the past 37 years. How much richer college football is as a result.
If only the same thing could be said for Notre Dame and Ohio State.
Yet, as the Fighting Irish and the Buckeyes take the field this Friday inside the stadium where the College Football Playoff National Championship Game will be held on Jan. 11, they own just five meetings in human history, only four in regular season contests.
Notre Dame and Ohio State played 10 years ago in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl — when the event was held in the eastside Phoenix suburb of Tempe, not the westside suburb of Glendale as it is today. Other than that, the Irish and Bucks own just a pair of meetings in the 1930s and two more meetings in the 1990s. That’s it. If Notre Dame had ever wanted to join the Big Ten, these teams would have rekindled what began in 1935. Alas, college football fans have never been able to see these schools become familiar with each other on the gridiron the way Notre Dame and Michigan did in the late 1970s.
We’re left with an attractive game, but also an overwhelming urge to wonder, “What if?”
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By far the most important and memorable Notre Dame-Ohio State game was the first one, in 1935.
Notre Dame was still regrouping from the death of its most iconic coach, Knute Rockne, just a few years earlier in a plane crash. Elmer Layden, one of the fabled Four Horsemen on the 1924 team which won the Rose Bowl over Stanford and helped make the Irish a truly national coast-to-coast program, coached Notre Dame. Ohio State, coached by Francis Schmidt, was a strong program at the time. Seven years later — in 1942 — a man named Paul Brown, one of football’s finest innovators, led the Buckeyes to a national championship.
Steve Helwagen, then at Scout.com (he now works for 247Sports), recounted the 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State game in exquisite detail. In a sport with many so-called “Game of the Century” mega-events, this is acknowledged as the first… and it lived up to the billing. Notre Dame, a big underdog, came back from a 13-0 second-half deficit to stun the Buckeyes in Columbus in the final minute of regulation. Whether it was the magic of one of the Four Horsemen, or the power of “Win one for the Gipper,” or any other image you want to use, the fact remains that it would have required someone as accomplished as William Shakespeare to write a script as dramatic and memorable as the one authored on that day in 1935.
Hyperbole, you say?
No — as Helwagen’s article notes, Notre Dame really did have a quarterback named William Shakespeare. (You could call him Bill.) He really did lead Notre Dame from a 13-point deficit, fashioning a denouement which dazzled the national college football press corps in the Horseshoe:
It could have been the start of something magical, something which could have stirred the souls of generations of college football fans. Yet, here we are today, with only five meetings between the Irish and Buckeyes on that 120-yard-long, 53-yard-wide piece of real estate with two sets of goal posts and four goal-line pylons.
The largely barren reality of the Notre Dame-Ohio State series creates a groaning emptiness inside. That said, it does make this Friday’s Fiesta Bowl a great way to start the new year… and a very precious event for those who cherish college football’s intersections between history and possibility.
