Notre Dame football great Aaron Taylor says it's all about the WIN: What's Important Now
SOUTH BEND — Watching a highly ranked Notre Dame football team inexplicably lose at home to upstart Northern Illinois, Aaron Taylor’s mind drifted back three decades to his senior year with the Irish.
While the stakes were undeniably higher in 1993, when Taylor won the Lombardi Award as a two-time All-American on the offensive line, the emotional rollercoaster from one week to the next was all too familiar.
“I have to be honest,” Taylor, the College Football Hall of Famer now working as a “College Football Today” studio analyst on CBS, said in a phone interview. “It reminds me very much of what happened to us in 1993 after we beat Florida State and then lost to Boston College the following week.”
Toppling 20th-ranked Texas A&M in the season opener wasn’t quite the Game of the Century, as that famous win over top-ranked Florida State was billed, but it was still the biggest win of the Marcus Freeman era as well as the first true road win for the Irish over an SEC opponent since 2004 at Tennessee.
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That made it even more shocking when the unranked Huskies, 28-point Vegas underdogs, outplayed Notre Dame in all three phases and used a late Kanon Woodill field goal from 35 yards to take a 16-14 upset back to their Boneyard in DeKalb, Ill.
In November 1993, David Gordon struck from 41 yards out to give the 17th-ranked Eagles a two-point win (41-39) that dashed the national championship hopes in South Bend. Adding to the symmetry, Notre Dame closed out that 11-1 season with a Cotton Bowl win over Texas A&M.
“I also think it’s proportional,” Taylor said. “We were in the Game of the Century, and the letdown was big because the game was bigger.”
And this early-season week of whipsaw?
“Texas A&M was, we knew, a tough out,” Taylor said. “It’s a good win, but maybe you celebrate a little too much. Maybe you put a little too much emphasis on that first game and what it’s going to take.”
Taylor, who won a Super Bowl ring with the 1996 Green Bay Packers during a six-year pro career cut short by injuries, has seen all sides of the competitive spectrum. What happened to Notre Dame last weekend could have happened to anyone, just as the ’93 Irish were automatically vulnerable after grounding Charlie Ward and the Seminoles.
“Where (those experiences) are similar is the human nature of this sport and I just think of our species really, right?” Taylor said. “You let go of the steering wheel. Human beings want to seek pleasure and avoid pain, period, and that’s what’s so amazing about this sport is that it constantly requires you to reject your basic human instincts.
“It’s really tempting to celebrate your accomplishments. It’s easier to get on top than to stay on top. And I think what we saw was a team that has a lot of experience, a team that’s very talented, but was emotionally immature — across the board, I’m saying, coaching staff and players — (and) not able to bounce back and rebound.”
Echoes of BC in 1993
As one of the founders of the Joe Moore Award, given annually since 2015 to the nation’s top college offensive line, Taylor clearly holds his former position coach in high esteem.
He just wishes Moore hadn’t let up on his ’93 Irish offensive line in the immediate aftermath of that 31-24 win over Florida State.
“Joe Moore, who was as old school as old school (gets), didn’t watch the film with us,” Taylor said. “He let us watch it ourselves. That to me, looking back, was the single-biggest (example) of what was different heading into BC than any other game I ever played there.
“We watched the game tape as a group, without him in the room, which is where you make corrections. Yes, we played well, but there were things that we needed to do. Our mindsets going into BC, we were confident. We knew what was at stake. We respected them. We knew they were a good team, but we were just a little bit less hungry than we had been the week before, and it cost us an opportunity at a national championship.”
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Many Notre Dame fans have the same sinking feeling this week, even with a 12-team College Football Playoff now in force.
“Marcus has been on record saying that maybe they celebrated Texas A&M a little too much,” Taylor said. “We’ve seen (Texas coach) Steve Sarkisian use Notre Dame now as an example for his team so they don’t fall into the same trap. But that’s a human nature trap, and it’s incredibly difficult to be able to rebound from that.
“That’s exactly why we lost to Boston College, the same dynamic. There were a lot of little things that week that were different in our preparation for BC than what we had done with all the attention the week before for Florida State. We got out of practice a little bit early to go light the No. 1 up on top of Grace Tower.”
The Information Superhighway was still under construction, and cell phones were half a decade from becoming ubiquitous. If it was that hard for Lou Holtz to keep the ’93 Irish on message, imagine what it’s like for contemporary coaches to steer the ship in the era of social media, NIL and the transfer portal.
“It’s incredibly difficult,” Taylor said. “And there is an absolute global war happening right now for our attention. Everybody on the planet is being sought after for their attention: on our devices, on our phones and everything.
“It makes it that much more difficult to not nibble on the rat poison. And you may think that you’re doing a good job because you’re not taking a big swig out of a mug of it, but if you take little tiny droplets throughout the day, throughout the week, over the course of the weekend, in the bar or in the dorm after the game, it starts to add up. And it’s incredibly difficult to resist that.”
Nick Saban’s Alabama teams pulled it off six times in a decade and a half. Dabo Swinney’s Clemson program won two out of three, and top-ranked Georgia under Kirby Smart is looking to win its third CFP title in four years.
In South Bend, where the title drought stretches back to 1988, the formula remains elusive. If nothing else, the recent high-low mood swing reminds us of that.
“That’s not an indictment on Notre Dame at all,” Taylor said “It’s not necessarily an indictment on Marcus Freeman. But it is their responsibility, and it is the consequence they have to bear for not being able to do it.
“It’s really hard, but if you want to be a championship-level team, if you want to be elite, if you want to be a playoff team now, those are the things you have to learn how to do. Notre Dame didn’t, and Northern Illinois has a memory that those players and coaches will never, ever forget.”
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While Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard may have been banged up and Sun Bowl MVP Jordan Faison was out with an ankle injury, there was nothing fluky about the loss.
“You see a flat team on tape,” Taylor said, “one that’s not playing inspired, one that’s not as focused, putting as much attention to detail as they needed and certainly what they showed against Texas A&M. You do see effort. You do see guys playing hard. But it takes more than that. It takes execution, and that just simply wasn’t there.”
Notre Dame’s first-ever loss to an opponent from the Mid-American Conference highlighted the experience gap along the offensive line, where the Huskies returned 115 career starts while the Irish starting five entered the year with six.
Eighteen returning starters for coach Thomas Hammock kept their poise and never blinked.
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“What you saw from Northern Illinois was a team that played quite a bit more physical than I expected them to,” Taylor said, “and it makes me wonder if that’s what Notre Dame felt as well going into that game on both sides of the ball. I was really shocked and surprised that they were able to run the ball on our front seven as well as they did.
“I was really shocked and surprised that we weren’t able to move the ball consistently down the field and convert third downs. Everybody seemed to be just a little bit off. That’s how these things happen. It’s a lot of little stuff adding up.”
According to ESPN research, Notre Dame owns three of the 28 home losses in college football since the start of 2022 when favored by 16 points or more. After effectively vowing “never again” after the loss to Marshall and later to Stanford, Northern Illinois just happened.
“Yeah, it’s difficult,” Taylor said. “And there’s a lot of noise, and that could be even more rat poison from the outside trying to seep in. But those are the facts; that’s the data.”
What comes next?
“The way to get yourself out of the hole is to do the next indicated step,” Taylor said, “to not worry about tomorrow, to not focus on what happened yesterday. What’s important now? That was a Holtz acronym: What’s Important Now. What do we need to do today? What do I need to do in this walkthrough? How do I need to take notes when I watch this film? How do I need to stretch and hydrate to get myself ready?
“Because I’ll be honest with you, this Purdue team they’re about to see is a more ented football team than Northern Illinois was, and Northern Illinois is pretty talented as we know. … If they don’t focus on what’s important now, they’re going to get themselves beat again.”
Not that Taylor expects that to happen with the Irish favored by 10 points on Saturday afternoon at Ross-Ade Stadium.
“I think this is a game that Notre Dame will dig deep and find a way to win because that’s who Marcus Freeman and this team is,” Taylor said. “I spent a day with them in the summer. It matters to them. But sometimes you need to get punched in the mouth to wake yourselves up and you learn.
“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Notre Dame didn’t want to take that ‘L,’ but hopefully they’ll learn from it, apply it as they move forward and run the table and get themselves into the playoff.”
Mike Berardino covers Notre Dame football for NDInsider.com and the South Bend Tribune. Follow him on social media @MikeBerardino.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame football great Aaron Taylor unpacks life after NIU upset
