Notre Dame Players React To NCAA's Penalty
Outsiders are looking for a reason to hate on Notre Dame’s football program, senior left tackle Mike McGlinchey said.
The NCAA’s order that Notre Dame’s wins be vacated from the 2012 and 2013 seasons in the wake of an academic misconduct investigation gives those people more ammunition.
But McGlinchey, one of four team captains for the Irish this season, said the 2016 team isn’t letting the penalty affect this team.
“Whatever the NCAA decides is what the NCAA decides,” McGlinchey said. “We understand that Notre Dame is a top class university and things were handled the right way and that’s the way they acted on it. We don’t really know what’s going to happen from here on out, but the team understands that it has no bearing on what we’re doing on Saturday and what we’re focused on.”
Notre Dame has announced that it is appealing the harsh penalty, which head coach Brian Kelly deemed “excessive.” The school did not dispute the NCAA’s findings, and the appeals process could take months.
So it wasn’t something guys like McGlinchey and fellow captain and senior defensive lineman Isaac Rochell were concerned about heading into the season finale at Southern Cal.
“It’s not something we’re overly concerned about, it doesn’t affect our team,” Rochell said. “I don’t think that’s situation is over with, so who knows. We can talk in six months, seven months or whatever.”
McGlinchey went to bat for the school’s academic reputation, calling the Notre Dame the “best university in the world” and stating that the football locker room is filled with “some of the highest character guys in the country.”
“You never want to have those kind of mistakes in your program and especially guys you consider your teammates,” McGlinchey said, “but people make mistakes and it just so happened that they’re at this university and people like to throw a little hatred at our school and that’s fine. We understand that with the hatred there’s a lot of greatness on the other side.
“It’s frustrating, but at the same time it has no affect on us moving forward.”
Rochell and McGlinchey said Irish head coach Brian Kelly briefly discussed the issue with the team. Though it wasn’t a major point of discussion, the seventh-year coach felt it necessary to address with his current players.
“He literally just told us facts, told us what’s going on,” Rochell said. “Just wanted to assure everybody that it doesn’t affect us, doesn’t affect our team now and won’t affect Notre Dame next year or in the future.”
For McGlinchey, who was a freshman on the 2013 team that went 9-4 and won the Pinstripe Bowl, it doesn’t change anything.
“We know we won the games,” McGlinchey said. “They’re not going to take that away from us. They can take it away in the record books all they want but we won the games. We had a good season that year and they had an even better season the year before that. Go ahead and scratch them off a piece of paper, but we know we won those (21) games.”