Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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MURPHY'S LAW DAN MURPHY visible between the sidelines, its mean- ing to the team was bound to be re- vealed. "We're a hammer," junior line- backer Prince Shembo said. "A big, tough hammer doesn't crack no matter how many times it hits something. It smashes things. That's what we are. We're the hammer." The Irish aren't the first defense to try to build their identity around a sideline symbol. Virginia Tech's lunch pail became a well-known personi- fication for one of college football's most consistently successful teams in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Defen- sive coordinator Rod Sharpless got the dented pail from his mother-in-law in New Jersey, who bought it from a former coal miner. It came to embody the blue-collar spirit Sharpless and co- coordinator Bud Foster wanted from their defense. The Nebraska defense first wore smack-you-in-the-mouth, blunt-force- trauma attitude that replaced some of the nasty that Charlie Weis failed to bring to campus. That's where the sledgehammer comes in. "We're going to be fired up going into a game regardless. It just symbol- izes what we're fired up about," Sh- embo said. "Plus, it looks scary." Shembo and the rest of Notre Dame's front seven have reached a level where they are their own intimi- dation for opposing offenses because they didn't crack against the ground game during their 7-0 start. They posted the best red zone success rate in the country, the second-best scor- ing defense and the sixth-ranked total defense. They've done it by bludgeon- ing opposing offenses along the line of scrimmage. Unlike their sledgehammer, Notre its black shirts in practice during the 1960s because they were the cheapest color at the local sporting goods store when coach George Kelly wanted to tell his two platoons on offense and defense apart. They grew into a sym- bol of pride, a stamp of approval that had to be earned. The blackshirts dur- ing Nebraska's national championship runs in the 1990s were a connection to the past. The tradition and blue-collar atti- tude have lingered on Notre Dame's Midwest campus for decades. The football program needed no remind- ers of its past and those core values. What the team needed was an edge, a Dame's defensive resurgence was a premeditated plan announced to the rest of the world as soon as possible. Brian Kelly promised in his first press conference as the team's head coach that defense would be the foundation of his program in South Bend. Most assumed that was nothing more than lip service for the coach who ran a catch-us-if-you-can spread attack at his previous stop in the Big East. There's no reason not to believe Kelly now when he says that the de- fensive mentality is here to stay. The Irish destructive force has become too Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com