It’s a long off-season, and that means there will be plenty of trolls, hacks, haters, and randoms that will choose to wake up one day and crap in the breakfast bowls of Notre Dame fans. They will do this
with a one or all of the top four Irish hating phrases in our college football world:
- Join a conference.
- Notre Dame is irrelevant.
- Notre Dame always plays a soft schedule.
- Notre Dame is always overrated.
While the first three are generally easy to dismiss with proof (although unlikely the person flaming ND will care) it’s the fourth one that sticks a little harder… overrated.
The defense of Notre Dame football over the last 20 years has a solid chunk of time from 2006-2016 that absolutely confirmed those negative comments. That helps set a nice base (along with a solid mix of no NY6 Bowl wins and blowout losses to good teams) and give the rest of the CFB world permission to trash ND.
While things have been much different since 2017, it still won’t ever be enough for some people to stop proclaiming the Irish as overrated every year.
I say this because it’s about to get hot and heavy. Current FanDuel odds have Notre Dame as the favorite to win the national championship, and there have already been a number of writers and talking heads that have the Irish absolutely in the mix to win it all.
Those kinds of expectations in the spring usually lead toward a very high preseason ranking in August. I know we already talked about if the Irish should be ranked #1 to start the season, and we generally agree that they won’t be… but maybe they will be. If the Irish are ranked anywhere inside the top 5, the expectation is national championship or bust — those are the rules.
So what do you think? Is this the year? Will Notre Dame meet the expectation? Will they finally put to rest the “overrated” narrative that’s already been beaten back quite a bit over the last 7 years?
Let us know in the comments below.
