44 Years

Saturday was a day of great mourning. Notre Dame lost to Navy for the first time in 44 years, breaking a 43 game winning streak, the longest in the NCAA. We all knew that just by statistics, it had to eventually happen. And I suppose for it to happen in what, by most measures, would be considered the worst season in history eases the blow a little. But it's still hard to take. I've always said that the coach that finally did lose that game could kiss his job good-bye. However, I think if anyone can survive it, it's Charlie Weis. I hope he has a chance to rebuild and return to the greatness that is Notre Dame football.

When I was there, it seemed like a really long streak. It was hard to imagine then that we had beaten Navy for 22 or 23 straight years. But as time has gone by, it's become more and more amazing. They all point out that the last time Navy beat Notre Dame was the year that Roger Staubach quaterbacked Navy and won the Heisman. But that doesn't give a feel for just how long it's really been. So I got to thinking. I was 1 year old at the time. JFK was president at the time. Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected governor of CA. George W Bush was 17 years old. At that point in time, Sesame Street was not on the air, Woodstock had not happened, nor had the sexual revolution, nor the hippie movement. Viet Nam was a little known place with no appearance of it's coming place in history. The ARPAnet was still several years away from existing, much less it's evolution into the Internet. At that point in human history, no one from planet Earth had ever been to the moon. In fact, the Mercury missions had just finished and the Gemini ones had not yet started. Communism and nuclear annihilation were still major concerns. People were practicing "duck and cover" and building bomb shelters. It had been only about a year since the Cuban missile crisis. No one had heard of OPEC. No one had heard of quarks. Fermat's last theorem was still unsolved. In the period from AD 1963 to AD 2007, the world changed in ways unfathomable to people then. Yet one thing remained constant. Every year when Notre Dame played football with Navy, Notre Dame won. On Saturday, that part of our collective experience came to an end.

Of course, the end of a winning streak is not as momentous as any of those events that occured during the past 44 years. But it is an interesting philosophical exercise (at least to those of us who are ND alums) to think about the streak in the larger context. And it really does give some perspective that we generally didn't think about while the streak was still going.

Not all of my thinking and activities since my last post have been so philosophical. While the Notre Dame, Navy game was going on, I was in Neyland stadium watching Tennessee trounce Lousiana Lafayette 59 to 7. Yes, it was homecoming, and yes, they had scheduled a team they expected to beat. But I don't think anyone was really expected them to win by 52 points. At the beginning of the 4th quarter, coach Fulmer put in the backups. In the first plays of the first drive, it was clear that their inexperience and nerves were limiting their performance. So I thought, that's just what's good about putting them in here. When the time comes, they won't be so nervous. But as the drive went on, it became clear that these players really didn't have any problem playing for real in front of 96,000 people. In fact, the last two Tennessee touchdowns were scored by the second-string offense. So that was a rather enjoyable experience, tempered of course by the Notre Dame loss.

Of course, no blog entry, even one this long, would be complete without a book update. I've been plugging away at the instructor's material. I have gotten some done and seem to be starting a bit of a flow, but not as fast as I really need to. Hopefully, I'll get some done this weekend, when I'll be home alone. But even on those weekends, I'm often distracted, preoccupied and spread thin. Recently, while working on the material for Ch 3, I realized that one of the exercises I put in wouldn't work at all. So I took it out and posted updated files for the printer. Still waiting to see the real thing. Yes, I'm impatient. Always have been, and probably always will be.