The Most Collegey of all Big Time Football Programs: and it is still a school

I grew up in a place where none of us were catholic, no one was actually Irish, and we were nowhere near Indiana, yet everyone wore hats, t- shirts, and sweatshirts with the logo of Notre Dame. Make no mistake, the school is a serious academic institution, it is the kind of place where they require you to be smart before you go there to get educated, but really, the biggest reason why so many smart people want to go there, is football.

It is a private religious school with 12, 000 students, and from what I understand many of them play other school sponsored sports like softball and basketball, but in all of America I can find no other university that has full padded, full contact, intramural football, where non-Varsity kids can actually play the game and not just spectate.  The sport is infused into the entire experience of the place, making Notre Dame the very definition of college football. It is one of the few places where a student can stroll across a picturesque quad, populated by kids who look studious, and walk right up to a world class stadium unimpeded. The stadium is built as part of the student’s life rather than a free standing football palace surrounded by parking lots built to accommodate tailgating alumni and other grown ups. Though there is also that. Consequentially the whole country feels the Fighting Irish belong to them. Rudy’s Dad never went there and he cried tears of joy just looking at the field. Ronald Reagan never went to Notre Dame but without their football team he might never have been president.

Condoleezza Rice did attend Notre Dame and as far as I know she never played the game, but it has been argued that she knows more about football than whomever might be serving as Secretary of State today… whenever today is right now, no matter who it is.

At Notre Dame even Jesus is signaling a touchdown (says ESPN, any and every time they broadcast from campus).

It is because Notre Dame is such a great school with such a great football program that I am at this moment with this sentence, petitioning the administration to replace the large murals in that golden dome building with the collected football artwork of J.C. Leyendecker. I don’t think Leyendecker is connected in any way to Notre Dame but who cares because the murals they have in there now are trash. Not trash in like they are poorly painted and I am talking trash about them, but trash in that in an effort to make an Italian guy look awesome they make a whole indigenous people look silly. It is bad enough to show the Taino Arowak people fawning over a guy who essentially destroyed them, but what really bugs me is that the dude on the far left is clearly wearing a hat made from an animal that never lived on “Hispaniola”. 

I would suggest they move some of that wonderful artwork they have over by the weight room into the administration building- but that stuff isn’t just art- they are all trophies.

Oh. And they also have a church.

the USC in California

The University of Southern California is not in South Carolina. You would think this goes without saying but some people need to hear it. They are known as the Trojans, they have almost 40,000 students, and every year the school receives more donations than almost any other university. They need those donations because while New York is the old world of inherited position, Los Angeles is the new world where nobodies just buy their way in, and USC is not just IN LA but in many ways IS LA.

I have been to more than 200 hundred American college campuses and nowhere have I been surrounded by so many kids who look like well-manicured super athletes. Remember that one sociology class you had sophomore year with all the football players? They would show up in sweat pants, unshaven, with bed head. At USC they arrive in crisp ironed t-shirts with tweezed eyebrows. These polished Adonises appear in white brown and black, male and female, with the only requirements being that they appear chiseled and leave behind first place trophies. There are so many trophies.

Winning is a big deal at USC.

At Harvard you can find a statue of John Harvard. At Penn you find a bronze Ben Franklin. At USC you find statues of a dog wearing a cap playing with a football, the 1969 defensive line nicknamed the Wild Bunch, a white horse named Traveler, several bronze Trojan warriors, actor Douglass Fairbanks, and six, count them six, Heisman trophies. There would be seven but Reggie Bush lost his due to NCAA violations. O.J. Simpson’s is still on display in the Hall of Champions.

Tearing Up the Front Porch: University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is one of those Rockefeller schools founded in the late 1800’s with a donation from John D. The first classes were held in 1892, not that long ago by some standards, but since then the place has housed 89 Nobel Prize winners, 50 Rhodes Scholars, and 13 billionaires.

More importantly Chicago was a founding member of the  Big Ten conference, won 2 national football championships, and a Chicago player was the recipient of the first ever Heisman trophy. That was 1935.

In 1939, Chicago stopped playing football.

Make no mistake, I love football. I even love college football. But Cancelling football right after winning the Heisman, at a time when college football was becoming America’s true national game, is FABULOUS!

It was fabulous in that more people today know about the Chicago School of Economics and its original rejection of Keynesian ideas than know about the Heisman. Which is appropriate because it is a college. A school. Odds are if one buys a Chicago Maroons sweater at Walmart they are not cheering a running back but more likely an academic.

Most schools are not that brave.

But to go to Chicago you have to be brave. It is a must.

Why? Because it is unbearably cold there. Freezing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people there chose brains over sports but really, it was probably just way too cold outside. Seriously how do people live in that? Ranked #4 by US News & World Report

Student body: 15,312

Endowment: $7.5 billion

Mascot…. the Phoenix!