Should Notre Dame ever play Michigan again?

When you compare the two college football programs, it really isn’t even close.

Sure, the overall winning percentages of the two teams are within .002 of each other. And the lesser of the two actually has 33 more wins than the other and leads the head-to-head series 24-17-1 (although that’s pretty misleading considering Michigan’s major advantages in the early going, with Notre Dame having literally just begun learning how to play football, led to them winning the first 8 games in the series).

But when you look at everything else, it’s no contest. The University of Notre Dame has more national championships (no, UM fans…the 11 titles you claim do not equal the 11 consensus titles Notre Dame has), its best-ever coach (I’m being subjective but reasonable, I think you will agree, with this term) was more successful than Michigan’s best-ever coach (Knute Rockne had a winning percentage of .881, Fielding Yost a winning percentage of .833), and its second-best coach makes Michigan’s second-best coach resemble the very average coach that he was (for those of you not following, Frank Leahy was 1000x the coach that Bo “No Titles, 2-8 in Rose Bowls, Let’s Kick It To Rocket Ismail Again” Schembechler was).

And don’t get me started on who has had the most successful alum in the NFL. Tom Brady? Please, that guy isn’t good enough to lick the dirt off of Joe Montana’s Sketchers Shape-ups.

Notre Dame has more Heisman winners, more All-Americans, and on top of all of that, a severely higher graduation rate, and embarrassingly higher, even, if we want to talk African-American players only. The Irish have a greater following nationwide, their own network TV contract (the Wolverines obviously do not), and are more valuable overall. Oh, and we don’t have this, thankfully.

To put it simply, this is not, and never has been, a rivalry.

Sure, Michigan can point to the fact that their team taught Notre Dame how to play football back in the late 1880s, and can even bring up the fact that the upstart Irish were constantly trying to play Michigan and join its conference.

But let’s be real here, and real arrogant as well – the Notre Dame football program is light years better than the Michigan football program in every conceivable way at this point, and just as history shows us – the Irish are much better off not playing the Wolverines at all.

Back when the Fighting Irish were a fledgling program just looking for experience playing football, the Wolverines got scared that they might make a habit of losing to them (after losing just once to them), and, spurred further along by some strong anti-Catholic sentiment, decided to refuse to play ND starting in 1910. This forced the Irish to go all over the country in search of teams to play, and the rest is history as rivalries and epic match-ups with USC, Army, Texas, and various other schools vaulted Notre Dame past the Midwest powers, including Michigan, and into the upper-most echelon of college football blue bloods.

The Irish willingly accepted a series with Michigan again in 1942, only to have the Wolverines once again decide after two years to stick to playing schools in their conference and to blackball the Irish from joining their fun little group, as they had been doing during the 32-year hiatus before that.

The Irish flipped their prior success and independence and established rivalries across the country into more national audiences and more national championships, and eventually reached a point in the 1980s and 1990s when the Big Ten was begging them to join, seeing their obvious monetary value and national reach.

Making more money than they would in a conference and earning a television contract for all home games with NBC, Notre Dame smartly declined. Now, after finishing their series with Michigan in 2014 in outstanding fashion (and with “chicken” taunts tossed at them despite the fact that Michigan was about to end the series AGAIN if ND athletic director Jack Swarbrick hadn’t beaten them to the punch), there is talk of Michigan wanting to resume the series and ND considering it.

Side note: there are multiple places you can find a retelling of everything I just summarized if you are skeptical that any of this is true, but if you want a pretty strong summation of the history between the two schools handed to you on a silver platter, read this and inform yourselves.

So why would we want to get back into bed with a football program like Michigan? Do we want a fantastic regional match-up? Michigan State has been the better program of late, and a series with Ohio State (undoubtedly Michigan’s superior at this point) is on the horizon.

Are we looking for a game that makes waves nationally between two all-time programs? USC provides that, as do multiple new match-ups coming soon with Georgia or with ACC opponents like Florida State, Clemson, etc.

Do people just yearn for the days of being able to kick the crap out of some Wolverines? I know I do, but the ending to the series was too perfect for me to seriously request a revamp for just that reason.

The moral of the story is that the University of Michigan is a second-rate program with a history of anti-Catholic bigotry, jealousy, and an inferiority complex. They wanted nothing to do with Notre Dame until it became clear their conference needed them for financial reasons, and that led to the Irish simply shoving past them and becoming the premier college football program in the country for the majority of the 20th century.

Notre Dame doesn’t need Michigan.

They clearly never did (once they knew the rules of football).

So forget them and their sorry history and focus on playing more respectable, hatable (Michigan is more pathetic and despicable than truly “hatable”) opponents within a harrowing, national schedule that most schools (especially Michigan) wouldn’t dream of playing for fear of losing too many times.

We are ND, and we are above that (and clearly holier-than-thou – nobody’s perfect!).