Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Rocking Rockne’s House Head coach Brian Kelly calls for raucous home atmosphere By Dan Murphy The friendliest college football stadium in the country is trying to get just a little bit less hospitable this season. Notre Dame’s welcome mat has felt a little bit like a red carpet for visiting teams during the past five years. The Irish, 17-16 on their own turf during that stretch, are making a concerted effort to inject some fresh energy into the 82-year-old stadium this season in a number of different ways. The week before its home opener against Purdue, Notre Dame launched a “Take A StaND” campaign to encourage the notoriously reserved crowd to jump up off its hands and make some noise. A season ago, the Irish added recorded music to the stadium atmosphere for the first time ever and tried to manufacture some excitement by hosting its first game under the lights in 20 years. Both of those initiatives will be fine-tuned and continue in 2012 along with more experiments to come. Athletics director Jack Swarbrick said restoring a home-field advantage is a high priority for him this year. “We’re going to continue to look for ways to make the stadium a tougher place to play,” Swarbrick said. “It’s not tough enough for our opponent to play, and we have to get better at it.” The tricky part for Notre Dame is walking the line between a rowdy, intimidating venue and its aspirations to be, as Swarbrick said, “the Augusta of college football.” “We want to still be a place where when other schools come they say, ‘That was a marvelous experience for us.’ But I don’t want athletic directors telling me, ‘We love playing here,’ which is what they say to me with some frequency,” he said. Head coach Brian Kelly has preached the need to improve Notre Dame’s home atmosphere since he arrived in 2010. He hasn’t been shy about suggesting ways to do it in the past, but recently Kelly has put the onus to restore Notre Dame Stadium on himself and his players. “If we do a better job on third down and get people off the field and score touchdowns I think the place will go crazy,” Kelly said. “We just have to get it to go crazy.” Kelly is taking some extra steps this season to make sure his team feels at home when they’re at home. The team practiced inside the stadium on Thursday afternoon prior to playing the Boilermakers to make it seem more like a football field and less like the hallowed ground that many consider it to be. As long as the natural grass holds up during the colder fall months, Kelly said he plans on making the Thursday practice part of the weekly routine. “I felt at times we ran into the stadium like we were running into the Basilica or we were running into the Grotto,” he said. “We’re running into the stadium, a football stadium. I want our guys to feel comfortable in there. We were in there [only] six or seven times last year.” By erasing some of the mystique in its own players’ minds, Notre Dame is hoping to add another successful chapter to the long history of the House that Rockne Built.