I drove the the game with Megan (a St. Mary’s alum), her husband Pat (a Notre Dame alum), and her cousin Ben (a Syracuse alum, he also kind of looked like Wilhelm). I met up with and sat with my former assistant principal’s husband and sons who are all Notre Dame fans. Getting into the stadium was a total disaster. We went to go in around 2:00. Other gates probably would have been better, but where we went in was barely moving. We ended up getting separated and I got in first. I made it just in time for kickoff around 2:40. I don’t get why it was so bad getting in. Yankee Stadium gets big crowds for Yankee games (not all the time, but somewhat frequently, they were second in the Majors in attendance with an average of 42,998). My other complaint with Yankee Stadium was that they didn’t make good enough use of the video board and the ribbon boards. They showed plenty of replays and during timeouts they had stuff about the history of Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium, so that was cool, but they could have provided more information during the game. They gave you score, time, down and distance, and timeouts remaining. They could have shown a lot more stats and scores from other games They did that a couple of times during timeouts, but not nearly frequently enough. Of course, it was a pretty bad weekend of games (our game was easily the best match up of the weekend), but Ohio State almost lost to Maryland and Alabama struggled against the Citadel for more than a half (by the way, that game never should have been played, the SEC teams playing games like that in November is a joke).
As for the game, I admit that I was a little nervous. I definitely thought that we were better than Syracuse and that we should win. But it’s hard to win all your games and Syracuse turned out to be the second best team on our schedule this year (they might not be in the top five opponents in terms of talent, but they’ve clearly had a better season than all of our opponents except for Michigan). And they score a ton of points. At least they had been scoring a ton of points. It was a little bit of a frustrating first half. Syracuse couldn’t cover our receivers and we were moving the ball through the air, but we were having trouble finishing drives. We scored our first touchdown on a pass from Ian Book to Dexter Williams. We settled for field goals on our next two drives. After that, we had a fourth and goal on the one. Ian Book stumbled on the snap and just threw it up and it was picked off. So rather than going up 20-0 or giving the ball back to Syracuse on their own one, Syracuse had the ball at their own 20. Jon texted me, “If this half somehow ends 13-7, that would be tragic.” But there would be no tragedy. After an interception, Jafar Armstrong scored a touchdown on a beautiful misdirection play. We went into halftime up 20-0.
 |
| Fortunately you can't tell how terrible our uniforms were in this picture. |
 |
| The band makes a batter hitting a home run during halftime. As always, we had the better band. |
Our first two drives in the second half resulted in a field goal and a touchdown pass from Book to Miles Boykin. With a missed extra point, we were up 29-0 and in total control of the game. Syracuse drilled the upright with a 23 yard field goal. Who kicks a field goal down 29-0? They deserved to miss that. Brandon Wimbush got to play in the fourth quarter and made some nice plays with his legs. There were some frustrating aspects of this game. We had four false starts (if I remember correctly) and we struggled to get the running game going. But on that Wimbush drive, we did it all on the ground. Dexter Williams finished it off with a 32 yard touchdown run to make it 36-0. I was really hoping for a shutout, but Syracuse kicked a 28 yard field goal with 10 seconds left. Congratulations on not getting shut out. Kicking those field goals was the football equivalent of sacrifice bunting down 8-0 in the ninth. What’s the point? If you show some guts and score a touchdown to break up the shutout, congratulations, but kicking field goals was lame. I figured out after the game that I’ve never been to a shutout. It would have been cool to see. With the win, Notre Dame is now 30-12 with me in attendance. There was a Beat SC chant at the end. We definitely should beat them. But they did beat Washington State so we have to go take care of business.
 |
| A rare I-formation play for Notre Dame. We had a touchdown called back because of holding on this play. |
 |
| The Alma Mater after the game. |
The defense was outstanding. We had six sacks and three interceptions. Jalen Elliott had one of the interceptions and Alohi Gilman had the other two. The second one by Gilman was a beautiful play where it looked like a completion, but Gilman separated the receiver from the ball and then picked it off. While there were some frustrating aspects of the game, we totally dominated the 12th ranked team. Syracuse isn’t great, but it’s November and they deserved to be ranked 12th. This wasn’t beating an overrated team in September. This was domination against a good team.
I’ll finish up with some thoughts about the Shamrock Series. Some fans hate it. I disagree. If we’re going to play seven games on NBC, we can play seven at home or six at home plus a neutral site game. The problem with playing seven at home is that you’re only playing five away so that means you have to play two games against teams that you’re not giving a return game. That means you’re getting the likes of Ball State, New Mexico, Bowling Green, Western Michigan, etc. This year Vanderbilt was one of those games. That’s about as good of a game that you can get without having to return it. If I was scheduling those games, I’d try to get them against Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Rutgers, and bad teams like that from Power 5 conferences. Or I’d go with Boise State and other Group of 5 teams that have had some success in the last couple of decades. I’d be willing to do two home games and one away game with BYU, Air Force, Army, and some Power 5 teams. My worst case scenario for those extra home games would be evening up some scores with teams like Tulsa, UConn, and USF.
I can live with the Shamrock Series not being every year, but I definitely wouldn’t get rid of it totally. I just think we need to fix it. First of all, stop wearing stupid uniforms. Please, stop. We’re Notre Dame, we’re not Maryland. I was expecting this year’s version to be bad, but I wasn’t prepared. I was thinking like a blue jersey with white pinstripes. No, it was much worse. I could actually live with the jersey (you know, if we’re going to be wearing stupid uniforms, which we shouldn’t be). But the pants were pretty much the Yankees’ pants. And the helmet needs to be gold. But just stop with all the stupidity. Just wear the regular uniforms. The gold and blue is beautiful. Speaking of uniforms, they also messed up the green jerseys. I don’t like the shade of green that we used, but I can live with it. The biggest problem is that Notre Dame and Under Armor insist on pairing the green with blue numbers and letters (this isn’t just a football issue, they do it in other sports as well). It doesn’t look good. If you’re wearing green, get rid of the blue. The numbers should be gold with white outlines (or the other way around, but I like gold numbers better with green).
The other issue to fix is who to play and where. Some fans hate playing in baseball stadiums. I disagree. Of course it’s not the same Yankee Stadium, but we have history at Yankee Stadium (we’re now 17-6-3 at either version of Yankee Stadium). I would take playing in Yankee Stadium over that big sterile stadium in the Meadowlands a million times out of a million. Yes, some of the sight lines are weird (I’ve actually really liked my view for all three games that we’ve played at the new stadium), but it’s still better than playing in a big NFL stadium with no personality. I’d be fine with playing in Yankee Stadium once every ten years. The only other baseball stadiums I’d consider playing in are probably Fenway Park (I’d say once every 20 years because of its smaller capacity), Busch Stadium, Petco Park, Target Field, Nationals Park, AT&T Park, and Dodger Stadium (a long shot because I’m not sure if you can fit a football field in there and we play at USC every other year anyway). I’m not saying we should play in most of those stadiums, I’m just saying I’d be willing to play there because they’re cool stadiums and either they don’t have an NFL stadium in those cities or I wouldn’t want to play in them (I don’t want to play in a dome in Minneapolis). I wouldn’t play at Wrigley Field because the last time they played college football there, they couldn’t fit a full field and we could easily fill up Soldier Field anyway (another spot where I’d play once every ten years). And the opponent needs to make sense. We could play anybody at Soldier Field. I’m cool with playing Army at Yankee Stadium because of the history, but we shouldn’t be playing them or Washington State in San Antonio (especially when Washington State was terrible). I’d be cool with giving 50-50 ticket splits to get some better opponents. That’s what we’re doing with Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in 2020. That was the one NFL stadium that I really wanted to play in. And we got a really good opponent for that game also. I don’t like how we’re playing them in Soldier Field in 2021 also. I would have greatly preferred to have a three-game series with a game at Lambeau, a game at Notre Dame, and a game at Wisconsin. And then we could play anybody else at Soldier Field for the Shamrock Series in 2021.
Anyway, now I have to go to work for three days this week when we have our biggest game in six years coming up on Saturday. I’m going to be entirely focused on the USC game. I’ll be wearing a Notre Dame tie all three days. Go Irish! Beat Trojans!
