Pride is a tricky thing. It notoriously comes before the fall, and yet after a defeat, it is the quickest rallying cry for moving forward.
Pride played no part in Notre Dame’s 41-8 failure at Miami this past weekend. It was, however, the buzz word afterward. With their College Football Playoff and national championship aspirations reduced to what ifs and pieces of the past, the Irish grasped for a tangible purpose, finding only intangible ones.
“Our mission from the start has been to restore the pride and tradition of Notre Dame football,” Irish senior linebacker and captain Drue Tranquill. “That’s what we’re going to do.”
That is a hefty task, one certainly beyond the doings of any one player, if not beyond any one team.
“It’s pride,” fifth-year left tackle and captain Mike McGlinchey echoed. “We have a lot of good people and a lot of good seniors that have helped turn this program around.”
Playing for honor, pride, tradition or whatever other abstract noun you may prefer is a worthy undertaking and a positive trait. If anyone will embrace that pursuit, it will be the Irish offensive line led by McGlinchey. That unit already oozes the characteristics Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly expects to rely upon now, partly thanks to it boasting four seniors with multiple years of starting experience.
“We’re looking at markers within our own locker room of how guys respond,” Kelly said. “Football is a game that builds character, that builds resolve. That’s what we’re looking for.
“It’s kind of a bigger picture.”
Needing to focus on that bigger picture is a side effect of remaining a college football independent. The Irish have no hopes of — for example — the Hurricanes losing their next two games to create a chance for Notre Dame to backdoor its way into a conference title game.
To some extent, even an ACC crown or a national championship would be an arbitrary goal. Those are results simply established, enforced and exaggerated by social convention. Nonetheless, they are established, enforced and exaggerated. Hence, banners, rings and bragging rights exist.
Pride and tradition are much less rewarded by societal construct. They offer only inward incentives. Manufacturing that version of motivation, inspiration and compensation is difficult enough with anyone subject to human nature. It is especially challenging when dealing with 18- to 21-year-olds.
This success or failure will define the 2017 season’s retrospective success or failure. The one-point loss to Georgia and the embarrassment in Miami will become pieces of a larger story. Finishing the season 10-2 would mark a definitive upward trend back toward Tranquill’s “pride and tradition of Notre Dame football.” Reaching a playoff-eligible bowl would establish the program as a part of the 2018 Playoff conversation.
“It’s really about how we respond now, individually and collectively as a group after a disappointing performance,” Kelly said. “The challenge really is about jumping back.”
That response would separate this rendition of a multi-loss season from 2014’s and 2015’s, years also filled with Playoff hopes that quickly devolved into specters of false confidence. Unfortunately, that standing was not recognized as paper-thin until the Irish crashed into last year’s 4-8 conclusion.
That is the hurdle ahead of the Irish now, one only rewarded with personal satisfaction at not repeating previous slides into the offseason and mediocrity. Instead, a strong finish would be another piece of evidence of the progress made since the end of 2016.
To pull a paragraph from an Oct. 27 column, “Back in August, if offered a 9-3 or 10-2 season with two or three notable wins — including a blowout over USC — and no bad losses, most Notre Dame fans would have gladly, readily and blindly accepted that step in the right direction.”
The Irish players may not have granted that premise, nor should they have, but that does not take away from its validity. With the always-a-likelihood second loss now a reality, Notre Dame needs to take pride in that long view, even if some of its fans might not.
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