Fun with numbers

Notre Dame won the 900th football game in its storied program's history yesterday, beating Virginia, the only team left on its schedule that might have had a shot at beat it this fall. A couple of hours earlier, Oklahoma also won its program's 900th game.

This made the Sooners and the Irish the sixth and seventh FBS programs in college football history to reach that milestone. The others are the usual suspects: Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and Nebraska. Also Yale, but Yale is no longer an FBS program, so I guess Albie Booth, Brian Dowling and them don't matter anymore.

Anyway ... what got the Blob thinking about all this is how long it takes to win 900 football games, and what that says about just what an enduring legacy college football has. The NFL is just a bunch of johnny-come-latelies, by comparison. Practically every major American sport but baseball is.

Notre Dame, for instance, started playing football in 1887. That was just 22 years after the end of the Civil War, and just 11 years after Custer bought it on the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull was still alive. The shootout at the OK Corral still qualified as current events. Knute Rockne wasn't even born yet over there in Norway, and it would be 31 years before he became head coach at Notre Dame and invented the forward pass, the T formation, the wishbone, the bubble screen, the jet sweep and the parking pass.

(OK, so he didn't invent any of that stuff. But Domers think he did.)

In other words, college football at Notre Dame has been around for a good long time. It's been around so long, in fact, that the Irish have actually won 900 games twice.

The Irish first did it in 2017, but then the NCAA took away 21 victories in 2012 and 2013 because, I don't know, they forgot to wash their hands after using the bathroom or something. This of course does not mean those 21 wins didn't happen. Everyone remembers that they happened, how they happened, and who made them happen. Knute Rockne probably remembers that they happened, and he's been dead for 88 years.

In any case, because of the NCAA's splendid penchant for Stalinist revisionism, they never happened. The NCAA said, nope, sorry, what you think you remember you don't remember. And so you don't have 900 wins anymore.

But yesterday the Irish got back there, anyway. And for that, we can bless college football's eternal,  unmatchable reach across the decades.