Like everyone else, our reaction to Saturday’s debacle can be reduced to three words.
Searching. For. Answers.
The questions are many:
- How can a veteran team, coming back nearly intact from an impressive finish in 2010, with a chance to start 2011 strong, make so many mistakes?
- How can so many turnovers, penalties, dropped passes, muffed punts, and missed opportunities happen in one game?
- How can a quarterback with so many positive qualities seem to freeze up at the first sign of difficulty?
- What does it say about a team’s psyche when it plays with a different urgency for a less-talented quarterback?
- Is the best way to correct mistakes during a game for the head coach to be turning apoplexic in berating the offending player face-to-face on national TV?
- What are senior leaders doing taking repeated personal foul penalties?
- How does yet another underdog first-time visitor to Notre Dame Stadium come away as the aggressor, the team that makes the most of its opportunities?
We’ve seen some interesting conversation on these and other questions, but no real answers.
And maybe that’s OK. Maybe Notre Dame football right now is in such a Twilight Zone of inexplicability, in such a mental funk that paralysis by over-analysis must be avoided.
So let’s make it simple.
Everyone who loves this University, and what it stands for ¡V starting with the 65 students wearing retro football uniforms Saturday night at Michigan Stadium ¡V needs to calmly, confidently say to themselves:
We Have The Talent. Repeat it again: We Have The Talent.
We have tremendous athletic talent. We have demonstrated coaching talent. We have training and conditioning talent. We have every talent necessary to have an outstanding football season.
We Have The Talent.
Instead of hundreds of thousands of fans nationwide throwing up their hands and saying “Now what?” or “How can we possibly win in front of 110,000 at Ann Arbor?” what if they said instead:
We Have The Talent.
