The Great Story of Notre Dame Football 2025: The beginning of Football to Marcus Freeman’s last game Paperback – February 1, 2025

Knute Rockne: “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. I play not my eleven best, buy my best eleven.The Notre Dame Fighting Irish football teams have been playing football on the campus since 1887. Though the team is known as the Fighting Irish today, they first played games as “The Catholics and then The Ramblers. In fact, it took about forty years before they got their lasting nickname. University president Rev. Matthew Walsh christened ND as the “Fighting Irish,’ in 1927 because of their never-say-die fighting spirit and the Irish qualities of grit, determination, and tenacity.This book begins with the first college football game in 1869 and continues through seven years with the team having no football head coach until the administration finally funded the program by hiring J. L. Morrison to mentor the Irish in 1894.The book starts by telling some interesting stories about Notre Dame's founding in 1842 and quickly gets to the first football game in 1867. From there, the progression leads, to Notre Dame's first football game in 1887, then to the first Notre Dame coach in 1894, and of course to the great immortal Notre Dame coaches-- Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian, Devine, and Holtz, through the lukewarm Brian Kelly years and to the current season with Coach Marcus Freeman.This book has it all. It takes the reader through stories about Notre Dame's 32 coaches to great stories of 137 seasons worth of great games (1323 games) and 980 wins. The book often stops in time and talks about a particular player such as Johnny Lujack, Paul Hornung, Tony Rice, Tim Brown, Leon Hart, Johnny Lattner, Brady Quinn, Jerome Bettis, Joe Montana, Joe Theismann, Ian Book or Riley Leaonard. You cannot get enough of ND greatness but we try in this book because there are lots of great moments. You will not be able to put this book down.Hang on folks and you will learn how good Notre Dame really is and you will see that with the talented Marcus Freemen leading the Irish as head coach, there surely is another Return to Glory in the offing. Amen! Read more