Mandel: Is Notre Dame football overrated? Lets dig into the data

With No. 4 Notre Dame set to host No. 1 Clemson in another one of those marquee intersectional games it rarely seems to win, I sought to find an empirical answer to a timeless question: Is Notre Dame overrated?
Not, overrated this year. I mean, in general. Is Notre Dame inherently overrated by the pollsters? Because that’s what the majority of college football fans rush to declare pretty much anytime the Irish lose a football game. Especially when they get blown out in the postseason.
Advertisement
I enlisted The Athletic’s resident AP poll historian, Matt Brown, who called up his secret Top 25 database and immediately spit out all sorts of interesting factoids. Among them was the fact that Notre Dame is actually tied with Alabama for the most all-time wins against top-10 teams with 80. Though I’m sure they were dubbed as overrated throughout most of those as well.
But my focus was entirely about the Brian Kelly era, 2010-present, a period in which the Irish have enjoyed their most success in more than a quarter-century (including an impressive 39-6 record since 2017) but still seem to come up short in most of their biggest games.
What we found is that, when compared with its peers — not Alabama and Clemson, but programs with comparable rankings to the Irish over time — you can make the case that yes, Notre Dame has not quite lived up to its billing.
What stood out even more so, however, is that the Irish are hardly the poster for “overrated” over the course of the past decade. That distinction belongs to some of their friends in the Big Ten.
More on that in a minute.
Most frequently AP-ranked teams
First, we needed to establish a baseline for where exactly Notre Dame has been “rated” over the past decade. If you rank every team in the country by how frequently they’ve appeared in the polls, Notre Dame checks in at No. 11, according to College Poll Archive. It’s appeared in 65.7 percent of all preseason, weekly and final AP polls since 2010, just below No. 10 Michigan (67.4 percent) and just above No. 12 Auburn (64.0 percent).
So, has Notre Dame under Kelly beaten Top 25 teams at a rate commensurate with the 11th-most frequently ranked team in the country? On the whole, yes. Its 20-20 record against ranked teams is exactly 11th-best among the teams on our list. However, if we focus only on games in which both the Irish and their opponent were ranked, their 16-17 record drops them to 17th.
The former category suggests Notre Dame’s Top 25 record is perfectly respectable; the latter provides some fodder for those who believe the Irish too frequently “choke” in big games. Though to be fair, they are 13-8 as the higher-ranked team and 3-9 as the lower-ranked team in those Top 25 matchups.
Advertisement
Now, here’s some further perspective.
Records vs. Top 25 teams
| School | All Top 25 | Top 25 vs. Top 25 |
|---|---|---|
36-10 | 34-7 | |
21-23 | 18-14 | |
20-20 | 16-17 | |
20-22 | 17-18 | |
14-29 | 13-20 | |
12-26 | 8-15 | |
8-25 | 4-13 |
Wisconsin since 2010 has appeared in the rankings more frequently (78.5 percent) than all but five teams — Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio State, LSU and Clemson. It has won three Big Ten titles and played for four more over that span. And yet, the Badgers’ Top 25 record is slightly worse than Notre Dame’s (20-22). Its ranked-vs.-ranked mark is nearly identical (17-18).
The sport’s sixth-most frequent Top 25 team since 2010 only has the 16th-best record in Top 25 matchups. Yet you don’t hear anyone suggesting Wisconsin is the most overrated team in the entire sport.
Meanwhile, Michigan, as previously mentioned, has been ranked slightly more frequently than Notre Dame. Yet its Top 25 record is a ghastly 14-29, and its ranked-vs.-ranked record is 13-20. It’s true that the pollsters afford way too much respect to a fabled Midwestern school with blue as one of its school colors, but it’s not Notre Dame.
Where it becomes harder to defend the Irish is when it comes to matchups like the one this coming Saturday. The Irish are just 3-8 against top-10 foes since 2010 and just 2-6 in games where both participants are top-10 teams. They rank just 19th and 20th, respectively, in those categories. Their highest-ranked conquest at the time of the game was No. 7 Stanford in 2018, and that Cardinal team finished the season unranked.
Mind you, it’s hard to beat top-10 opponents. Only six teams — Ohio State (17-5), Alabama (26-8), Clemson (15-7), LSU (20-12), Oregon (10-7) and Oklahoma (14-10) — have a winning record against such foes. But in games where you yourself are a top-10 team, you should probably win more than 25 percent. TCU (4-3) and Baylor (3-3) have both won more top-10 vs. top-10 games since 2010 than the Irish.
Best records, all teams
| School | vs. Top 10 | vs. Top 25 |
|---|---|---|
17-5 | 36-10 | |
26-8 | 53-15 | |
15-7 | 30-15 | |
20-12 | 41-18 | |
10-7 | 26-17 | |
14-10 | 35-18 | |
12-12 | 26-26 | |
10-10 | 28-20 | |
10-10 | 21-23 |
On the other hand, teams with even worse top-10 records than Notre Dame include Nebraska (3-12), Penn State (2-15) and, once again, Michigan (2-19), which holds the distinctions of both worst top-10 record and worst top-10 vs. top-10 record (1-6) among the 25 most frequently ranked teams.
Advertisement
Penn State is an interesting study. Since a last-second loss to ninth-ranked USC in the 2017 Rose Bowl, James Franklin’s teams are 0-5 in top-10 vs. top-10 matchups. Yet the Nittany Lions don’t face nearly the same post-loss blowbacks as the Irish.
One possible explanation is that Penn State has never made it to a BCS championship or College Football Playoff semifinal, and thus never suffered as high-profile an indignity as No. 2 Alabama 41, No. 1 Notre Dame 14 in 2012 or No. 2 Clemson 30, No. 3 Notre Dame 3 in 2018. Those two particular results have come to so thoroughly define the perception of Notre Dame football under Kelly that it may take even more than a win against the Trevor Lawrence-less Tigers this weekend for much of the public to finally forgive the Irish.
Regardless, the biggest takeaway from our research is not that voters are chronically overrating Notre Dame. It’s more that they keep getting duped by Big Ten teams not named Ohio State.
Records vs. top-10 teams
| School | All top 10 | Top 10 vs. top 10 |
|---|---|---|
17-5 | 16-5 | |
10-10 | 6-2 | |
6-15 | 1-7 | |
3-8 | 2-6 | |
3-12 | 0-2 | |
2-15 | 1-4 |
Wisconsin is a respected program that consistently beats comparable or lesser opponents. But since 2010, it is just 6-15 vs. top-10 teams, and 1-7 in top-10 vs. top-10 games.
And yet, there sit the 1-0, coronavirus-stricken Badgers at No. 10 in the current AP poll.
Penn State, as previously mentioned, has not beaten a top-10 team since the 2016 Big Ten championship game against Wisconsin. Yet it has spent 31 of the 57 polls it’s been eligible for since then in the top 10.
Then there’s Michigan. Since 2016, Notre Dame’s rival has cracked the top 10 on 33 occasions despite going 2-10 against top-10 foes during that span and 2-19 since 2010.
And don’t get me started on Nebraska. The Huskers have appeared in 44.2 percent of all AP polls since 2010. They are 8-25 against Top 25 opponents.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Notre Dame’s Midwestern rivals. Michigan State since 2010 is 6-2 in top-10 vs. top-10 games, 10-10 in all top-10 games, 18-14 in Top 25 vs. Top 25 games and 21-23 against Top 25 foes. The Spartans, especially during their Mark Dantonio heyday, were frequently underrated.
Advertisement
Of course, in their highest-profile postseason appearance, the 2015 CFP semifinal, Alabama trounced the Spartans 38-0.
So if you’re one of the many who have suggested Notre Dame be banned from future CFP consideration due to its lack of competitiveness, you may have to apply that same standard to a whole lot of their neighbors.
And that’s where context becomes important. If your bar for overrated is not as good as Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State, then yes, absolutely, the Irish are. But that would be unfair, because the pollsters have rarely ranked Notre Dame as high as those programs to begin with. It’s more constructive to compare the Irish’s performance relative to their comparable peers.
The Athletic’s Matt Brown contributed.
(Photo: Keith Srakocic / Associated Press)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kWpvaWxgZnxzfJFpZmppX2WCcLrOrameZZSWuqZ5zq%2Bcq6qRqbKlecWopq2akaG5cA%3D%3D