Let’s Overthink: Notre Dame Football

Here we go, the post that makes my (scant) feminist/tv nerd audience delete their bookmarks. Uh, if it helps you stick around, we can subject a few tight-pantsed dudes to the female gaze in the comments, for a change, or we could discuss the intricacies of ND’s NBC contract.

Notre Dame football occupies a strange cultural place, a place it shares with perhaps just the New York Yankees. Few cultural institutions are so loved by their fans (if in fact you can call the weird mixture of obsessiveness, fickleness, and entitlement “love”) and so hated by almost everyone else. First of all, there’s the Catholic Factor (I’d argue that this is a huge motivation for, say, the collective desire for the state-schooled UNC boys to beat Duke every year). And of course any wealthy private school is always going to attract it’s share of haters (yawn) and its share of you’re-no-better-than-us-ers (they’ve got a point).