Three years we have been waiting for this Notre Dame game and now I see it is scheduled for a Friday afternoon in the fall and I just cannot get excited the way I used to. Back in 1993 when we went to South Bend and played those boys in that old stadium you knew it meant something because both teams had been building for years not just assembling a roster through the portal over the winter. We had kids like Brent Moss and that offensive line that had been together since they were freshmen eating in the same cafeteria and grinding through winter conditionning together. Now I look at this matchup and I wonder how many of our guys will even be on the team by the time September rolls around.
The thing that gets me is Notre Dame used to be the measuring stick for programs like ours. You went to South Bend and you found out if you had the guts to play four quarters of real football. I remember watching that 1993 game and thinking this is what college football is supposed to be. Two programs that develop kids and build cultures that last longer than a single recruiting year. Now we are talking about recruiting rankings in April and trying to figure out which freshmen might contribute before they hit the portal after their first spring practice. The whole thing makes me tired.
You look at what is happening across the sport with Oregon stacking five star recruits and Colorado bringing in forty three transfers and I just think about the 1994 Rose Bowl team that had exactly zero transfers in the two deep. Those kids came to Madison because they wanted to be Badgers not because somebody cut them a check or promised them immediate playing time. They earned every snap in practice and they bled for each other in the fourth quarter when the game was on the line. That is what I want to see when we finally line up against Notre Dame this fall. I want to see a team that looks like they have been through something together not a collection of mercenaries trying to figure out the playbook in August.
I will be there on that Friday afternoon because I have been watching this program since the late seventies and I am not fixin' to stop now. But I cannot help feeling like this game would have meant more back when the rivalry actually meant something beyond a television slot and a paycheck.