The Sugar Bowl had hosted the #1 team in each of the previous two years and the annul game following the 1980 college football season no different. The Georgia Bulldogs were undefeated and atop the polls. Notre Dame was playing the final game in the tenure of head coach Dan Devine. On New Year’s Day, the 1981 Sugar Bowl might have marked the end for Devine, but it was just the beginning for the great Georgia freshman, Herschel Walker.
Notre Dame was the defending national champion coming into the 1978 college football season. Houston was only two years removed from a major bowl appearance of their own, but continued to be a mostly unheralded program. These two teams marched a path to a memorable January 1 battle at the 1979 Cotton Bowl.
The 1978 Cotton Bowl was the lynchpin to a dramatic turn of events that saw the polls turned upside down on January 2, as Notre Dame stunned top-ranked Texas and ended up vaulting from #5 all the way to a national championship by night’s end.
The 1989 Notre Dame football team was one Lou Holtz believed was the best he had ever coached—better even, than the team that won the national championship the prior year. Holtz had a good point—the ’89 Fighting Irish kept winning against a grueling schedule, but ended up one win short of a repeat title.
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The Charlie Weis era that started in South Bend with fanfare, bold talk and looked to be backed up, with major bowl appearances in 2005 and 2006, came to a crashing end when the 2009 Notre Dame football team collapsed in November and continued a three-year pattern of performance that ranged from the mediocre to the poor.
Notre Dame was coming off a disastrous 2007 season. With head coach Charlie Weis now in his fourth year, and sophomore quarterback Jimmy Clausen having some experience under his belt, the program needed significant improvement. Whether the 2008 Notre Dame football made “significant” improvement, they at least recovered and got back to a bowl game.
The first two years of the Charlie Weis era at Notre Dame had been promising, with major bowl trips in 2005 and 2006, even if the latter year ended on a dour note. There was still a belief the Irish were going to get better, as Weis’ highly ranked recruiting classes began to take on more prominent roles. Those hopes crashed hard against reality. The 2007 Notre Dame football team had an awful 3-9 campaign. They were unranked to begin the season and never provided a reason for pollsters to rethink that.
…while the season was good, with another big bowl trip and a big year from quarterback Brady Quinn, the ultimate lack of big wins left a “blah” feeling with the Irish faithful.
Another coaching tenure that began in South Bend with high expectations came crashing to the ground in 2004. Ty Willingham’s first year of 2002 had seen Notre Dame rise to #4 in the polls in late October. But they finished that season poorly, endured a losing campaign in 2003 and when the 2004 Notre Dame football team proved to be mediocre, Willingham was told to pack his bags.
The Ty Willingham era had started at Notre Dame with a lot of promise in 2002, but ended with disappointment in a season-ending loss and bowl defeat, both by convincing margins. The question facing the 2003 Notre Dame football team was which they would build off of—the promise or the disappointment. It proved to be the latter, in a long season at South Bend.
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