ND: Tears Of Infinite Sadness

There is also a Liveblog you can read through. So that should be awesome!

The NDNation guy is right that the failure of the Catholic Leagues hurts ND and I think that really does preclude them from being a consistent power as their bread and butter pipeline fails.

The decline of the Detroit Catholic League hurt us too though, as we also pulled players out of there.  We found new recruiting areas and pipelines (ex: Cass Tech) and moved forward.  The NDNation guy falls apart when he goes so far as to say "black people play football, we're done as a power."

At this point I'm not sure if it is the coach or more the failure of ND's AD to establish stable recruiting ties.  I wonder if the problem might be that Weis and BK had to spend too much effort to pull in their classes, which in turn reduced the time they had to focus on play development and scheme planning.  Be interesting to compare the man hours Michigan spends landing a 4* vs ND's hours.

I think you meant tremendous.

I am also an MSU alum (LAW) and am not trying to come across as snarky, but most schools in my experience don't sacrifice that much in fielding competitive teams. 

Yes, Stanford and NW hold their athletes to higher academic standards than, say, LSU, but not to such a degree that those athletes would qualify as the "true" student-athletes that some proclaim them to be.  The average SAT scores for athletes at virtually all schools, including top academic institutions such as Duke and Stanford, are consistently lower than those of the general student body, almost always by a significant degree.  Of course, every school has athletes who could have gained admittance without athletics, but those are relatively few even at the elite schools. 

While some might find this distressing, I find it difficult to see how it offends the overriding goal of most academic institutions, which is to educate and serve the people.  Not to drag up the old talking points, but there are large swaths of the citizenry with limited options for gaining valuable skills and knowledge via education, due to a multitude of socio-economic issues.  Regardless of one's opinion about its cause, athletics has become a means by which a small number of individuals (and yes, disproportionately from certain racial backgrounds) gain admission to a college education that would otherwise have been denied them through more conventional channels. 

Whole treatesies have been written about the efficacy of this practice to truly bring about change in underserved communities and how it clearly benefits universities in non-academic ways, but in the end I doubt the practice has a signficant effect upon the overall culture of the student body.  Even if one presumes that every athlete at a school like UM would not have gained admittance without his/her athletic ability (which is patently false), we are talking about approximately 1000 people in a school with a little over 41k.  Same with MSU, Stanford, Alabama, ND, and Texas.  Those schools are "what they are" academically regardless of who suits up for them on the field or court, and thus I don't think schools like ND are giving up their identity to field a competitive football team.  And while it is true that Alabama probably lets in more "academically risky" players than ND, my guess is that the discrepancy could be measured in the teens at most.  Frankly, the ND rant reads more like an elitist fandom that can't comprehend the idea that the rest of the world has caught up, that having "Notre Dame" stenciled on your chest doesn't assure victory anymore, and is striking out at strawmen to account for the reality that they have mediocre coaches and an unrealistic desire to be a perrenial top-10 outfit despite the fact few, if any, teams can lay claim.

Ah - Thanx. Couldn't see the blue in my save-the-battery-keep-brightness-to-minimum state.

1. Terrible coaching.
2. ...
3. Secularization in American life compared to the first part of the 20th century.
4. ...
5. ...
6. Not yet.
7. The south is growing big time, the north is shrinking, and ND's Catholic roots probably doesn't mean the same thing to a kid from a Babtist dominated town in the south that it does to an athlete out of Joliet Catholic Academy in Illinois.

OK, stating there have been onging changes in the demographics of this country and nature of college football that have helped certain programs and hurt others is racist. Thanks for clearing that up.

Based on your understanding of "racism," I'm doubting you've ever had an intelligent discussion on any subject.