(03-29-2024 08:45 AM)EKUSteve Wrote:  

(03-28-2024 11:56 PM)IWokeUpLikeThis Wrote:  Interestingly, in the year before Rockne took over (1917), Notre Dame played road games at Morningside and Washington & Jefferson.

Heck, in Rockne’s first 2 years (1918-19), Notre Dame played road games at Case, Morningside, & in-state Wabash.

Not a total surprise. A&M's 12th man bowl game was against Centre College of KY.

Centre College was a legit powerhouse program at the time. Possibly better than any Southern school other than Georgia Tech (although my knowledge is incomplete).

The first football game played South of the Ohio River was Centre College vs Transylvania in 1880.

Centre claims a national championship in 1919, and Sagarin agrees. They had 2 consensus first team All-Americans that year.

In 1921, the year Texas A&M beat Centre in the 12th man bowl game (on Jan 2 1922), Centre went 10-1 and beat Clemson, VPI, Xavier, Transylvania, Harvard, Kentucky, Auburn, Washington & Lee, Tulane, and Arizona by a combined score of 320-6. The only team to score on them before the bowl game was Xavier.

Centre had 11 players graduate & go to the NFL from 1919-1922.

(03-29-2024 07:50 AM)gosports1 Wrote:  At one time Fordham was a power as well. They chose a different path than ND in what role sports played at the school. Who knows where they would be today had they placed an emphasis on varsity athletics?

True. Lombardi was one of the Seven Blocks of Granite, iirc.

Maybe Terry can help with this question. Why Irish? Notre Dame was founded by a priest of a French missionary order, not an Irish one. And the name Knute Rockne certainly isn't Irish.

(03-29-2024 01:44 PM)ken d Wrote:  Maybe Terry can help with this question. Why Irish? Notre Dame was founded by a priest of a French missionary order, not an Irish one. And the name Knute Rockne certainly isn't Irish.

https://www.nd.edu/stories/whats-in-a-name/


This article explains it as well as any.

Give it a click, its a good read.

Rockne was Norwegian.

(03-29-2024 12:47 PM)EdwordL Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 07:50 AM)gosports1 Wrote:  At one time Fordham was a power as well. They chose a different path than ND in what role sports played at the school. Who knows where they would be today had they placed an emphasis on varsity athletics?

True. Lombardi was one of the Seven Blocks of Granite, iirc.

Interesting!

The head coach of Fordham's Seven Blocks of Granite was Jim Crowley, who was one of Notre Dame's Four Horseman.

And the Line coach of the Seven Blocks of Granite was a young Frank Leahy.

(03-29-2024 12:35 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:13 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:04 AM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 09:31 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  People like the racist mascot?

Hibernians aren't a race.

Catholics were making fun of Irish Protestants when they made the logo and mascot.

Irish Protestants aren't a race but you understood what I meant.

Anti-Protestants Sentiment is a mouthful when I can shorten it to racism.

It's actually not "racism" as Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are the same exact "race".

Which is how we can tell that neither is the same race as a Leprechaun, which is what the mascot is portraying.

"Leprechauns aren't a mascot, they're people" really doesn't work great as a protest given that Leprechauns aren't actually homo sapiens kind of people, but rather one of the faerie folk. If you believe that the faerie folk are mythical, then they are every bit as good a mascot as a Dragon or a rabble of Titans.

Quote: It's something far worse, it's a religious war that's still kind of simmering all these decades, even centuries later, and probably not a great topic for this forum. As for the suitability of the actual mascot? It's a irishman with a Catholic symbol on his hat, aka a "fighting Irish", it seems quite appropriate to me.

"I'm not entirely sure that a Leprechaun is a Catholic symbol" would be one of those Ozzie size understatements. To the extent that Leprechauns are religious symbols, that'd be a religion older than the Catholic / Protestant divide, and indeed older than Christianity in Ireland.

(03-29-2024 12:24 AM)esayem Wrote:  They barnstormed and fielded teams full of the sons of Catholic immigrants. They became America’s Catholic team when Catholics were still overtly discriminated against. The fact they’re in Indiana made it cheaper to field a team vs Fordham or St. Mary’s

Catholic and Irish.

JFK getting elected as president was a big deal as hard as that is to imagine today. A few years back we had a Supreme Court without any Protestants. All Catholic or Jewish, when in those days a Catholic or Jewish Supreme Court justice was rare.

(03-29-2024 12:38 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 08:45 AM)EKUSteve Wrote:  

(03-28-2024 11:56 PM)IWokeUpLikeThis Wrote:  Interestingly, in the year before Rockne took over (1917), Notre Dame played road games at Morningside and Washington & Jefferson.

Heck, in Rockne’s first 2 years (1918-19), Notre Dame played road games at Case, Morningside, & in-state Wabash.

Not a total surprise. A&M's 12th man bowl game was against Centre College of KY.

Centre College was a legit powerhouse program at the time. Possibly better than any Southern school other than Georgia Tech (although my knowledge is incomplete).

The first football game played South of the Ohio River was Centre College vs Transylvania in 1880.

Centre claims a national championship in 1919, and Sagarin agrees. They had 2 consensus first team All-Americans that year.

In 1921, the year Texas A&M beat Centre in the 12th man bowl game (on Jan 2 1922), Centre went 10-1 and beat Clemson, VPI, Xavier, Transylvania, Harvard, Kentucky, Auburn, Washington & Lee, Tulane, and Arizona by a combined score of 320-6. The only team to score on them before the bowl game was Xavier.

Centre had 11 players graduate & go to the NFL from 1919-1922.

Harvard was a power in those days, winning a share of the MNC in 1919 and 1920.
Centre hired a coach out of Ft. Worth who took a bunch of Texans with him to Kentucky to play football.

(03-29-2024 01:07 PM)ken d Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 12:35 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:13 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:04 AM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 09:31 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  People like the racist mascot?

Hibernians aren't a race.

Catholics were making fun of Irish Protestants when they made the logo and mascot.

Irish Protestants aren't a race but you understood what I meant.

Anti-Protestants Sentiment is a mouthful when I can shorten it to racism.

It's actually not "racism" as Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are the same exact "race". It's something far worse, it's a religious war that's still kind of simmering all these decades, even centuries later, and probably not a great topic for this forum. As for the suitability of the actual mascot? It's a irishman with a Catholic symbol on his hat, aka a "fighting Irish", it seems quite appropriate to me.

Since when is a shamrock a Catholic symbol? Don't other Christian denominations also believe in a trinitarian god?

The shamrock is an Irish symbol.

The disagreements between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics are not about religious differences. It's a nationalist dispute that is so old that they were all the same religion when it started.

The Irish Protestants are either descended from English (or from post-reformation Scottish) invaders/settlers, or from the few Irish who collaborated with them. But then again, many of the descendants of English settlers became "more Irish than the Irish themselves" over the years and stayed Catholic when the Reformation came along.

But whatever their religious preferences, they're all equally Irish today (at least in the RoI; Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland might disagree).


The shamrock is so universally Irish that it's used to represent Northern Ireland on modern UK coins (along with a rose for England, a leek for Whales, and a thistle for Scotland).

(03-29-2024 12:35 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:13 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 10:04 AM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  

(03-29-2024 09:31 AM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  People like the racist mascot?

Hibernians aren't a race.

Catholics were making fun of Irish Protestants when they made the logo and mascot.

Irish Protestants aren't a race but you understood what I meant.

Anti-Protestants Sentiment is a mouthful when I can shorten it to racism.

It's actually not "racism" as Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are the same exact "race". It's something far worse, it's a religious war that's still kind of simmering all these decades, even centuries later, and probably not a great topic for this forum. As for the suitability of the actual mascot? It's a irishman with a Catholic symbol on his hat, aka a "fighting Irish", it seems quite appropriate to me.

Not really. It's a political war. The "Troubles" started in the 60s but the separation from the Catholic Church by Henry the VIII was the beginning of the Church of England as Protestant. Ireland was solidly Catholic. Being a protestant became the equivalent of being a British loyalist and being Catholic with loyalty to your Irish roots.

It started because Henry the VIII couldn't get an annulment which he felt he needed because he believed the women he had married were barren and he wanted an heir. In reality the issue was probably in Henry's loins.

Be that as it may he withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church and started the Church of England, but for far different reasons than Martin Luther, or John Calvin had done. The Church of England was similar to the Catholic in worship, but the head of the Church was not the Pope, but the King.

Ireland remained Catholic and didn't see the reason for supporting to them the heresy of having a Monarch as the head of the church. Protestant became synonymous with support of the British King and Catholicism as both a political and religious repudiation of it.

These issues then got wound up in the struggle for Irish independence from England.

The Catholic vs Protestant aspects are more political than religious in most instances, nationalistic in effect in many, and with its century's old violence with all of these pieces of visceral history shoved into the intestines of two peoples it has created a couple of confused sausages of cold irrational hatred the impetus of which has long ago been lost in the shuffle. I'd hardly call it religious. It's simply now a blood feud.

There was a rail line to Chicago that made it easy enough for Irish in Chicago to find their way to South Bend.

There was and is a line 10 miles to the north used by the Michigan club to travel to South Bend to demonstrate the game.

Then there was Rockne.

As for the Big Ten "boycott". ND owes us one for that favor.

As for more recent coaches and facilities, ND has had the pockets to invest in football like few can.

I wonder if they would still have the same amount of success if they were named "Northern Indiana" instead of "Notre Dame".

(03-30-2024 02:10 PM)andy98 Wrote:  I wonder if they would still have the same amount of success if they were named "Northern Indiana" instead of "Notre Dame".

That would have been a strange name for a Catholic private school to take.

(03-31-2024 07:32 AM)TerryD Wrote:  

(03-30-2024 02:10 PM)andy98 Wrote:  I wonder if they would still have the same amount of success if they were named "Northern Indiana" instead of "Notre Dame".

That would have been a strange name for a Catholic private school to take.

Quite, but alternatively, if it had been Holy Cross University, after the founding order, but still had Knute Rockne and the popularization of the forward pass and the building up to success as a big time Midwestern Independent in the days of the Big Eastern Independents in the 50s and 60s ... it would have been the same level of success.