OOn Thursday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish take on the Penn State Nittany Lions in the Orange Bowl, which is also one of the semifinals of the College Football Playoff. The game marks the latest of Notre Dame’s many successes on the field. In its 138-year history in football, the Catholic university has checked off every measure of success. He produced 109 All-Americans and seven Heisman Trophy winners, while winning 45 bowl games and 11 national championships. A victory against Penn State would bring the Irish closer to the 12th title that has eluded them since 1988.
Notre Dame’s success was so great that other private Christian colleges sought to follow in its footsteps. Brigham Young, Baylor and Liberty universities have all taken steps to become the leading universities of their faith communities – and football plays a large role in that effort. These schools recognized that Notre Dame’s football success had helped bring American Catholics into the mainstream, and they believed it could help strengthen their own religious communities and evangelize nonbelievers.
At the turn of the 20th century, American Catholics, particularly immigrants flocking to the United States, faced doubts about their religious and national identity and allegiance. Notre Dame football helped assuage these concerns and change the public’s perception of American Catholicism. Participating in football meant adopting the same “gentleman’s game” played by America’s elites at schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. This meant making it clear that Notre Dame would produce the kind of men who could win through violent competition—exactly what the business environment of the Gilded Age demanded.
And Notre Dame did more than just compete, especially after Knute Rockne took over as head coach in 1918. He facilitated the school’s rise from regional program to national power by winning four national championships . He attributes his conversion to Catholicism in 1925 to the faith of his football players. At the time of his death in a plane crash in 1931, Rockne was one of the most popular Catholics in America. A small German Catholic farming community in Texas even renamed itself “Rockne” after children attending a local Catholic school voted to commemorate the coach.
Learn more: The power of football has always been part of Liberty University’s plan
The popularity of Notre Dame football during Rockne’s era helped forge the distinct identity of American Catholics and countered assertions that they were un-American. Catholic faithful across the country can now participate in the American ritual of cheering on their football team on Saturday, while also attending the global ritual of Mass on Sunday. As a result, the Fighting Irish reflected and shaped the journey of American Catholics to assimilate into mainstream American culture.
Administrators at other private Christian schools have taken note. In 1919, BYU resurrected its football program 19 years after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) banned the game. Mormons, like Catholics, faced questions about their Americanism. They remained outside mainstream American Protestant culture despite more than two decades of religious, cultural, and political transformations that brought them closer to American cultural norms.
By the time Rockne found success at Notre Dame, Mormons were looking to take the final step and move squarely into the mainstream. Church leaders and administrators at BYU believed a successful college football program would help them along the way. Like Notre Dame Catholics, the LDS Church hoped that playing—and excelling at—the American game would unite their religious community, demonstrate their Americanness, and increase their interactions with non-Mormons.
As a result, in 1923 the school recruited Rockne to spend the summer as an assistant instructor to run a football coaching clinic. He taught coaches his latest techniques and plays. The camp was a success. In 1928, the hiring of G. Ott Romney – Mitt Romney’s once-distant first cousin – gave BYU its first taste of football victory. He led the Cougars to a tie in its first “Holy War” rivalry game against the University of Utah, their first winning season in 1929, and an impressive 8-1 record in 1932.
BYU wasn’t the only Christian school influenced by Rockne’s teams at Notre Dame. Yet his impact on Baylor University, the largest Baptist university in the world, was quite different. In 1925, the famous coach invited the Bears, who had won the Southwest Conference the previous year, to travel to South Bend to open the college football season. Notre Dame was the reigning national champion, with a team led by the famed “Four Horsemen,” meaning the stakes were high, with regional and religious supremacy on the line.
As the game approached, the Baylor coach used Notre Dame as an example to beg his administration for more money. Yet the repeated use of a derogatory term for the Irish in Baylor’s student newspaper caused the defending champions to seek to make a statement. Rockne’s team dominated Baylor on both sides of the ball. By the third quarter, Notre Dame’s substitutes were in the game and the final score was 41-0.
In his sermon the next day, the pastor of Waco’s First Baptist Church used the game to reflect on Baylor’s place in American culture and urged his congregants not to lose faith in the team after the humiliating loss to the great Catholic school. The pastor and Baylor officials understood that giving up was not an option. Football offers too many potential benefits for a religious institution.
Learn more: How the Orange Bowl Made History
This was true even for Baylor, which did not need sports to help Baptists enter the mainstream of America. Instead, the school was free to use football to shape the religious, sexist, and racial beliefs of players, students, and fans. The creation of the Baylorettes – a group of 80 female students who joined the school band during halftime shows – in 1948 allowed football games to help shape gender expectations of women at school. While men led the team on the field, women’s role in Baptist college football was to titillate and entertain. Additionally, Baylor reinforced the South’s segregationist order by not fielding a black player on its team until 1965.
The school’s devotion to football has only grown over time. By the time it won another Southwest Conference championship in 1974, the school had broken ground on a new stadium and its administration was consistently financially supporting the football program.
Nevertheless, despite BYU and Baylor’s emphasis on football, Notre Dame remained the pioneer of football’s possibilities at a religious university. His team continued to win and the injection of television visibility and dollars starting in 1949 and from there expanded the school’s brand even further.
Televangelist Jerry Falwell took note of this success. In 1971, he founded Liberty University. The school motto promised “Here we Developing Champions for Christ” and Falwell viewed a successful college football program like Notre Dame as an essential part of his vision.
In 1989, Sports Illustrated interviewed him about Liberty football. Falwell boasted, “I know Lou Holtz [the head coach] at Notre Dame. He’s a good evangelical Christian, you know. I have the idea that he would schedule us when we were ready. The following year, Notre Dame signed an exclusive $75 million (over $177 million today) television contract with NBC to broadcast its football games. No conservative evangelical understood the power of this television exposure and money better than Falwell. As he worked to save America from desegregation, feminism, drugs, rock and roll, homosexuality, and the Democratic Party, he consistently cited Notre Dame and BYU as his models for creating a strong religious identity – and a source of income – through football. He believed that recruiting the best conservative Christian athletes to Liberty would help win football games, give conservative evangelicals “their” school, and revive America.
So Liberty invested millions of dollars in its football program. Falwell used his team to imbue students with a strident and aggressive new form of faith that has reshaped religion and politics in 21st-century America: Christian nationalism. But Liberty is still waiting for Notre Dame’s invitation to play in South Bend.
The 2024 college football season could prove to be the high point for the great Christian disciples of Notre Dame college football. BYU went 11-2 in its second season in the Big XII Conference and knocked off Deion Sanders’ Colorado team in the Alamo Bowl. Baylor finished 8-5, although it lost to LSU in the Texas Bowl. Liberty failed to repeat its 2023 success — which included a Fiesta Bowl bid — but still won eight games, earning a trip to the Bahamas Bowl.
While every major Christian college football team has had success this season, Notre Dame continues to inspire and surpass its football fans. The long history of the Fighting Irish illustrates how faith and football can foster assimilation, strengthen community and evangelize non-believers. Ultimately, the quintessentially American, masculine, and violent game continues to shape these religious communities through the gospel of the gridiron.
Hunter M. Hampton is an assistant professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the author of The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in 20th-Century AmericaA, forthcoming with the University of Illinois Press in the fall.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME’s editors.
