Monday Musings 3/07

One of the most annoying points made over and over again during the 2006 college football season was that of Notre Dame's schedule. Even now there are still people ripping both the Irish and Brady Quinn for not winning a game against elite competition, and lambasting the "cupcakes" which the Irish throttled during the year. This point was particularly annoying this year because of the nature of Notre Dame's schedule, which featured both Army and Air Force in addition to the usual matchup with the Midshipmen. Never mind that Navy has had four consecutive winning seasons of eight wins or more, apparently the real "experts" still think playing Navy is comparable to playing the Temples or FIU's of the world. The amazing thing is, to me anyway, that these same folks were neglecting to talk about how the Irish played a one win Stanford team that Navy just shellacked, a North Carolina team which sunk to the bottom of the ACC, and barely escaped a Michigan St. team which managed only one conference win. Now I know people brought up those three teams up many times in their arguments, but the point is the argument about ND's schedule almost always started with the Service Academies, and with Navy. Why? I don't really know, but I'm assuming its just out of ignorance. It's hard to defend the on-the-field accomplishments of Air Force and Army as of late, but I hope that people recognize the Midshipmen, while not a Top 25 team, are by no means cupcakes. Scheduling Navy shouldn't be ripped, since let's be honest here, Navy is one of the better non-BCS teams in the country. Not only that, the Paul Johnson's offense presents matchup problems with defenses, and even against reletivly good defenses (Notre Dame, Rutgers) the Mids have proven they can move the football and score. So lay off the fact that Notre Dame plays Navy, as far as a the streagth of schedule argument goes the Irish could play someone far, far worse. And lay off Army too, seeing that when the Black Knights don't throw five interceptions a game they're actually decent (just ask Texas A&M.) As for Air Force, well, I won't stop you.


That is all.