I find the last 12 months of ND football really disappointing, not because the performance has been bad. Objectively, it's been pretty good--win 10 games, score record number of points, put several kids in the pros and have a drama-free national signing day. But that's actually what makes it disappointing--ND football now seems like a professional operation, Kelly seems to revel in making things dispassionate ('just execute your job'), the players seem to show very little emotion on the sidelines, and we (as fans) seem to have scaled our expectations that, realistically, we're note a Tier 1 program, and the national media have all but forgotten about us. We are close to irrelevant.
For better or worse, we used to have a lot of drama around our program. On NSD, for example, there was Scott Bentley, Justin Trattou and Manti T'eo. There were QB controversies; there were hot debates about whether ND is over-rated or under-rated; and there were fans who passionately cared about the football. This year, we had a loss to Michigan; it was bad, but we convincingly won 5 games after that and only moved 1 spot in the CFP polls. In years past, that would have been met with outrage; this year, crickets. On NSD, there was almost no coverage of ND's class. Even this board, which used to have hot takes on X player's performance or Y coach, has devolved into name-calling about the other posters, because...well...the football is all so predictably boring.
In short, we are the Downton Abbey of college football--polite, boring and aging into irrelevance.
Yuck.