I am a NDamer, an alumnus, and a fan, but not an uncritical one. The administrators of this site are willing to brook no criticism of ND football and/or its so-called "legend," and label one as a troll if any balanced remarks are offered herein. I'm sure the result of this posting will be no exception, but, what the heck, here goes:
Are any of you embarrassed to be participating in a serious discussion of us possibly being ranked in the top twenty-five? On those rare occasions when we play anyone with so much as a hint of a national ranking, we come up short. Admittedly, there's not a lot of evidence to support that contention, because we virtually never play anyone any good, and then wonder why we get blown out in the bowl games when we finally do. We love to stack the deck in our favor, scheduling-wise, demanding a 7 (home game)-4-1 format, no representative home-and-home schedule with several traditionally strong teams, and we carefully handpick opponents that even we are guaranteed to beat. In that noble tradition, we have added two more patsies for 2010, Western Michigan, who has a losing record in the pathetic MAC, and Tulsa, loser to the Sooners by 45-0. If we want to manipulate scheduling in a manner that will please the home fans and get us lots of "winning" records, that's fine, but let's not pretend that we're doing anything but lying to ourselves, suggesting somehow that we "belong" on the real national scene when we do that....we don't, and to talk about us deserving a national ranking is, frankly, embarrassing under the circumstances. When we start playing no more than half our games at home, when we visit top programs on their turf every other year, and when we succeed on that basis (don't hold your breath), then let's talk about rankings.