Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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6 PRESEASON 2017 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY LOU SOMOGYI Editor's Note: One of our favorite col‑ umns in nearly four decades of Blue & Gold Illustrated was written by Ara Parseghian's backfield coach at Notre Dame from 1964‑74, Tom Pagna, who died in 2010. With Parseghian's death this month at age 94, we felt it would be fitting to print some of the excerpts — and it is apropos given how Notre Dame is attempting to bounce back from a 4‑8 season. A t his December 2009 press confer- ence that introduced him as Notre Dame's new head football coach, Brian Kelly indicated that a timetable for turning around Fighting Irish for- tunes cannot be long term. "We don't have a five-year plan," Kelly said. "We have a five-minute plan and we'll start to work on it immediately." More than a half-century earlier, one of Kelly's predecessors at Notre Dame, Ara Parseghian (1964-74), in- troduced the ultimate "five-minute plan" even prior to accepting the Fighting Irish job. It was predicated not on what to plan for the long term, but what can be controlled in the immediate here and now. His former star player and longtime right-hand man, Pagna, ex- plained this concept. It never gets old, and bears repeating. The greatest sprinters in the world train endless hours and years just to try to be the world's fastest man in a race that lasts about 10 seconds. Con- versely, the average college football game lasts approximately three and a half hours — but the actual physi- cal exertion to players is about five minutes. That was the main theme of what was known as "The Great Interval" during Parseghian's era. After Parseghian's Northwestern team finished 0-9 in 1957, the fiery young head coach was on the hot seat. He had just completed the sec- ond season of a three-year contract, and the clock was ticking. With his career as a head coach on the line, Parseghian analyzed ev- ery detail of the program, from the equipment the players were wearing to offseason habits. During one film study, he broke down the different length of plays in time duration. The longest play was usually a kickoff return, about 12 seconds, and the shortest were less than two seconds, a no-gain dive into the line. On average, an offense will run about 70 to 80 plays per game, as will the defense. Each play averaged about four seconds. So if you multi- ply four seconds by 70 to 80 plays, it translated into 280 to 320 seconds, or about five minutes of live, active, playing time. Naturally, talent was essential to any successful football program. No one could win without it. But the "edge" in a program, or a leg up on others, came from the three E's: Ef- fort, Execution and Endurance. Wrote Pagna: "As Ara realized the significance of how little time actu- ally was involved with the game, he asked himself what it was he, as the head coach, was asking of his play- ers. It was an 'interval' of time, five- plus minutes, and what you filled it with that really counted. He settled UNDER THE DOME THE FIVE-MINUTE PLAN, REVISITED What applied to Ara Parseghian in 1957 is needed for Brian Kelly in 2017 After the 4-8 nightmare of last season, Brian Kelly's attention to detail this season could serve him well the way it did Ara Parseghian after he was 0-9 at Northwestern in 1957. PHOTO BY JOE RAYMOND