2002 Week 10
October 30, 2002
This last week we saw some more great football. I was particularly impressed with Arizona State's solid win at Washington. It's just further evidence of the fine football played by teams from the Western Athletic Conference.
Miami had a real struggle in Morgantown VA. The Canes finally pulled away from the Western Virginia Banjo Boyz with a few late touchdowns, then got out of town in a hurry before the pigs started squealing.
The Michigan State Fighting Chippewas had another difficult loss, this time to Wisconsin. Before the game I was quoted as saying that Michigan State was the "Enron of college football". I would like to apologize for that remark. I did not mean to insult the many fine people at Enron.
Ohio State took another win from Penn State in what is becoming quite a bitter rivalry. I'm not saying that the two coaches don't like each other, but I don't think JoePa and Coop are going to be sending each other Christmas hams this year.
JoePa is going to have to calm down a bit out there on the field. It was one thing to chase down that referee after the Iowa game, but I don't think it was a good idea for Coach Paterno to go after that one line judge.
I mean, the guy clearly blew that pass interference call and deserved *some* punishment, but Coach Paterno should have stopped short of stabbing him 53 times. 10 or 11 would have sufficed.
The most remarkable performance of the weekend was by Stanford. I missed their Saturday game, but understand that they put on a solid performance against UCLA, falling just a bit short after UCLA came back from a large deficit.
That's pretty good considering that the Cardinals were playing less than 48 hours after they had really put the wood to Clemson in North Carolina. I was kind of surprised to see them playing two games in such a short period of time.
I also was a bit confused by the Stanford helmet. For some reason they're now proclaiming themselves national champions because they have a little "N" on one side of the block S and a little "C" on the other side. "NC" -- "National Champions", even though I looked in the record books and haven't seen any sign that they've won a national title in anything other than wussy sports like swimming and diving.
Stanford's far from the only school with well-known helmets. Among the most famous helmets in college football are the ones worn by the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.
Way back when college football teams didn't wear helmets. During the early days of football at Notre Dame, future ND coach Newt Rockne was a player for the Irish. In fact, he was a pretty good lineman. He was also almost completely bald. Newt often would polish his head before games and aim his head toward the opposing team's best defensive player so that the player would be blinded by the sun's reflection off Rockne's head so the opponent wouldn't be able to rush the quarterback.
Unfortunately, the lack of helmets caused many closed head injuries, and NCAA President Franklin Theodore Roosevelt soon mandated that players wear head gear.
So when Rockne became head coach at Notre Dame, the players were all required to wear helmets and he wasn't able to implement his first idea, which was to have all the players shave their heads and apply polish.
But Rockne thought long and hard about the problem and realized that perhaps he could turn the helmets to his advantage. He did a lot of research and learned that the most reflective color was gold. So he decided to paint helmets gold so they'd be sufficiently reflective so as to blind opposing players and protect the Notre Dame backs from being sacked behind the line of scrimmage.
So Newt Rockne's first great idea as coach was to have the Notre Dame helmets painted in a gold hue. This helped protect the backs, as did Newt's second great idea, which was to have the backfield mount horses. Due to complaints by People Against Sexual Treatment of Animals (PASTA), the latter tactic was soon banned by the NCAA.
So Newt had to limit himself to having very reflective golden helmets, and those helmets and their blinding effect on the opposition helped carry the Irish to great success.
The golden helmets themselves became famous across the world, and the University saluted the beautiful golden Notre Dame helmets by painting the Notre Dame Administration building an identical shade of gold.