Irish ascending

I know how this goes now. We've seen it before, right?

Notre Dame looked good, very good, in ball-peening a top ten team last night, and now everyone's going to trample the throttle like Mario Andretti. You're going to hear This team could challenge for a national title here and Let's just go ahead and put up a statue of Ian Book there. Somewhere in there will be that old standard They really could run the table now, because isn't that what you always hear when Notre Dame mashes a quality opponent like Stanford by three touchdowns (and could have mashed it by more)?

Look. I get it. The Irish appear to have something going here. They come at you like a pack of wolves on defense, and in Book they've finally found a quarterback who can turn loose all the weapons they have on offense. That he was right there all along should have been obvious as far back as the bowl game nine or so months ago, but, oh, well.

Sometimes coaches are a little slow on the uptake. It happens.

And yet ...

And yet, the requisite word of caution must be spoken here: It was just one game.

It was one game against a Stanford team that needed a miracle to stay unbeaten against a "meh" Oregon team last week, and which had beaten a "meh" USC team before that, and otherwise had noshed on UC-Davis and San Diego State pastry. So who knows if the Cardinal was actually the seventh-best team in the country, or just a pretty good team riding for the inevitable fall.

That Notre Dame so thoroughly brought about that fall would seem to indicate the Irish are a level or two above pretty good themselves. That's really about as much as we can say about them right now.

This is a team that beat a Michigan team that itself has not turned out to be quite as good as people originally thought, an emerging theme of the Jim Harbaugh era in Ann Arbor. Yesterday the Wolverines nearly got taken down by a Northwestern team that did get taken down by Akron. Before that, they'd lost to Notre Dame and hammered all the people they were supposed to hammer. So who knows.

Same with Notre Dame. As good as the Irish looked last night, this is a team that got all it wanted from Ball State and Vanderbilt. It kicked around Wake Forest as Book feasted on one of the worst pass defenses in the country. Now it goes on the road to Virginia Tech, which has easily handled Florida State and previously unbeaten Duke but let Old Dominion -- Old Dominion! -- drop 49 on it.

Later, the Irish get a Syracuse team that nearly toppled Clemson yesterday.

So who knows.

Standard motto for every college football season in late September forever. You can look it up.