The irony was not lost on me. On Pearl Harbor Day, Notre Dame announced its football team would play in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl against the University of Hawaii. The game will be played on Christmas Eve, which has caused quite a stir among Irish fans who are already displeased with the fact that the football program is in such dire straits.
Notre Dame alumni cannot blame a surprise attack by the Japanese for obliterating their once-proud football program. That honor belongs to the administration, whose mismanagement bordering on gross negligence during the past 20 years has steadily reduced Irish football from a national treasure to a punch line. The University has only one enemy in this war of attrition – its own leadership.
Christmas Eve is not exactly an appropriate time for Catholics to get cozy by the television and watch a four hour infomercial on the joys of Sheraton hotels interspersed with nauseating servings of mediocre football. I don’t feel quite the outrage over this latest blasphemy as some of my more vocal colleagues, mainly because I will simply choose not to tune in.
My strongest emotion is one of pure sadness. Notre Dame was once a headline performer, but it has been reduced to a barely recognizable warm-up act in a third rate lounge. The payout of $750,000 won’t cover the University’s travel expenses, but the administrators will tell you between sips of their fruity drinks that the real motivation is to reward the players for their six wins against some of the worst teams on the planet. It apparently is of little consequence that they had to sell Christmas to earn it.
One can only hope that as December 7, 1941 marked the end of the Great Depression, the 2008 Sheraton Hawaii Bowl will someday be known as the point in Irish football history from which the program rose from the ashes and returned to glory. The problem with such optimism is that Notre Dame does not have a Churchill or Roosevelt at the helm. It has Neville Chamberlain in a smock.
Some misguided historians say that Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement bought a much-needed year for Britain to get ready for the inevitable world war. Maybe Notre Dame’s strategy to keep Charlie Weis for one more season is similarly brilliant, and will result in a home run hire twelve months from now. Then again, things just may get worse.
In any event, don’t waste time wondering if the bowl game is a just reward for the team after months of hard work, or whether the extra practice time will detract from their academic performance this semester or lead to a lick of improvement next season. The entire circus is irrelevant and the benefits are inconsequential. Besides, the team’s performance in Oahu will be eerily similar to what we’ve already experienced in November.
The best advice I can give you is to stay home and have a merry and blessed Christmas, and you can do that by keeping the silliness and depression out of your living room.