The Cultural Impact of Notre Dame Football Goes Far Beyond the Playing Field

On Thursday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish play the Penn State Nittany Lions in the Orange Bowl, which doubles as one of the college football playoff semifinals. The game marks the latest of Notre Dame’s many successes on the gridiron. In its 138-year history of playing football, the Catholic university has checked off every measure of success. It’s produced 109 All-Americans and seven Heisman trophy winners, while winning 45 bowl games and 11 national championships. A victory against Penn State would move the Irish one step closer to the 12th title that has eluded them since 1988. 

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So great has Notre Dame’s success been that other private Christian colleges have aimed to follow in its footsteps. Brigham Young University, Baylor University, and Liberty University have all taken steps to become the leading universities for their religious communities — and football is a big part of that endeavor. These schools recognized that Notre Dame’s football success helped to integrate American Catholics into the mainstream, and they believed that it could help strengthen their own faith communities and evangelize to non-believers.

At the turn of the 20th century, American Catholics, especially the immigrants flooding into the U.S., faced doubts about their religious and national identities and allegiances. Notre Dame football helped to assuage these concerns and change the public’s perception of American Catholicism. Competing in football meant embracing the same “gentleman’s game,” played by American elites at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. It meant conveying that Notre Dame would produce the sort of men who could win through violent competition — precisely what the Gilded Age business environment demanded.

And Notre Dame did more than just compete — especially after Knute Rockne arrived as head coach in 1918. He facilitated the school’s rise from regional program to national powerhouse by winning four national championships. He credited the faith of his football players for his conversion to Catholicism in 1925. By the time he died 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 memorialize the coach.

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The popularity of Notre Dame football during the Rockne era helped forge the distinct identity of American Catholics and counter claims that they weren’t American. The Catholic faithful across the country could now participate in the American ritual of cheering for their football team on Saturday, while also attending the global ritual of Mass on Sunday. As a result, the Fighting Irish reflected and shaped American Catholics’ journey to assimilate into mainstream American culture.

Administrators at other private Christian schools took note. In 1919, BYU resurrected its football program 19 years after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) had banned the game. Mormons, like Catholics, faced questions about their Americanism. They remained outside of mainstream Protestant American culture despite more than two decades of religious, cultural, and political transformations that edged them toward American cultural norms.

By the time Rockne experienced success at Notre Dame, Mormons were looking to make the final leap and squarely enter the mainstream. Church leaders and BYU administrators believed a successful big-time college football program would help them along the journey. Like Catholics at Notre Dame, the LDS Church hoped playing — and excelling at — America’s game would unite their religious community, prove their Americanness, and increase their interactions with non-Mormons.

Accordingly, in 1923, the school recruited Rockne to spend the summer as an adjunct instructor in order to host a football-coaching clinic. He taught the coaches his latest techniques and plays. The camp was a success. In 1928, the hiring of G. Ott Romney – the first cousin once removed of Mitt Romney – brought BYU its first taste of winning football. He led the Cougars to a tie in his inaugural “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 Notre Dame teams. Yet, his impact on Baylor University, the world’s largest Baptist university, was quite different. In 1925, the famed coach invited the Bears, who had won the Southwest Conference the year before, to visit South Bend to open the college football season. Notre Dame was the defending national champion, with a team led by the famed “Four Horsemen,” making the stakes high, with regional and religious supremacy on the line.

In the run-up to the game, Baylor’s coach used Notre Dame as an example to beg his administration for more money. Yet, the repeated use of a derogatory term for Irishmen in the Baylor student newspaper left the defending champions looking to make a statement. Rockne’s team dominated Baylor on both sides of the ball. By the third quarter, Notre Dame’s backups were in the game, and the final score was 41-0. 

In his sermon the next day, the pastor at First Baptist Church in Waco used the game to reflect on Baylor’s place in American culture and urged his congregants to not lose faith in the team after the humiliating defeat to the large Catholic school. The pastor, and officials at Baylor, understood that giving up wasn’t an option. Football offered too many potential benefits for a religious institution.

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That was true even of Baylor, which didn’t need the sport to help Baptists enter mainstream America. Instead, the school was free to use football to shape the religious, gendered, and racial beliefs of players, students, and fans. The creation of the Baylorettes — a group of 80 female students, who joined the school’s band in halftime shows — in 1948 meant that football games helped shape the gendered expectations for women at the school. While men led the team on the field, women’s role in big-time Baptist college football was to titillate and entertain. Additionally, Baylor reinforced the segregationist Southern order by refraining from fielding a Black player on its team until 1965.

The school’s devotion to football only grew over time. By the time it won another Southwest Conference Championship in 1974, the school had inaugurated a new stadium and its administration consistently supported the football program financially.

Nevertheless, despite the emphasis BYU and Baylor placed on football, Notre Dame remained the pacesetter for the possibilities of football at a religious university. Its team continued to win and the injection of television exposure and dollars beginning in 1949 and growing from there expanded the school’s brand even more.

The televangelist Jerry Falwell took note of this success. In 1971, he founded Liberty University. The school’s motto promised “Here we Train Champions for Christ” and Falwell saw a successful big-time college football program like Notre Dame as an essential element 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 is a fine evangelical Christian, you know. I have an idea he’d schedule us when we were ready.” The next year, Notre Dame signed a $75 million (over $177 million today) exclusive TV contract with NBC to broadcast its football games. No conservative evangelical better understood the power of this television exposure and money than Falwell. As he toiled to save America from desegregation, feminism, drugs, rock and roll, homosexuality, and the Democratic Party, he consistently pointed to Notre Dame and BYU as his role models for creating a strong religious identity – and revenue steam – through football. He believed recruiting the best conservative Christian athletes to Liberty would help win football games, give conservative evangelicals “their” school, and revive America.

Liberty, therefore, poured millions of dollars into its football program. Falwell used his team to imbue students with a new strident, aggressive form of faith that 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 may prove to be the high point for Notre Dame’s big-time Christian college football disciples. BYU went 11-2 in its second season in the Big XII Conference and blew out Deion Sanders’s Colorado team in the Alamo Bowl. Baylor finished 8-5, though it lost to LSU in the Texas Bowl. Liberty failed to repeat their 2023 success — which included a Fiesta Bowl bid — but still won eight games earning a trip to the Bahamas Bowl.

While each big-time Christian college football team succeeded this season, Notre Dame continues to inspire and outperform its football followers. The long history of the Fighting Irish illustrates the way faith and football can aid assimilation, strengthen community, and evangelize non-believers. Ultimately, the distinctly American, masculine, and violent game continues to shape these religious communities through the gridiron gospel.

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 America, coming out 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 editors.