October 15, 1988: The football team at the University of Miami, defending National Champions and ranked Number 1 in the country, travels to Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana to play the University of Notre Dame, ranked Number 4. It is one of college football's periodic games labeled the "Game of the Century." But it gets remembered by another name.
In their last game of the 1985 season, Notre Dame were humiliated by Miami, 58-7 at the Orange Bowl, in front of a national audience on CBS, finishing 5-6. They fired head coach Gerry Faust, and hired Lou Holtz, who had succeeded at North Carolina State, Arkansas and Minnesota. (Of course, between N.C. State and Arkansas, he held his one NFL head job, with the New York Jets, and flopped badly.)
Notre Dame fans noted that Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian and Dan Devine each won the National Championship in their 3rd season at the South Bend helm. And after going 5-6 in 1986, and 8-4 in 1987, the Fighting Irish were thinking title for 1988, Holtz' 3rd season.
They had good reason to think so: They opened the season ranked Number 13, and beat Number 9 Michigan at home. They rose to Number 8, and beat Michigan State away, Purdue at home, Stanford at home, and the University of Pittsburgh away. They were 5-0, and ranked Number 4.
But the Miami Hurricanes had kept going. National Champions in 1983, they began the 1985 season with a new head coach, as Howard Schnellenberger had left. It was Jimmy Johnson, who had rebuilt the program at Oklahoma State, and had been a lineman on Arkansas' 1964 National Champions.
They began 1985 with a loss to rival Florida, and ended it with a loss to Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl. They roared through the 1986 regular season undefeated, losing the Fiesta Bowl and thus the National Championship to Penn State in another "Game of the Century." They had no such missteps in 1987, going undefeated, and beating Number 1 Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl to win another National Championship.
They began the 1988 season ranked Number 6, and opened with a spectacular 31-0 home win over Number 1 Florida State. After a week off, they had vaulted to Number 1. Like Notre Dame, they beat Michigan; unlike Notre Dame, they did it on the road. Then they beat Wisconsin and Missouri at home. They were 4-0, having won 36 straight regular-season games. Steve Walsh might have been the best quarterback in the country, and their defense was known as the Miami Pound Machine.
So Miami came in, needing this game as part of their defense of their National Championship; while Notre Dame came in, needing this game as part of their restoration to National Championship status.
Joe Frederick, Michael Caponigro, and Pat Walsh were Notre Dame students, and had T-shirts printed up, promoting the game. The words "UNFINISHED BUISNESS" on the front were understandable, given that the last game between the teams was an awful one for the Fighting Irish. But on the back, they put the words "CATHOLICS VS. CONVICTS."
The previous year, 2 Miami players had been arrested, and their scholarships were canceled. And the players, representing a city school despite their campus being in suburban Coral Gables, Florida, embraced rap music and its "gangsta" image, sometimes wearing army-style fatigues on roadtrips. They didn't care if you thought they were bad guys: They wanted to be the Raiders of college football. Come to think of it, they were doing better on the field than the Raiders ever had, in either Oakland or in Los Angeles.
The thing is, the headline wasn't true: Neither of the players had been convicted of a crime. No player on that Miami team had. And plenty of Miami players were Catholic, as you might expect in a city with large Hispanic and Italian communities. Heck, Walsh was not only Catholic, but Irish. And Notre Dame were hardly innocents themselves, although most of what later came out about them was administrative, "white-collar crime."
Once again, CBS were the national telecasters. The teams got into a fight before the game. And the game lived up to the hype. Quarterback Tony Rice scored on a 7-yard option run, to give Notre Dame a 7-0 lead. Walsh passed to Andre Brown to tie the game. Rice passed to Braxston Banks to make it 14-7, and Pat Terrell intercepted a Walsh pass and took it in. It was 21-7 Irish.
But Miami had come from 30-14 to beat Michigan, 31-30, so they weren't going to give up in this one. Walsh passed to Leonard Conley for a touchdown, and to Cleveland Gary for another. At halftime, it was 21-21. It was anybody's ballgame.
The Irish scored a touchdown and kicked a field goal in the 3rd quarter, making it 31-21. The Hurricanes got a field goal to make it 31-24. They thought they had a touchdown when Gary scored, but the officials ruled that he had fumbled the ball a foot before the goal line. Still, the 'Canes had another chance, and Walsh threw a touchdown pass to Brown with 45 seconds left. It was 31-30 Notre Dame, pending the conversion attempt.
Another "Game of the Century" involving Notre Dame, the 10-10 tie with Michigan State in 1966, had not been forgotten: Johnson remembered the talk that Parseghian had played for the tie to preserve their National Championship hopes, and thus "had no guts." Johnson was a "No guts, no glory" type: There was no question that he would go for the two-point conversion, and then trust his defense to keep the Irish out of field goal range for the last 45 seconds of the game. But Walsh's floating pass intended for Conley was batted down in the end zone by Terrell, and the game ended 31-30 to Notre Dame.
Once the pandemonium in South Bend calmed down, Holtz refused to let his team take their eyes off the prize. They beat Air Force at home, Navy in Baltimore, Rice and Penn State at home, and then when to the Los Angeles Coliseum to play the University of Southern California, ranked Number 2. So that game was something that their game with Miami was not: A Number 1 vs. Number 2 matchup. Notre Dame won, 27-10. That set up a game with Number 3 West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl, outside Phoenix.
Miami took their frustrations out on everybody: They clobbered the University of Cincinnati at home, East Carolina away, Tulsa at home, and Number 11 Louisiana State away. They got a tough test, at home, from Number 8 Arkansas on Thanksgiving Saturday, but won, 18-16. Then they clobbered Brigham Young University at home, and rose back to Number 2.
They prepared to play Number 6 Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, their home field. If they could win, and Notre Dame lost to West Virginia, and West Virginia didn't beat Notre Dame overwhelmingly, the Hurricanes would be National Champions, anyway.
No such luck: In the Fiesta Bowl, playing earlier on January 2, 1989, Notre Dame won, 34-21. So it no longer mattered what Miami did that night: Their 23-3 win meant little. They were Number 2, and Notre Dame were Number 1.
Miami won the National Championship again in 1989, 1991 and 2001; and coming close in 1990, 1992, 2000, 2002 and 2020. Notre Dame have never won it again, having close calls in 1993, 2012 and 2018, but blowing it.
In 2018, Notre Dame had an undefeated regular season, and faced Clemson in the Cotton Bowl, which served as a National Championship Playoff Semifinal. Someone, anticipating a win and a title game matchup with Alabama, printed up T-shirts reading, "JANUARY 7, 2019: CATHOLICS VS. COUSINS." Clemson made them pay for their presumptuousness, winning 30-3. Clemson then beat Alabama for the title.
*
October 15, 1988 was a Saturday. A few hours after this game, in one of the most improbable finishes in World Series history‚ pinch hitter Kirk Gibson hit a 2-run home run off Dennis Eckersley with 2 out and 2 strikes in the bottom of the 9th inning, to give the Los Angeles Dodgers a 5-4 win over the Oakland Athletics in Game 1. I have a separate entry for this event. And German soccer great Mesut Özil was born on this day.
Among the other college football games played that day were these:
* Number 2 UCLA beat the University of California, 38-21 at California Memorial Stadium in the San Francisco suburb of Berkley., California.
* Number 3 Southern California beat Number 16 Washington, 28-27 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. USC beat UCLA to win the Pacific-Ten Conference title, but blew their shot at the National Championship the next week, when they lost to Notre Dame.
* Number 5 Florida State beat East Carolina, 45-21 at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee.
* Number 7 Nebraska beat Number 10 Oklahoma State, 63-42 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nebraska won the Big Eight Conference title, but lost the Orange Bowl to Miami.
* Number 8 South Carolina were upset by Georgia Tech, 34-0 at Grant Field in Atlanta.
* Number 9 Oklahoma pounded Kansas State, 70-24 at Owen Field in Norman, Oklahoma.
* Number 12 Auburn beat the University of Akron, 42-0 at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Alabama. Auburn won the Southeastern Conference title, but lost the Sugar Bowl to Florida State.
* Number 15 Michigan were held to a tie by Iowa, 17-17 at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City. Michigan still won the Big Ten Conference title, and beat USC in the Rose Bowl.
* Number 20 Florida were upset by Vanderbilt, 24-9 at Vanderbilt Stadium (now FirstBank Stadium) in Nashville.
* Syracuse beat Penn State, 24-10 at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania.
* North Carolina State beat their arch-rivals, North Carolina, 48-3 at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
* Alabama beat Tennessee, 28-20 at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee.
* Among the service academies, Army beat Lafayette, 24-17 at Michie Stadium in West Point, New York; and Air Force beat Utah, 56-49 at Rice Stadium (now Rice-Eccles Stadium) in Salt Lake City.
* And with New Jersey's teams, Rutgers beat Boston College, 17-6 at Alumni Stadium, just outside Boston in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; while Princeton beat Bucknell, 41-35 at Memorial Stadium in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The next year, that stadium was renamed for Bucknell's most famous graduate, a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame: Christy Mathewson Memorial Stadium.
The NBA season wouldn't start for another 20 days. There were 7 games in the NHL:
* The New York Islanders beat the Montreal Canadiens, 2-1 at the Nassau Coliseum.
* The Hartford Whalers beat the Chicago Blackhawks, 7-5 at the Hartford Civic Center (now the PeoplesBank Arena).
* The New Jersey Devils lost to the Washington Capitals, 8-5 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland. Dave Christian scored a hat trick for the Caps.
* In an "Original Six" matchup, the Detroit Tigers beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 5-3 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Detroit.
* The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the St. Louis Blues, 9-2 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh. Rob Brown scored a hat trick, and Mario Lemieux scored 2 goals.
* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Boston Bruins, 5-1 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.
* And the Philadelphia Flyers beat the Los Angeles Kings, 4-1 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.
No comments:
Post a Comment