Trench Talk Tuesday #6
On remembering your history
Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas USA Today Sports Draft Wire
By now you know the news: after a season that ended with ten straight wins and plenty of promise, Notre Dame was left out of the 2025-2026 College Football Playoff. And look, I get it. It’s hard to start a season 0-2 and then get into the playoffs. It’s hard (but acceptable) to see a team that beat us (Miami) get in over us. Head-to-head matters. It’s ridiculous to see a team with more losses than us (Alabama) and an embarrassing loss in their conference championship game (Alabama) get put into the playoff over us, igniting suspicions that ESPN will kill someone before they allow an SEC blue blood to get passed over the CFP two years in a row (Alabama, Alabama, Alabama).
We then announced that we would rather decline a bowl game entirely, and so the season is over. We’re 10-2, with our last game being a dismantling of Stanford (but what else is new).
This isn’t new for the Irish. From 1925-1968, Notre Dame famously opted not to play in any bowl game if it was not the national championship game. The argument the team presented was simple: the best team was decided by regular season performance, and bowl games at the time were little more than glorified exhibitions. Now, obviously that argument has lost weight over time, and starting in 1969 we would play in bowl games. But the point is thus: Notre Dame choosing to end the season on their terms is not unique.
And yet you’d think, based on that decision made earlier this week, that Notre Dame just killed college football. Chris Vannini of The Athletic said that Notre Dame took its ball and went home, “and everyone is worse off for it.” Tom Fornelli of CBSSports framed it as Notre Dame being ‘caught up in its feelings,’ and remarked that the Irish “took on the posture of righteous indignation, but who among us hasn’t been guilty of telling themselves anything they have to in order to justify their feelings?” Even Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) took the time out of his apparently busy day to tauntingly remark that Notre Dame declining to face BYU in the Pop-Tarts Bowl was “absolutely the right move.” Cox wrote on X that “Getting embarrassed in a bowl game against BYU would be really hard on the program…Much smarter to avoid playing tough teams so you can keep your brand intact.”
Might wanna be careful about that getting embarrassed line, Governor. Texas Tech might want to beat you 34-7 again.
And, as always, whenever Notre Dame is on the receiving end of some sort of controversy, out comes the tired argument from the rest of the world. You can set your watch to it: This wouldn’t happen if Notre Dame joined a conference. Why doesn’t Notre Dame join a conference? Notre Dame should be banned from postseason play until they join a conference.
Sigh. As timeless an argument as it is stupid.
First, people nationwide frame it as though Notre Dame is taking this morally snobbish ground, as though the idea of joining a conference was never in the cards and is an offensive suggestion to even ask. There’s one problem with that: Notre Dame wanted to join a conference. The Irish wanted to join the Western Conference at the turn of the 20th century. But Michigan athletic director Fielding Yost, so aggrieved about losing to Knute Rockne’s Irish in 1908 that he cancelled the rematch in 1909 literally hours before the game, blocked the move. Yost leaned into anti-Catholic sentiment, and because of that Notre Dame was denied entry into the conference.
From there, Rockne turned the Irish into a sort of traveling circus, playing any team that would take us. And from there we developed some of our greatest rivalries (Hi USC! I hate you guys but appreciate that you wanted to throw down over the years. Tell Lincoln Riley to stop being a baby and stick with the annual matchup). Notre Dame built up enough cache nationwide that, in 1990, it decided to break away from the then-restrictive College Football Association television deal and sign an exclusive partnership with NBC. The deal runs till 2029, I believe.
So if you really wanna be mad at someone, be mad at Fielding Yost for being such a religious hater that he motivated the Irish to set off on their own even when they had wanted to join a conference. None of this nonsense would have happened if a single coach had gotten over his bigotry.
But okay, fine. Too historic for you? Then let me bring up a more modern tale.
Let me tell you about Jaylon Smith.
From 2013-2015, Jaylon Smith was a linebacker at Notre Dame. Manti Te’o had graduated after 2012, and who were we supposed to replace him with? How about someone even better? Smith was a multi-year All-American, the 2014 Independent Defensive Player of the Year, and the 2015 Butkus Award winner for the best linebacker in the country. But don’t take my word for it, check this out.
That’s not college speed. That’s “top-5 pick in the NFL draft” speed. Jaylon Smith was him.
And then, on January 1, 2016, in the Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State, this happened. (timestamp 0:34)
Yeah, a human leg should not bend that way. And Jaylon Smith’s injuries are the type to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up: MCL tear, ACL tear, nerve damage in his knee and ankle, and what was supposed to be a sure-fire top 5 pick became a guy who if you drafted him…he was missing his rookie year. And it was a big IF his nerves would regenerate. The Dallas Cowboys took a flier on him, and he played and even earned a Pro Bowl nod in 2019…but he’s 30 now, and he’s out of the league. What could have been a legendary career became a cautionary tale.
And it basically made the college football world, and especially its stars, stop and ask: Wait, what am I doing playing in a “meaningless” bowl game and risking my draft status and potentially millions?
The dominoes began to fall: the following season, Christian McCaffrey (Stanford) and Leonard Fournette (LSU) opted out of playing in their teams’ end-of-season bowl games in 2016. More followed. Coaches began to expect it. And can you blame them? In this increasingly homogenized world, where money trumps all, there is less and less of an incentive for a player to risk the potential for generational wealth just so they can pick up 200 yards in the Pop-Tarts Bowl (and, to be clear, I love the Pop-Tarts Bowl).
But college football became a business years ago. And unless we get some meaningful reform up at the top, we’re gonna see more and more teams make this kind of decision.
Notre Dame isn’t thinking about you, the anonymous keyboard warrior, when they make the incredibly difficult decision to end a season and (for some) the careers of players.
They’re thinking about guys like Jaylon Smith, and hoping that they never see another star get snuffed out like that. A star snuffed out all in service of our refusal to admit that money has overtaken the joie de vivre of college football.
WEEKLY FOOTBALL PICKS - NFL WEEK 15
(Yeah I’m aware the NFL season is halfway through. Next year I’ll be on the spot, promise. Winner picks are in bold.)
Thursday, December 11:
Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Sunday, December 14:
Cleveland Browns at Chicago Bears
Baltimore Ravens at Cincinnati Bengals
Los Angeles Chargers at Kansas City Chiefs
Buffalo Bills at New England Patriots
Washington Commanders at New York Giants
Las Vegas Raiders at Philadelphia Eagles
New York Jets at Jacksonville Jaguars
Arizona Cardinals at Houston Texans
Green Bay Packers at Denver Broncos
Detroit Lions at Los Angeles Rams
Carolina Panthers at New Orleans Saints
Tennessee Titans at San Francisco 49ers
Indianapolis Colts at Seattle Seahawks
Minnesota Vikings at Dallas Cowboys
Monday, December 15:
Miami Dolphins at Pittsburgh Steelers
Last Week’s Record: 7-7; Season Record: 35-38
Weekly Recommendations
A thing to read: If you’re annoyed that all AI bots write the same, does Sam Kriss at the New York Times Magazine have a piece for you!
A song to listen to: “The Bells of Notre Dame” by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. Disney in the 80s and 90s was dropping bangers, both in movie and in soundtrack, and yet for some reason this one gets overlooked all the time. Makes sense: The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a surprisingly dark, moody film that is undercut by those stupid gargoyles, so tonally it’s a bit outside typical Disney fare (and Tony Jay as the villainous Judge Claude Frollo is a little…too real in his creepiness). But the opening number of this film? With that final, endless high note by Paul Kandel? Absolute poetry. Hair-raisingly good.
A video to watch: SNL Digital Shorts Presents - “People Getting Punched Just Before Eating”. It’s so stupid. It’s so bizarre. It’s so breathtakingly sincere. And it’s so funny every time. It’s gotta be Andy Samberg, I guess.
Have a good week, and as always:
Stay steady, y’all.
- Mike G.W.