Mike Celizic

It has been 17 years since the last national championship, 12 years since a season that finished with a top-10 ranking and 18 since the last Heisman Trophy. For college football’s most famous program, that’s far too long.

You either love Notre Dame or hate it, which is how it should be with great franchises, from the Yankees to the Lakers and Celtics to the Dallas Cowboys. But you should never be in a position where you don’t really care.

Sports need flagship franchises, teams against whose accomplishments all others are measured, teams you go out of your way to see. If you cheer for those teams, all the world is right when they’re doing well. If you cheer against them, every one of their losses is sweet.

Notre Dame was always that team in college football, a program slathered in legend, much of which had the benefit of being true. They were the Yankees of their sport, the team that became part of the national culture. You didn’t have to know a thing about football to recognize the Fighting Irish or feel something stir inside when you heard the Notre Dame Fight Song. The stirring may have been the bile in your gorge, but still, something moved inside you.

As much a part of the school’s reputation was built not only on how it performed but the way it conducted its business. When the graduation rates of Division I-A schools are published, Notre Dame is always at or near the top of the list along with Stanford and Duke. When players misbehaved, they weren’t slapped on the wrist or given a stern talking to. They were frequently tossed off the team and out of the school.

Only once was the program on probation, and that was under Lou Holtz. It's the same Holtz who has left four schools — Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame and South Carolina — under investigation and eventually on probation after his time was done at the schools.

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The holier-than-thou attitude rankled and grated in many quarters. Those who feel toward Notre Dame the way some people feel towards dental hygienists — “It’s good for you. And don’t worry, you’ll stop bleeding in no time.” — love to grouse about the school’s exclusive television deal with NBC, which, with Microsoft, is a partner in this Web site.

But even there, the money didn’t go into the football program — Notre Dame has no separate athletic budget, nor does it have any facilities that are exclusively for athletic teams — but into the general scholarship fund.

Notre Dame bragged about doing it the right way. But when it fell on hard times under Bob Davie and then Ty Willingham, endless commentators and even many within the Notre Dame community said that the decline was inevitable and that Notre Dame would never return to the top of the heap because its academic standards were too high. Even legend Paul Hornung got in the act, making a sloppy mess of things with comments that were read to be racist.

And that’s another reason why the two-game renaissance of Notre Dame is so important. Somebody has to show that it is possible to graduate the players and maintain high standards and succeed on the field. Somebody has to show all the apologists for all the abuses in the game that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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That’s where Charlie Weis has done his best work in this young season. By last year, the players had read so often about how they weren’t good enough and never would be they were starting to accept it as true. Weis has convinced them they can compete, and he’s given them the schemes and tools to do that.

I will never absolve Notre Dame of blame for the way the school kicked Willingham overboard before his contract had expired. That wasn’t the Notre Dame way of doing things; it wasn’t the right way. That blot remains on the school’s reputation.