I just finished watching the TCU/Boise State Bowl game, which actually turned out to be much better than it looked like it was going to be at first, even considering you had to listen to Lou Holtz slur and suck on his dentures for three hours. At any rate, at some point they were babbling on about something and one of them mentioned that Notre Dame will be in a bowl game tomorrow.
Full Stop.
Notre Dame is in a bowl game? Why? How? Notre Dame has been the worst major football program in the nation for how many years running, and they are still going to a bowl game with a 6-6 record? And it will be televised?
Say what you want about Caroline Kennedy- she is better at what she does than Notre Dame is at football. At least the Kennedy legacy is still intact.
Comrade Stuck
Isn’t he like a 110?
Michael
As a lifelong Notre Dame fan who will always stick by his team through thick and thin, I will say this:
Notre Dame does not deserve to be in a bowl game. Sure they went 6-6, but they didn’t play anybody.
Last year I said they’d be awful, and they were. This year I said they’d push .500, and they did. Next year they’ll push 10-2 or so and actually do something.
Keith
I dn’t know if they still do it, but NBC used to have "Notre Dame Saturday", and I could never understand it. Sure, it’s a legacy program with tons of history, but so are dozens of other colleges. And I’m not entirely sure I buy into the notion that it’s because of the Catholic fanbase; if that were the case, then BYU would be even *more* popular. Yeah, I’m not quite getting how ND is getting into a bowl game this year.
mikesdak
Sadly, it is true….in Hawaii, no less, which if you’re going to be in a who-cares bowl would be the place to be.
ricky
Listening to him slur and suck on his dentures is better than hearing him call the hogs from his Razorpig days which
is what he has to do to get the toupee to come home before he goes on the air.
wilfred the shoe thrower
Late entry for the loose association of the year award.
Crusty Dem
Well, they’re not even the worst 6-6 team in a bowl game, that honor goes to Florida Atlantic (or Northern Illinois). Still, it truly sucks that those spoiled bastards, and all their spoiled bastard fans (oh yeah, I’m bitter, I have stronger ties, and more hatred, of Notre Dame than just about anyone anywhere), are going to freakin’ Hawaii to showcase their own special brand of suck.
Oh yeah, and comparing Caroline Kennedy to Notre Dame is just a slap in th… uh, never mind. But George W Bush is almost as good at his job as Notre Dame is at football. Maybe not. Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld? Alberto Gonzales? Condoleezza Rice? Wow. You’ve got to hand it to the Bush administration, they really defy metaphor. It’s only possible to compare their ineptitude to themselves…
Matt
I was all excited for ND to be in the Motor City Bowl in Detroit to get crushed by Central Michigan. I would have actually bought a ticket to watch that beating first hand.
Church Lady
My father is a ND alum, class of 1955. He’s just embarrassed by the whole thing. At this point, he just wishes the school would buy out Weiss’s contract. The alums have been screaming for his head all year long.
mr. whipple
well, there’s only like a gazillion bowls, so of course yer gonna end up with a lot of shitty teams playing.
too bad the pros don’t have ’em. i could be looking forward to the browns/lions weedeater/pb blaster/ bluebonnet bowl.
Bill H
I’m astonished that you were listening to them with sufficient attention to hear anything they said. I pay more attention to my cat than I do to the babbling of those idiots. Her conversation is much more meaningful and entertaining.
Punchy
Catholic skool playing on Xmas Eve? THAT is what’s unfukinreal
Josh E.
Notre Dame will always play in a bowl if they are bowl-eligible. The point of bowls is to make money and Notre Dame has a lot of fans and they are widespread.
Conservatively Liberal
Is it the Tidy Bowl? That would make sense.
Rommie
Notre Dame in the glory days turned down bowls that would be teh awesome for the current version – so for the team who used to have the noses in the air, it’s sweet sweet tears for them to "have" to go to Hawaii.
But, in a way, they got lucky, because there is overwhelming evidence that they need the extra practices they get by going to a bowl. Just one more loss and they are sitting around for another winter getting as fat as Tun..er, the coach.
MikeJ
Asking why ND is in a bowl is like asking why Mariners fans have to pay extra to see their lousy team play another lousy team just because the other lousy team wears pinstripes. It doesn’t matter how much the yanquis stink in any given season, your hometown team is gonna charge you extra to see them.
Which is just another way of saying, really bored with football.
YellowJournalism
Then throw you out when you take your coat off, revealing the "Yankees Suck" t-shirt underneath.
bago
Chuck Norris is Jacking Jesus. That is all.
NonWonderDog
Gah! Fuck!
Ann Coulter’s Jaw has apparently made a full recovery, since she’s on Red Eye screeching about birth certificates and the Myth of the Recession as a liberal plot.
Our reprieve didn’t last nearly long enough.
robertdsc
This Yanks fan thinks his team is killing baseball with huge contracts.
maxbaer (not the original)
Walker, Texas Moron’s column on the hand is hilarious, if only for its pointless banality.
Andy K
The beauty of being Catholic is as long as you make that one mass, the rest of the day is yours.
And there’s a reason it took pro football to catch on in the Protestant South, ya know, and it wasn’t NASCAR.
HeartlandLiberal
Bowl games are not what they used to be. We now live in an era of college football (and basketball) at the Division I level that has progressively sold its soul (that being the soul of collegiate athletics as a mission of a school) to the corporate financial entertainment system.
Now all you need is a barely tying record (heck, I thought you at least had to have at least a one game winning, not just tying season) to get a bid to a bowl game that is basically nothing more than a chance for a corporate sponsor to lend their name to an event and get it plastered nationwide.
One of the clearest examples of this move towards corporatism it the Big Ten Network. This consortium has pumped significant monies into all the Big Ten schools, in exchange for becoming the primary delivery method via cable TV and web streaming of the majority of Big Ten events. The contract is pretty much exclusive except for allowance for e.g. basketball and football games of a high enough rank (based on current team standings) that they will be carried by ESPN/ESPN2 or CBS. That is still even bigger payoff bucks per game for the schools.
Take Indiana University, for instance. Its Athletics budget in the past three years as the Big Ten Network was implemented went from about $35 million to about $53 million. The difference is almost solely due to revenue stream from the Big Ten Network deal.
Ten years ago at Indiana University, even breathing the words .com or suggesting having ads in the basketball arena was anathema, and would get you pilloried by the top level administrators of the school. Now, ten years later, the new scoreboard and the video board fronting the officials bench blares ads non-stop, pizza coupons are tossed in boxes to members of the audience, one bank gives away money to card holders holding their cards up on camera, and the latest, a person from the audience gets to climb in an inflatable cube and try to grab money being blown up in front of them for 60 seconds at half time. Used to be the university hated ticket scalpers, and would even debate whether the university could legally keep them from standing on Athletics property hawking tickets at game time. Now the scoreboard runs ads for an online ticket exchange outfit.
Ah, yes, Collegiate Athletics, mens sana in corpore sano, the good old days of idealism.
Many of us joke now about how important it is to try and achieve at least that 51% level of wins in football so we at least get an invite (and the cash infusion) from the Toilet Bowl, which surely will be the next corporate bowl on the horizon.
MMM
Still talking football….
Did you know the Steelers lost last Sunday because Santa Claus showed up at the press conference yesterday? Santa has been banished. He is the reason the offense looks so sluggish.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Damn. All of the toilet bowl jokes are taken.
Liberals. Hmph!
dan robinson
Lou Holtz is a punk. He bullied students into playing while hurt so that he could win games and his record looked better. Yeah, I know it is a business, but you can believe that Holtz is a Republican, trying to make money on someone else’s sweat and labor.
Bob In Pacifica
Why?
Because they travel well.
Bill H
And, by the way, you notice they never once referred to the "Poinsettia Bowl" without using its full name, "The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl."
What’s interesting is that that’s two sponsors. The Ecke family of San Diego is the leading grower of Poinsettias in the world and was the original sponsor of the bowl game. I don’t know the details, but apparently they now co-sponsor the thing.
DBrown
John,
we need a thread about Obama using the Lincoln bible to take the oath of office – where is the Q’uran? Where are all the assholes and their bullshit now? This will be the first time since 1861 that that bible will be used! That is a first this country needs.
ezdidit
Democrats are the "good guys." What do you expect?
grandpajohn
As a Clemson grad , we sort of liked it when good ol Lou was coaching at South Carolina, it sort of became a guaranteed win for us.
Comrade Darkness
I thought the Hawai’i bowl was the perfect bowl for ND, actually. It’s a consolation prize that damns with faint praise. Few teams would accept the invite (to always play the UHawai’i rainbows?/warriors? in it) were it not warm and beachy there. And it’s on the teevee because no one else wanted to play on a christian holiday except the polynesians (who somehow convinced the catholics to accept an invite, nonetheless). If ND learned anything from those missing missionaries they should be sure and ask *who* is on the menu for the luau, because with the drop in tourism recently, there’s probably a shortage of long-pork.
Honestly, it gives me giggles to imagine it’s 300 years ago and the invitation is solely on the basis of how many islanders the coach could feed.
The Other Steve
Lou Holtz is a dirty word around these parts.
The Other Steve
So the last time this Bible was used, it spawned a Civil War.
Paul in KY
If I were a customer of the San Diego Co. Credit Union, I would wonder if they could raise my interest rate a tenth of a point or two if they didn’t spend any money on a bowl game.
I do hope Hawaii lays a whupping on ND tonight.
SeanH
I’m a Nebraska fan and our one consolation during the Callahan years was looking at Notre Dame and realizing things could be a lot worse.
AnneLaurie
According to Corker, Shelby & McConnell, that war’s still going on. If Obama wants to remind them which side failed to profit from the whole Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery project, good for him.
Dave
In case anyone needs a last-minute gift, here’s an idea: JTP’s book.
http://secureourdream.com/
Bill H
@Dave
And you notice his discussion forum has 16 active users.
Hyperion
@bago:
i followed the link.
i don’t believe Norris wrote the article.
it has too many links.
and although it has a stupid premise, it is not executed stupidly.
wtf?
is chuck norris secretly intelligent?
TenguPhule
Fuck you.
Cannibals live in the other fucking ocean on the other side of the Americas.
Hyperion
@Andy K:
At the other extreme, from a NYT article about Madoff (titled In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal):
none of this "just say you’re sorry to get a do over."
JoePo
It’s not easy being the fan of a team when most of that team’s fans have such a sense of entitlement, when the coach is far more impressed with himself than anyone else is, and when the team gets invited to BCS bowls only to get blown out. Yet I remain. And I still think Jarious Jackson was the best quarterback since the Tony Rice years.
It would be nice if they joined the Big Ten, where they could maybe re-establish a recruiting base somehow. It would also be nice if the midwest had a power conference again. I’m as sick of SEC fans claiming supremacy as I am of Notre Dame fans who think the school deserves special treatment. Christ, I don’t even like Oklahoma, but I want them to crush Florida.
Which gets me to another topic: Clay Travis from Deadspin claimed that Tebow is the best college football player in the past quarter century, citing two (possible) national championships, the sophomore Heisman, etc. To which I say two things: Tommie Frazier, and Tebow was not an integral part of the championship team – he was a glorified backup running back. But I’m sure his jump-passes will revolutionize the game.
John M
Most ND fans aren’t happy about going to the bowl game given the 6-6 record, the time and date of the game, and the poor finish. Still, ND is in a no-win situation. Accepting such a bid leads to posts like this. Turning it down leads to "how dare those holier-than-thou pricks!" Contrary to the comments above, a minor bowl game is a financial wash at best, and probably a net loss.
Still smarting over the 1988-89 Fiesta Bowl? Or WVU’s 0-3 record against the Bob Davie era Irish? Regardless of the reason for your angst, I can’t imagine how a college football fan could be surprised by the fact that mediocre 6-6 teams get to go to bowl games.
Linkmeister
As of last night’s news, 41,700 tickets had been sold to the UH-ND Hawai’i Bowl this afternoon. That’s about 10,000 more than last year (admittedly, UH didn’t play in it in 2007).
Hawai’i’s tourism numbers are way way down; we need the ND fans.
adam
Lou Holtz is a punishment sent from catholic jesus.
How can you put a mush mouth on any sort of broadcast situation? I’d rather have someone grate a blackboard for a minute then hear his voice. I think there is a direct link between the words he speaks on espn and the level ND sucks.
Comrade Glocksman
What’s the difference between Notre Dame and Cheerios?
Cheerios belongs in a bowl. :)