For decades, the standard reasons when ND has a poor football team include:
Tough admission requirements
Cold weather campus
Lack of diversity in student body
Players must go to class and keep on track to graduate
Outdated student behavior rules and enforcement
For the most part these things are true. But they shift from reasons to excuses when the Irish lose to BC, Stanford or Service Academy teams, all of whom play under many of the same restrictions without the recruiting and tradition advantages. I fervently hope that Marcus Freeman is successful, and believe that he needs a couple of years before we decide one way or the other. But right now he is 0-1-1 in "no excuse" games. He gets another chance on Saturday.
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But a lot departures from that class; some played at ND and some not. Paul Glonek, Jeff Pearson, Jim Dadiotis, Zalenski and anther ski who played at Purdue....
Didn't a bunch of them go to Burbank (IL) St. Laurence. And wasn't Tim Grunhard also in that class?
Also I seem to remember that someone from that class had a sister who married Frank Kmet (Purdue DL) and they had a son Cole.
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1989: Todd "Marijuanavich" Marinovich shoulder butts him after making a good play, and taunts him. Kowalkowski gets his revenge late the game by absolutely leveling Marinovich, even hurting Marijuana Boy's shoulder badly. He barely threw wounded ducks for the last few plays.
1990: Eric Hunter mouths off at him. A series or two later, Kowalkowski squats under Hunter, and drives his legs upward, smashing his shoulder pad against Hunter's jaw. That definitely rang Hunter's bell, and he was quite gunshy after that.
He was one of the quietest, no nonsense, no showboating people you'd see on that team, but definitely stood out in his excellent play.
I wonder what happened to that idiot who tried to pick a fight with him... Even though he's in his 50's, I'm pretty sure Kowalkowski can still lay down some heavy lumber and take such an upstart out to the woodshed...
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Kowalkowski was applying some serious pressure, and Marinovich was lucky that he had heaved that wounded duck about 1 second before he would have been crushed from the blindside.
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No, but he was my recruiting life-lesson. So excited when he signed, sure he would be great. Never got admitted. Learned to not get invested in recruits until they show up on the field. Lemming never got my money after that.
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forget the interception against Miami in 1989 that I believe, tied the game up at the time. We should have beaten that team if not for so many bonehead big mistakes we made. We had them on the ropes at the end of the first half and had a good drive going until Derek Brown ran a poor route that enabled the linebacker to cut in front of him, intercept the pass and almost return it all the way, after which they scored a TD. I also remember the fumble that we failed to fall on and the 3rd and about 45 conversion. Yuch!!!
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Pretty sure we beat Navy
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MF will figure it out. BK had issues playing down to the level of unranked opponents also. I am 100% confident MF will fix it. Don't know when. But, he will.