University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Big Time Football
November 4, 2006 | Football
Nov. 4, 2006
By Adam Lucas
SOUTH BEND--This can't be Big Time Football.
That's why Carolina made the 90-minute flight north to South Bend, right? They were in search of Big Time Football. Not just big time football.
Big. Time. Football.
But there wasn't a video board to be found inside Notre Dame Stadium. The scoreboards only had room for down, distance, and the time left in the quarter.
Fans in the stands sat on weathered wooden bleachers with no backs and the seat numbers stenciled on in plain white paint.
Where were the contests? Where was the buzz? Where were the laser lights and fireworks and clowns jumping out of Volkswagens?
Speaking of that, where was the traffic?
Coming into town two hours before the game, there were hardly any cars on the road. You zipped into South Bend on Angela Blvd., past the house with the sign in the yard that read, "Bathrooms $5.00," went straight through a stoplight, and there was Touchdown Jesus summoning you to the parking lot.
Which is about the time you realized why there wasn't any traffic: everyone was already at the game.
Two hours early.
Big Time Football does not just happen for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It happens all day, starting at daybreak. This is what it says on the back of the Notre Dame parking passes:
"Spots can not be guaranteed less than 90 minutes before kickoff."
Huh?
You can be cynical and you can hate Rudy, but it was almost impossible not to get a little tingle when the Notre Dame band lined up and those gold helmets and navy jerseys ran out of the tunnel. Maybe they get too much credit in national polls and maybe they get too much hype on ESPN and maybe they're on the cover of Sports Illustrated too often (the 12 covers framed in the press box are impressive...until you realize that's just the first dozen covers)--by the way, every other program in the country would love to be complained about in the same way, kind of like Carolina in basketball--but the history seeps out of every corner of the stadium.
Structurally, the stadium itself is not as physically imposing as Clemson or Florida State. Get a wide view from the press box and the extremely narrow sidelines (purposely designed by Knute Rockne to be narrow to try and eliminate "unnecessary visitors," a quest that evidently didn't work based on the drift on the sidelines) make the stadium appear tiny.
Let Death Valley be the equivalent of Yankee Stadium. Notre Dame Stadium is content to be Wrigley Field.
Wrigley has a feel. South Bend has that same feel. It doesn't need fancy electronics or jazzy introductions. It has history, and it simply waits for you to be overwhelmed by it. Carolina players noticed it during their walk-through on Friday, when several of them couldn't resist snapping photos and, for a couple minutes, acting like tourists.
It is hard to be a tourist and still compete in Big Time Football. Down 31-13 at halftime, it looked like the Tar Heels were content to play the role of friendly visitor. But Hakeem Nicks comes from Charlotte Independence, the scaled down high school version of Notre Dame that loses even less frequently than the Gipper. So he knew about Big Time Football.
And he played it throughout the second half, hauling in a pair of touchdown passes and breaking the Carolina single-game freshman receiving record with 171 yards. The last of the half-dozen receptions was a 72-yard touchdown that brought the Tar Heels within 38-26 with 7:25 left in the third quarter.
Suddenly, this was a winnable game.
That's about the time Carolina imploded. With Notre Dame at the UNC 20 and a first-and-10, Brady Quinn scrambled for 4 yards. A flag went down during the run; the Irish were going to be penalized for holding, pushing them out of the red zone and setting up the Carolina defense to try and improve on their game total of three sacks.
But Durell Mapp hit Quinn out of bounds, and then the Heels were whistled for a painful second personal foul penalty as the Notre Dame sideline enveloped Mapp.
Those were just two of the five personal foul penalties whistled on the Tar Heels during a disappointing fourth quarter that saw them go from competitive to combative. The Irish cleared their bench midway through the final period and cruised to the 45-26 final margin.
After the final play, after the final Notre Dame student had been tossed up in the air to celebrate a score (apparently a school tradition), after the leprechaun had danced his peculiar jig for the last time, every player gathered in the corner in front of the student section. They threw their arms over the shoulders of their teammates and began to sway, singing along to the alma mater with the rest of the student body.
Through the windows of the press box, it wasn't quite possible to make out the tune. But it was easy to discern the message:
Big Time Football.
Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
