None of these commentators is paid to talk about the "sociology" of football [i.e. which teams do it right and which are irresponsible meat factories]. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they know that such talk [unless there is some public scandal going on] is not in their best interests if they want to keep their job. There is no incentive to bash things which could threaten the "fun". Therefore there is no incentive to praise Notre Dame for doing it right. The only way ND will get its praise from them is if we begin regularly beating teams that they consider good. Purdue, though probably "good" doesn't count and with the loss of Smith probably won't count all season. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I bet that if we begin beating people like MSU, Stanford, Pitt that we'll begin getting plenty of reps from most of these guys [except someone like Craig James, who seems totally buried in Texas and Florida, psychologically]. I heard Trevor Matticks [forgive the misspelling] say that his favorite helmet was the ND gold helmet. Why? asked his partner. Because of its tradition, its meaning, it's the helmet. I believe that there's a lot of sentiment out there among real football people, but our team is going to have to prove it---and close losses are not good enough. One thing that I believe that Kelly will accomplish this year is to beat enough of the prestige teams to end the commentator negativity and allow some spontaneous "affections" to occasionally leak out. A change there is a'comin'
