The Lou Holtz Didn’t Just Create A Great Team, He Created Great Men
Lou Holtz left a permanent imprint on football because he was a man who loved the game and knew and respected his players.
Lou Holtz passed at age 89 this week. With him goes the last Notre Dame coach to win a college football national championship, a feat he accomplished in 1988. That’s an eternity for “Subway Alumni.”
To appreciate Holtz’s contribution to the game, it’s important to understand the emergence of college football on the national sports landscape over the past century and more. The change can be attributed to several factors, but perhaps the most important was Notre Dame’s decision to make the sport one of the college’s major disciplines.
Just about a century ago, Knute Rockne, a Protestant, turned the small all-men’s Catholic school in northern Indiana into a juggernaut in college football and expanded the scope of the school from regional to global. Still, the Irish were denied entry into what is now the Big Ten (plus 14 and counting) because the athletic bureaucrats and administrators had their collective noses bent out of shape with the elements of Notre Dame’s admission standards, player eligibility, and academic requirements, all mixed with a bit of anti-Catholic bias.
The Big Ten’s repeated rejection of Notre Dame turned into a Godsend. The team decided that, if the Midwest didn’t want ’em, they’d go elsewhere. Rockne took his show on the road and expanded the Notre Dame brand nationally through clever marketing, recruiting, and an exciting style of football with the implementation of the forward pass.
Thus, Rockne’s yearly sojourns to the Pacific Coast, beginning in 1926, to play the University of Southern California (USC), turned into an “event” instead of just a game and turned the annual contest into one of college football’s best rivalries.
By the end of the 1970s, Notre Dame administration, faculty, alumni, and its “subway” fan base were yearning for a coach like Holtz. After Dan Devine resigned from the team in 1980 after six seasons and his securing championship number 12, Notre Dame tried something revolutionary: It hired Gerry Faust, an extremely successful high school coach out at Moeller High School in Cincinnati.
That revolutionary move backfired—mightily.
Faust’s particular brand of football, his “philosophy” of the game, didn’t translate well on the college level. Faust, perhaps realizing that his type of coaching was not well-suited for big-time college football, resigned after a full-throttle “take no prisoners” blowout against Miami (FL), 56–7. And that paved the way for Notre Dame’s glory.
