Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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MURPHY'S LAW DAN MURPHY Athletics director Jack Swarbrick bristled at the suggestion that this is- sue was the latest in a pattern of some of Notre Dame's best student-athletes failing to live up to the first part of that title. Looking at the past year of improprieties, it's impossible not to connect those dots. Starting quarterback Everett Golson missed the entire 2013 season for what he called "poor academic judgment." In December, the Irish basketball team lost leading scorer Jerian Grant be- cause of "a lack of good judgment" in the classroom. Daniels, Notre Dame's No. 1 receiver, and Robbie Russo, the hockey team's top-scoring defense- man, missed the spring semester due to poor grades. "It's a privilege to play at Notre Dame. It's not a right," head coach Brian Kelly said when addressing the most recent academic problems. "We hold our players to a very high stan- dard here at Notre Dame." There is no doubt the Irish take pride in their attempt to show that you can excel in academics and athletics at the same time. There is no doubt that in the past year they haven't done either on the football field or the basketball court. Is the recent string of classroom mis- steps proof that Notre Dame's mission is failing? Or is the school's willing- ness to address its problems and call its players to the carpet proof it's suc- ceeding? It depends on whether you see that mission as a journey or a destination. It's noble to chase after perfection on the field and in the classroom. It's fool- ish to think you'll ever get there. "Look, at any university, you're dealing with young people. The vast majority of them make good decisions, but young people sometimes make bad decisions," Rev. John Jenkins, the university president, said after an- nouncing the investigation Aug. 15. "Our job is to hold them accountable and to use those incidents as ways to educate them, and that's what we're doing. "I think we've done that, and we'll do it again in this case." Notre Dame's fans, the Domers Ex- traordinaire, do themselves no favor in this department. Some of them be- lieve, in no quiet way, that their Irish already sit on the pedestal of that NCAA ideal. In their eyes, the Irish do no wrong. Their hubris makes it easy for the rest of the college sports world to delight in knocking them from that perch when evidence to the contrary arises. Some members of the univer- sity and its athletics teams are guilty of the same thing. The locker rooms in South Bend will never be filled exclusively by students with unimpeachable integrity. Kelly and Notre Dame aren't likely to ever to go a full calendar year without at- tracting scrutiny away from the field, and part of that they bring on them- selves. The school will never catch the un- approachable ideal it tries to reach, but at least they continue to chase it. ✦ Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com