WHEN NOTRE DAME LOSES TO NORTHERN ILLINOIS, COLLEGE FOOTBALL STILL KILLS
The transfer portal should have ended huge upsets, but the Irish continue to buckle under embattled coach Marcus Freeman, who is less prepared for the 12-team playoff than winning coach Thomas Hammock
With her famous beauty mole, Cindy Crawford grew up in DeKalb, Ill., also the hometown of America’s barbed wire developer. The local university was attended by Joan Allen, Sebastian Maniscalco, director Robert Zemeckis and various athletes, including Fritz Peterson, who traded wives with another major-league pitcher.
Whatever they’ve accomplished just became secondary news.
Saturday afternoon, Northern Illinois was paid $1.4 million to play football at Notre Dame, where the Huskies were supposed to collapse at the feet of Touchdown Jesus. Instead, coach Thomas Hammock and his players delivered an upset so mesmerizingly phenomenal that it sent a reminder: The Supreme Court didn’t remove all the fun from college football. So much for kids who leave programs for others in swirls of madness.
“A lot of teams have the transfer portal, but we have a family,” Hammock said.
A 16-14 victory was a missile into the fat bellies of industry powerhouses. Northern Illinois became the first Mid-American Conference team in 51 tries to beat a Top 5 team in the Associated Press poll, gutting The Great Independent with another stunner. Here we thought no team would have an easier time reaching the new 12-team postseason tournament, without the difficulty of playing in the SEC and the Big Ten. Notre Dame was talking about a national championship, for the first time since 1988, and has a big shooter from NBC running the athletic department. A Week 1 victory at Texas A&M propelled fury for coach Marcus Freeman, who finally would contend like the old days.
Instead, he might be fired.
He lost to Marshall and Stanford two years ago. He lost to another unranked team, Clemson, last year. He wasn’t finished. Losing to Northern Illinois, on a field goal with 31 seconds to play, means his odds to win the tournament dropped from 16-1 to 75-1. Freeman likely won’t survive and sounded like a man who promises to fix problems that won’t go away.
“Very disappointing. You know, it's our job as coaches to make sure these guys are ready to go. You go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in a tale of two weeks, but we've got to own this thing," he said. “As coaches and players, we have got to own it, and we have got to fix it. We’ve been here before, right? We’ve got to get it fixed and get back to playing football the way we know how to play, the way we’ve played before, and we can — and we will.”
He won’t fix his quarterback, transfer Riley Leonard, who looked tentative and didn’t complete a pass of at least 20 yards. He might not fix his defense, which allowed Ethan Hampton to hit Antario Brown for an 83-yard touchdown among numerous big plays. It’s shocking to see the Irish play so well at Kyle Field, where 107,315 fans watched, and see them fold up at home. Whatever athletic director Pete Bevacqua was planning to tell the playoff selection committee, he should save it until next season. No one has any interest in helping Notre Dame, which couldn’t help itself. Even questionable calls against the Huskies — a first down with 36 seconds left was called fourth-and-2 by the officials — were integrity lapses.
“Yeah, this sucks. Everybody knows that,” said Howard Cross III, an All-American defensive tackle. “All of our fans know that. We know that. All of our coaches, top down, all know that. They’re gonna be hearing it all week, ‘We suck.’ ’’
Shouldn’t Notre Dame be far beyond such woes? “Absolutely. Absolutely,” Freeman said. “I’m sure everybody outside of here will try to point the finger at some coach, some player, some person. It should be at the head coach. It’s my job.”
How about a push for the Huskies, who realize the highest-ranked Group of 5 conference champion makes the playoff?
“We are still college football. All these guys who have been with our program, been through ups and downs and continued to fight, it's like they're my kids,” said Hammock, who spilled tears on the field. “I’m happy for the adversity, to push through no matter the situation. I know there's a whole lot of other things with the transfer portal, NIL — but we believed in that family and doing things the right way.
“I couldn't be more proud of them. We believed. We didn't need luck. That was our theme. We just needed to play our best. We made enough plays to win a game. This is a program-changing-type win, no different than when we beat Alabama a while ago.”
That happened, 21 years ago, when Joe Novak led a 10-2 team that also beat Iowa State. We figured those days were over thanks to the transfer portal. Not yet, as Penn State struggled in a 34-27 victory over Bowling Green. The DeKalb crew, training near the cornfields 64 miles west of Chicago, has become popular in the past while Illinois and Northwestern stumble in the Big Ten. Jordan Lynch was a Heisman finalist in 2013, when he helped the Huskies to the Orange Bowl. Will it happen again?
“It's amazing," Hampton said. "It's something I'll remember forever. I grew up a Huskie fan. Playing here has been a dream for me."
“I think we were bigger than what they thought. We're not a normal MAC team, in my opinion,” Hammock said. “We're big on the offensive and defensive lines and we are physical. I didn't look at it as a mismatch in that capacity.”
At one point, the coach looked at the TV camera and said, “I’m sorry. I'm sorry.”
For what? His team just saved college football.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.