Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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52 SEPT. 26, 2020 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY LOU SOMOGYI M any Notre Dame fall traditions had to be put on hold to help make a 2020 college football season possible in the Year Of COVID-19. Limited game-day attendance, no marching band on the field, no "Player Walk" through a throng as they enter the stadium … One tradition that remains is who will don jersey No. 25: For nearly 50 years it has rep- resented the "speed number" in Fighting Irish football, with freshman running back Chris Tyree the worthy heir. In the 11-year Brian Kelly era, Tyree is only the second Irish running back that was ranked a national top-100 prospect by Rivals, and the first since the late Greg Bryant in 2013. He also is the first at the posi- tion to receive four stars from the outlet since Dexter Williams in 2015. Most pertinent is the game- breaking speed that Tyree pro- vides. He won the Fastest Man Com- petition at the pres- tigious The Open- ing Finals in both 2018 and 2019, and was a two-time Virginia Class 6A state champion in the 55-meter dash, most recently this past Feb. 29. In 2019, his 6.30 in the 55 meters was the swiftest in the United States by a high school athlete. For context purposes, the ulti- mate Notre Dame standard of speed, Raghib "Rocket" Ismail (more on him later), ran a 6.07 with the Fight- ing Irish track team in 1991, which was the fastest in the world that year at the time, and he later finished sec- ond in the NCAA Championships. Tyree provides the "greasy, fast speed" of which fictional trainer Mickey Goldmill waxed poetic in the movie "Rocky II." However, Kelly during the pre- season emphasized that Tyree is not strictly a one-trick pony. Although listed at 5-9½, 179 pounds on the Notre Dame roster when he signed last December, Tyree expanded positively to 188 prior to this season. "He's a lot stronger than we thought in terms of lower-body strength," Kelly said. "He's not a specialist who just plays in the slot or gets hand-off sweeps. He's a guy who can run the football downhill between the tackles, too. … He has been impressive." At Thomas Dale High School in Chester, Va., Tyree donned the No. 4. At Notre Dame he has been issued No. 25, which is hardly a coincidence. It was worn last year by current ju- nior wide receiver Braden Lenzy, who this year will be sporting No. 0 — which the NCAA passed as now legal earlier this year to cut down on teams having multiple players with single-digit numbers. Lenzy rivals Tyree as Notre Dame's swiftest player and show- cased some of his game-breaking skills last year. So when No. 25 was vacated, naturally it had to be issued to Tyree. It's been sort of an unwritten tradition since 1973. AL HUNTER (1973, 1975-76) The freshman running back was advertised as the fastest player to ever enroll at Notre Dame. The metric used back then was not the 40-yard dash, but the 100-yard dash — which is not to be confused with the 100 meters, which is actually 109.4 yards. Anything less than 10 seconds in the 100-yard dash was sizzling, and Hunter was listed with a 9.3 time when he arrived. He also was timed at an equally impres- sive 21.4 in the 220-yard dash. This explosive- ness was show- cased his freshman year in the 24-23 Sugar Bowl na- tional title victory over Alabama in which he returned a kickoff for a 93- yard touchdown. F o l l o w i n g t h a t return, ABC color commentator and former Oklahoma multi-national title coach Bud Wilkin- son commented: "Notre Dame is not supposed to have fast backs." That's because through the first nine years of the Ara Parseghian era (1964-74), other than Nick Eddy from 1964-66, Notre Dame was gen- erally bereft of speed in the backfield, and the fastest players usually were shifted to defense. The running joke with backfield coach Tom Pagna was, "You can't be fast and explosive and expect to play for Pagna." That began to change in the 1970s when Notre Dame signed two other sub-10 seconds speedsters in the 100 such as Eric Penick (1971) and Art NO. 25: HIGH-SPEED CONNECTION Freshman running back Chris Tyree embarks on a nearly 50-year tradition In his college debut, Tyree rushed six times for 20 yards and returned four kickoffs for 90 yards against Duke, continuing the tradition of fast players wearing the No. 25 that made an early impact for the Irish. PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME ATHLETICS