by G. Murphy Donovan (January 2026)
If winning isn’t everything, why bother keeping score? —Knute Rockne
American college football, not to be confused with lesser foot fetishes like soccer, has its knickers in a knot this season.
Notre Dame, arguably a collegiate Division One brand name, has been excluded from the holiday playoffs which are supposed to leave no doubts about best teams or national champions. Alas, Notre Dame got off to a dicey start in 2025 with two near-win loses; then righted the leprechaun with an impressive run of lop-sided wins.
Better to lose early than late, in love, war, and sports.
Indeed, late in the ’25 season, the Golden Dome impressed jock sniffing journalists enough to be consistently rated 9th or 10th in a pending college playoff field of 12.
If season-long ranking or logic mattered, ND should have made the big show.
At years end, a team ranked in the top ten for months didn’t make the top twelve. Go figure. In 2024, Notre Dame was best man for an Ohio State bride. In 2025, the Irish didn’t even get an invite to the 2026 wedding.
Jock logic at the university level, like economics, is clearly another one of those dismal sciences.
Several teams with worse records and/or shabbier statistical credentials made it to the playoffs, but the “fighting Irish,” did not.
Oye! Wake up the echoes!
Some say it was a sucker punch from a bitter confederacy of “conference” dunces who abhor independent private schools like Notre Dame who don’t share revenues with any state school conference underachievers.
Albeit, given the margin of victory in those two ‘25 loses, one might argue that Notre Dame coaching screwed the pooch for want of a kicker, a big toe who might have made South Bend only a one-loss wonder this season, yet still a playoff team.
How hard is it to find a lad to kick a stationary ball through the sticks in a fourth quarter crunch?
Kicker neglect might be laid at the foot of head coach Marcus Freeman, an $18 million per annum speculation himself. If small details like a reliable kicker matter, that’s on the coaching crew, not the “student” grunts on the pitch.
Hubris is the elixir of youth and all fast burners on and off the playing field. The Golden Dome is like all that “luck of the Irish” hokum at South Bend, just a paint job after all.
To be sure, arbitrary NCAA rules and weak standards make for value vacuums and dicey outcomes. Indeed, good coaches are almost as expensive as losing coaches these days.
Just ask Brian Kelly.
The great 2025 college football kerfuffle ought to be an opportunity for reflection on such things. But then again, let’s not be naïve.
When all is said and done, little gets done; especially when values go head-to-head with big bucks and bottom lines. The college playoff scheme is a professional football knock off, a contrived season extension to create more big games and even bigger TV revenues.
Those traditional New Year’s “Bowl” games now serve as attendance or consolation prizes.
This is not to suggest values, ethics or even arithmetic should replace dollar signs at the schoolhouse. Clearly, dollars and cents kicked common sense into the non-binary crapper years ago.
No college in America today features a major in common sense.
School boy football isn’t just a game any more either. The NCAA is now another big ugly business blessed with sketchy tax exempt “non-profit” immunities. Imagine a country believing that an $18 million coach actually works for a 501C “charity.”
Prime time college football, like basketball, is a cash cow, pedaling all manner of merch; everything from beer, bratwurst, and bromides to exorbitant court-side or stadium seats.
Prime seating at college sporting events today makes opera tickets at the Met look like a bargain.
Revenue streams like men’s football and basketball pay for a lot of virtue signals on campus too; things like multi- million dollar gym teachers on the gridiron and all those vanity sports like beach volleyball and golf, loss leaders really, that can’t pay their own way.
Alas, without convening a pity party, we are remiss if we don’t pause to reflect on some of the obscene ironies that now flourish like jock itch and herpes on NCAA campuses country wide.
Did you know that none of the top twelve football schools appear in the ranks of top twelve academic schools?
Did you know that American universities used to be the best in the world, but now rank down at 25, in the 3rd World swirl pool? US Colleges now echo American public grade and high schools where social grading and social promotion is the norm.
Did you know that the NCAA is a now plantation where 75% or more of male players in the money sports are black whilst student body black male numbers are in low single digits?
Indeed, the College “portal,” like the NFL draft, is a euphemism for auction block.
The SEC conference takes a bow here. Four year graduation rates for black males in the SEC, schools like LSU, Georgia, and Florida are consistently well below 50%.
Did you know that few or no blue chip black athletes play for subsidized Historically Black Colleges and Universities, (that’s 107 colleges or universities)? There was a time when segregation was mandated, now its just another choice.
And so it goes.
If you were to conclude that “higher” education in America was a racket, you wouldn’t be far from ground truth.
A once iconic South Bend coach speculated years ago that most public school teams who played against Notre Dame couldn’t pass a drug, IQ, or criminal background test – nor could any of their “students” get past the Notre Dame Admissions Office.
That kind of candor, then or now, helps to insure that your team will be watching, not playing for national championships. Old grudges die hard at the public schoolhouse. But then again, winning isn’t every thing, right?
Not really, competition on the pitch still might be the only thing worth watching on campus these days. Knute was a sweaty prophet.
Alas, there’s always another year, 2026 for instance. Indeed, salutations to all; we have again earned the best of the worst to amuse us to begin the New Year.
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G. Murphy Donovan usually writes about the politics of national security and Intelligence. Follow him on X.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
