UM’s football program is sinking faster than Paris Hilton’s “Class B” celeberty shelf life. If you do not believe me, go ask your favorite radio-head – Colin Cowherd. (GET OVER IT.)

ND is nursing the longest bowl losing streak in the country and has not done a thing of significance lately.

Both of your schools should continue to revel in the jurassic past of the first part of the 20th century, because their is no future.

Cheety McSweatervest at Ohio State will continue to spank UM and I would put my dough on the Irishman from USC (Carroll) to continue to win against the Joisy boy from ND (Weis).

But to get to the nitty gritty: UM and ND have a terrible tradition of not having the level of hot chicks that a quality program deserves!

Noticed, but wasn’t going to mention it.

And actually, during those overlapping years, both are credited with two national championships (ND – 1919, 1920; Michigan – 1918, 1923) with ND winning the 1924 title while Yost was not the Michigan coach.

“But I won’t cede the point that it is an insult to mention Yost’s accomplishments in the same breath as Rockne’s.”

Ummm…actually, if you go back to how this all started, in comment 38, the term was “disservice” and not “insult”. I was merely trying to point out that if you just look purely at numbers to compare Yost and Rockne, then you’re missing the entire picture and doing a disservice to Rockne’s legacy.

“I presume most ND fans feel similar to UM fans in that college football is special because of tradition. I don’t see the need to ignore a significant part of Michigan’s tradition merely because it has not received it historical due to date.”

Yup…and from one biased observer, Michigan and ND have the two top tradition’s (with USC, Alabama, and Nebraska just outside): top two in all-time wins, winning percentage (ND will get that back…), and fight song’s, not to mention everything else.

I have already ceded the pointed that Rockne currently is more famous. But I won’t cede the point that it is an insult to mention Yost’s accomplishments in the same breath as Rockne’s.

My personal belief is that most people know of Knute Rockne because of the movie. I too am a fairly serious college football fan and while I know that there were 4 horsemen, I can’t name a single one of them. And until this thread, I would only have been able to guess that Rockne was their coach. So, at least as far as I am concerned, there exists a generalized knowledge of Rockne, but not much of the particulars.

Having said that, again, I agree that most football fans still know more about Rockne (at least a little) than Yost (almost nothing at all).

I presume most ND fans feel similar to UM fans in that college football is special because of tradition. I don’t see the need to ignore a significant part of Michigan’s tradition merely because it has not received it historical due to date.

P.S. I goofed about the 2nd Rose Bowl. Michigan did not return until 1948.

As I said, the rememberance of Rockne is more than just the winning percentage. You ask any casual college football fan if they know who Knute Rockne was and they know about Notre Dame, the Four Horsemen, and “win one for the Gipper”. I would bet that there isn’t nearly the same name recognition for Fielding Yost. I consider myself a reasonably informed college football fan and beyond knowing that he was a coach at Michigan (and has a hockey rinked named after him), I would have been hard-pressed to name anything else about him. A quick google search has revealed much to me, but that’s the point…you have to go out of your way to find out about Yost while Rockne is just known.

But, okay, let’s look at winning percentages. Yost went 55-1-1 in his first five seasons (claiming four national championships in that time, or the 1901-1904 championships; the other two came in 1918 and 1923), 94-10-8 in his first 13 years (.875 for the length of Rockne’s career), and 165-29-10 at Michigan (.833). Six national championships in about 25 years of coaching. All fine numbers.

But Rockne’s career record was 105-12-5 (.881) with five national championships (to keep things equal, I’m using http://www.nationalchamps.net) between 1918 and 1930. Or five in 12 years of coaching. And ND’s only Rose Bowl appearance, a win against Stanford, which was also ND’s only bowl appearance until 1969.

In the years that they were both coaching (1918 to 1923, 1925 and 1926), Yost was 46-9-2 (or a .807 winning percentage) and Rockne was 64-7-4 (or a .853 winning percentage).

Who would you rather have? Like it our not, five percentage points is a pretty big deal when we’re talking about numbers this high.

The two men detested each other. But both were great coaches.

At the time, Michigan represented the best in the mid-west and of course ND was aspiring to be the best. ND even tried to join the same athletic conference, but when they were rebuffed, ND decided to aspire to be the in the US. Instead of hating Michigan, we should be thankful. Playing the national schedule was probably the best thing that ever happened to the university, significantly raising its profile and attracting fans and students across the nation.

It is discusses how ND came to UM so as to replicate the UM stadium.

As I recollect, Yost was instrumental in excluding ND from the Western Conference.

For what it’s worth, Murray Sperber chronicles the history of the Yost vs. Rockne “rivalry” in the early chapters of “Shake Down the Thunder”. Recommended.

Certainly, ND is now an excellent academic institution and it has a great football pedigree. But to claim that any comparison between Yost and Rockne is insulting is a difficult argument to make.

When we look at the later years of such coaches as Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, Vince Dooley, Wally Butts, and Lou Holtz, we see drop-offs (sometimes precipitous drop-offs) in their previous success.

However, it seldom is the case that a successful head coach simply forgets how to win the way major league closers sometimes lose the ability to find the plate.

Had he coached another 17 years, until he was 60, Coach Rock probably would not have won 88 per cent of his games over the long haul, but it seems doubtful that he would have lost it altogether. He died in 1931 at age 43; if he had remained on the Notre Dame sidelines until he was 60, his tenure would have ended in the late 1940s.

The sort of “sea changes” in the game that occurred in the early 1970s (with the integration of Southern state universities) and in the early 1990s (with the advent of sophisticated passing attacks and the implementation of more advanced training and dietary regimens) did not occur in sweeping fashion between 1931 and, say, 1948.

It is for that reason that I have difficulty believing that the game would have passed Knute Rockne by. What won in ‘31 remained great in ‘48.

The Fighting Irish are like the New York Yankees of college football . . . you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em, but, if you follow the sport, you cannot be neutral about them the way you can most other teams that aren’t in your conference or division.

While I do not share the negative view of Charlie Weis offered by some commentators in this thread, I agree that the jury remains out on Coach Weis. He may be great, but we cannot tell that based solely on one season’s worth of work. We will know more a year from now, and still more a year after that. At this point, his long-term success is pure speculation and conjecture.

Such is not the case with Coach Rockne, however. He was a proven winner who was cut down in his prime and, had he survived, I have no doubt that his legend would have grown, rather than been diminished, by the subsequent years of a career sadly truncated.

Actually, Yost’s distaste for ND had far more to do with the fact that ND skirted more than a few rules in its attempt to achieve Michigan’s level of success. But congratulations for spewing forth the typical ND propoganda approved by the NDNation zealots.

The odd thing is that even Rockne would disagree with you. In his day, Yost was Steve Spurrier writ large – a braggart who could back it up. The beginning of Rockne’s animosity toward Yost began when Yost did not name him to one of the All-American teams. From that moment on, Rockne sought to beat Yost and UM. So to Rockne, Yost was comparable.

By the way, did you know that ND is currently on the longest bowl losing streak in NCAA history?

IG