Win one for the Gipper

there is an old joke about a chaplain who said a prayer at the start of a football game between Notre Dame and a rival team. At the end of the prayer, he reminded the teams that "God has no favorites", at which point one of the Notre Dame players said: NO, but his mother does.

American football is nothing like world football, which we call soccer. And at a time when political correctness is destroying the love of the game for many fans who resent being dissed by millionaire football players as racists and "despicables", it is a good time to point out a time of when Football was almost considered an American religion, and some of football's religious ties.

A few blogposts back, I used the phrase "Hail Mary Pass".

That has it's origin in the University of Notre Dame's football team.

From Wikipedia:

The expression goes back at least to the 1930s, when it was used publicly by two former members of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen, Elmer Layden and Jim Crowley. Originally meaning any sort of desperation play, a "Hail Mary" gradually came to denote a long, low-probability pass... attempted at the end of a half when a team is too far from the end zone to execute a more conventional play, implying that it would take divine intervention for the play to succeed.

For more than 40 years, use of the term was largely confined to Notre Dame and other Catholic universities.[1] The term became widespread after a December 28, 1975, NFL playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings, when Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach said about his game-winning touchdown pass to wide receiver Drew Pearson, "I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary."

Here is a video about Notre Dame's rise to fame via Knute Rockne:




Another related factoid: President Ronald Reagan was often called "the Gipper": the origin of this knickname is explained here: