Though the Odds Be Great or Small

$17.99 U.S.

A SEASON LIK E NO OTHER

BRENNAN

BIOGRAPHY / SPORTS

ON NOVEMBER 16, 1957, an unranked Notre Dame football team squared off

Though the Odds Be Great or Small chronicles the story of legendary coach Terry Brennan, from his days as a player at Notre Dame under Frank Leahy, to his selection as the head coach in 1954, to the high-intensity comeback season of 1957 in which Notre Dame finished in the top 10 overall. This book provides the social, cultural, and athletic context to understand college football before and after 1957—a year that changed how the game was played at Notre Dame for decades.

The 1957 season remains one of the most important seasons in Notre Dame football’s storied history. In Though the Odds Be Great or Small, Coach Brennan shares his version of what happened in the trenches and on the sidelines during a time when a college football game had the power to keep an entire country on the edge of its seat.

TERRY BRENNAN played halfback at the University of Notre Dame from

1945 to 1948. In 1954, at the age of 25, he became Notre Dame’s youngest football coach, serving as head coach until 1958. In his five seasons as head coach for the Fighting Irish, Terry Brennan compiled an overall record of 32–18 while playing one of the most challenging schedules in college football history.

WILLIAM J. MEINERS is a writer, an editor, and the founder of Sport Literate, which celebrated

its 25th anniversary issue in 2020 as a preeminent journal for all things sports.

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GR E AT OR SM A LL

against the No. 2 Oklahoma Sooners. It was supposed to be an easy Sooners win.

But despite being 19-point underdogs, the Fighting Irish, guided by their young and tenacious coach Terry Brennan, maneuvered their way to a 7–0 upset, ending the Sooners’ NCAA-record 47-game winning streak.

AND

NOTRE DAME’S 1957 COMEBACK SEASON THE YEAR THAT CHANGED COLLEGE FOOTBALL

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GR EAT OR SMA LL

ISBN: 978-0-8294-5123-8

TERRY BRENNAN    foreword by JOHNNY LUJACK

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GREAT OR SMALL

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GREAT OR SMALL NOTRE DAME’S 1957 COMEBACK SEASON AND THE YEAR THAT CHANGED COLLEGE FOOTBALL

TERRY BRENNAN

& WILLIAM MEINERS

© 2021 Terry Brennan All rights reserved.

Cover art credit: Author photo provided by the Brennan family. Cover art: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Case photo: meltonmedia/E+/Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-8294-5123-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933692 Printed in the United States of America.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Versa 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Kel and to my wonderful family whom Kel nurtured and loved.

Contents Foreword by Johnny Lujack ......................................................................ix Prologue by William Meiners ................................................................xiii Part I

....................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1

The Young Irishman .............................................................3

Chapter 2

And Then, 1956...................................................................25

Chapter 3

The Longest Season ............................................................41

Part II

................................................................................................................53

Chapter 4

Blanking Boilers, Hoosiers................................................55

Chapter 5

Here Comes the Army, Again ..........................................69

Chapter 6

Surviving Pitt ........................................................................83

Chapter 7

Cold November ....................................................................93

Chapter 8

Happy Birthday, Oklahoma ...........................................109

Chapter 9

Iowa Letdown .....................................................................129

Chapter 10 Trojan Horses ......................................................................139 Chapter 11 Cotton Bowl Bashing .......................................................149 Part III

............................................................................................................157

Chapter 12 Notre Dame 1958 .............................................................159 Chapter 13 Merry Christmas, Coach .................................................177 Chapter 14 ND Legacies ........................................................................195 vii

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Epilogue ............................................................................................................211 Appendix ............................................................................................................217 Endnotes...........................................................................................................223 References .......................................................................................................245 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................261 Photographs ...................................................................................................265

Foreword

by Johnny Lujack

In 1946 and 1947, I was in the Notre Dame backfield with Terry Brennan. In fact, we were in two backfields together, as we played both offense and defense. Some people say those Fighting Irish teams were some of the best in college football history. I don’t know about all that, but we were really good back then, winning consecutive national championships.

In 1947, living out my childhood dream of playing quarterback at Notre Dame, I won the Heisman Trophy. I’m told that makes me the oldest living winner of the award. Today I’m ninety-five years old, and honestly, I don’t remember everything I did last week. But I sure do remember my friend Terry. When he was a sophomore, in the 1946 season, he was as good as any running back in the country, and in those days, we played against most of them. We had Brennan and Emil Sitko in the backfield. Every time we got down inside the 10-yard line, I always gave the ball to Terry because he never fumbled. And Terry and I became very close friends. You could depend on him on and off the field.

I really don’t recall Terry ever fumbling, or even getting a penalty.

Maybe he did and I just don’t remember it. He was a good football player who knew how to play the game. Additionally, a good blocker and great pass catcher, he was absolute murder as soon as he got into

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the open field. Army learned that pretty quickly when Terry returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown.

It was kind of a strange time to play college football. With so many guys shuffling through lineups because of World War II, I was a sophomore when I replaced Angelo Bertelli at quarterback after six games in 1943. Angelo, activated by the U.S. Marines, won Notre Dame’s first Heisman that year. Then I served in the Navy for two years after we won the national championship in 1943.

I came back to campus in 1946. With all the servicemen returning, a lot of guys who had been playing lost their starting positions, and we felt kind of funny about that. I think Terry and Bill Fischer were the only two younger players who kept their spots. Bill was a terrific lineman who ended up on Terry’s coaching staff. Just getting back to Notre Dame after the war and connecting with my old friends made for some of the happiest days of my life.

Since Terry and I played in both the offensive and defensive backfields together, we talked football frequently. Many people go back to the 0–0 tie against Army in 1946 in the “Game of the Century.”

Though I don’t want to say it’s the worst game I ever played in college, it certainly wasn’t my best. Both coaches were probably too conservative, trying not to lose the game, which of course neither team did.

After the game was over, even though Terry and I both made some critical plays on defense, I wasn’t happy with my own performance.

After I played with the Chicago Bears for four years, I coached the quarterbacks on Frank Leahy’s staff in 1952 and 1953. It seemed like a way to give back to the school that gave me such great experiences. Coaching can be a tough business. I ended up in the car business in Iowa and enjoyed a wonderful career. Terry, who always had a great mind for the game, was terrific in leading Mount Carmel to

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three consecutive city championships in Chicago. Living in the city then, I followed those teams pretty closely.

Terry ended up going through some tough times at Notre Dame, especially during the 1956 season. He did the best job he knew how, but he just wasn’t getting the scholarships to compete. There was a genuine de-emphasis on football as the administrators wanted success in academics. I felt bad for Terry. Even with Paul Hornung, whom I became quite friendly with through the Heisman connection, the Irish had one bad year.

But what a turnaround over the next two years. To me, that says so much about the coaching job Terry did. Notre Dame seemed to go from a has-been team to world-beaters in one season. Terry and I may have played in the “Game of the Century” in 1946, but he led the Irish to victory at Oklahoma in what could be the “Upset of the Century” in 1957. I was thrilled for his comeback success, especially after all the adversity he had faced in the 1956 season. All those players who’d lost eight games one year won nearly that many the next. And more than scripting the plays that led to victories, Terry had them all believing that they could win. That’s great coaching. And that young man, my old friend, was a great coach.

Any Notre Dame coach, certainly with some losses mounting, is going to take some potshots from fans or the press. I don’t know if his reputation suffered for it, but for guys like me who know him, there’s no way we could stop feeling affection for Terry Brennan. I think he was always sort of a quiet person. Never boastful or anything like that.

Maybe it was because he was a few years younger than all the war veterans on the team. But anything he said you could really take to the bank.

I knew him best as a teammate, but I’m sure his players loved him too.

Of course, I always wanted to go to Notre Dame. As a kid growing up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, I remember listening to the Irish

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football games on a Philco radio. People in my hometown encouraged me to play for Army, but I got set up with a tryout for Frank Leahy in the days when you could do that, and he offered me a scholarship. That probably changed everything else that came next in my life.

Terry has his own story—how he got to Notre Dame, along with what happened in his coaching days. I was really pleased when his son, Terry Jr. asked me to write this foreword. If you don’t know Terry as I did, this book will share the story of a young man from way back when.

We’re both older men now. Like me, Terry has his memories and a great big family with kids, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Many of them pretty good athletes, I hear. He must have done pretty well by all of them. I miss my old friend, the guy I looked for in the end zone or wanted to give the ball to in tough spots. I should probably catch up with him on the phone.

I enjoy talking to people who knew Terry because I always hear flattering comments about the good things that happened to them because of him. Never boastful, Terry has always simply been a really solid person, willing to do something for someone else. And that’s a good legacy.

Johnny Lujack was Notre Dame’s second recipient of the Heisman Trophy in 1947. He was also a monogram winner in four varsity sports, including baseball, basketball, and track. His Notre Dame days were interrupted by his World War II service, when he served in the U.S. Navy hunting German submarines in the English Channel. Drafted by the Chicago Bears after his Heisman season, Lujack was named All-Pro twice in the NFL—once on defense and once on offense. In a 1949 game against the Chicago Cardinals, he threw six touchdown passes and compiled 468 passing yards, a Bears single-game record to this day.

Prologue Memories of a Loyal Son

by William Meiners

What echoes resound in Terry Brennan’s mind? A nonagenarian—ninety-three years old, to be precise—when this book went to press, Brennan must surely marvel at how quickly his life has flown by.

Like a tight spiral finding his sure hands on a dead sprint to the end zone. Of all those sights and sounds from sixty, seventy, even eighty years ago, the highlight reel may still be enough to make him smile.

There’s the Notre Dame Victory March, for sure, the most famous of all fight songs. Something of the crowds, too. The thunderous home faithful in full glory after his touchdown return of the opening kickoff against Army in November 1947. Perhaps the low-murmuring buzz of an Oklahoma crowd, with others in stunned silence, in November 1957 after one of the greatest upsets in college football history. Beyond all of that, playing the scales of a piano as a small boy seated next to his mother. Maybe the first notes of an Irish jig.

Brennan had always been young for his age; he still might be.

The sixth of seven children, he had a June birthday that delayed certain milestones his classmates traversed. He was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Notre Dame, too young to be drafted as World War II ended. As a nineteen-year-old junior, he did more than hold his own on the military-muscled Fighting Irish squads of 1946 and 1947.

The quiet little brother and designated altar boy for road-trip Masses, xiii

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he played both defensive back and running back, known to coaches and teammates alike as “Dependable Terry” for his go-to toughness.

Within a decade he’d be one of the most famous “family men” in the country as the twenty-five-year-old whiz kid (and then-father of two) hired to replace the legendary Frank Leahy as the head coach of Notre Dame football.

For all his good fortune as a player’s coach who got the most out of his boys, Brennan could not avoid a third-year trap set foolishly

by Notre Dame administrators that limited scholarship players. Still, like a boxer coming off the canvas from a 2-8 record in 1956, he turned the team around to the tune of 7-3 in 1957. His “Comeback Comets”—as the 1957 team became known—were still taking on the nation’s best, week in and week out. Knowing that they still lacked the numbers of top-tier teams, Brennan was breathing the fight back into the Fighting Irish program. But they pulled the carpet out from under him near Christmas 1958.

Ash Wednesday arrived in late February 2020, just a couple of weeks before a global pandemic forced much of the population indoors. Terry Brennan, then ninety-one years old, was anxious to get downstairs by 11 a.m. to receive ashes at his senior independent living facility in Wilmette, a North Shore suburb of Chicago. However, a priest’s thumbprint on his forehead, with the reminder that we’re all dust, would have to wait. Inside his small apartment, his son Terry Jr. and a writer peppered him with questions about his playing and coaching days at Notre Dame. That book that people had bugged him about writing for years might finally happen.

“Ancient history,” the elder Brennan surmised. “Not sure anyone would want to read about it.”

“It’s happening, Dad,” Terry Jr. said with a laugh. “You’ve already signed a contract.”

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The notion of a contract may have floated him back to his youth.

As a Notre Dame graduate in 1949, not yet twenty-one years old, Terry had to get his own father to sign his employment contract with Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. With ambitions to practice law, he might have envisioned a future full of contracts and negotiations. Yet football, even with two bad knees that forced him to turn down professional ball, would stand him for a few more years. A fifthround selection of the Philadelphia Eagles and the top choice of the Chicago Hornets (the overall number-one pick of the All-America Football Conference), he would leave the rough game behind him for pursuits of the mind. He had always enjoyed drawing up plays, so the game plan was to coach in the afternoons and take law classes at night. What did he have to lose?

Notre Dame was the center of the college football universe in the 1940s. The return to glory from Knute Rockne’s 1920s was shepherded by Leahy, a worrywart of a coach who fielded teams deeper than World War II submarines. Brennan, tough as nails but not oversized, never even considered losing his starting job to men returning from war. From 1946 through 1949, the Fighting Irish never lost a game. They tied a couple and won three national championships (1946, 1947, and 1949). They also won the national title in 1943.

In the “happy days” of the 1950s, the university of the famed “Four Horsemen” fell off its high horse a bit. As the administrators fretted over the notion of a football factory, they did their damned best to handcuff a young coach and the team. There were no national championships, but they were still media darlings with good teams playing exceptionally difficult schedules. Johnny Lattner won the Heisman Trophy in 1953, and Paul Hornung followed with his in an otherwise dreadful 1956 season.

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So even the most fervent Fighting Irish fans could be forgiven for thinking that the 1950s were simply an off decade for Notre Dame football. They had won so routinely throughout the 1940s, maybe anything less than a no-loss season seemed unsuccessful to a rabid fan base. Like the decade itself—to many the kettle boiling before the explosive 1960s—even highly ranked Irish teams from the 1950s are often overlooked. They are shelved away in a history that better recalls the Fighting Irish of the 1920s, the 1940s, and the latter halves of the 1960s and 1980s. Though that all may be an oversimplification of the times and circumstances, Brennan, head coach from 1954 through 1958, remembers all of it.

Notre Dame’s Mount Rushmore Diehard sports fans hardly need a primer for a full-throated argument regarding such pressing matters as “who wore it better?” in terms of a particular uniform or, if you go the coaching route, a fedora, ballcap, or cutup sweatshirt. It’s an especially dicey discussion whenever it involves players and coaches from different eras. Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth, however, didn’t mind stirring up a little heat during the NFL’s hundredth-anniversary opener on September 5, 2019.

From their shared Sunday Night Football booth, Michaels announced season-long plans to name the various “Mount Rushmore” representatives from NFL franchises. The first night honored the Chicago Bears, who were hosting their perennial rivals the Green Bay Packers.

Their collective “stone worthy” included the Papa Bear himself, George Halas, along with players Sid Luckman, Dick Butkus, and Walter Payton. That list, certainly open to debate, may or may not set any hair on fire over the all-time Monsters of the Midway.

A Fighting Irish Mount Rushmore made up of coaches, however, wouldn’t call for much debate, at least not to date. Rockne, Leahy,

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Ara Parseghian, and Lou Holtz seem suited for mountain-sized mugshots. All won national championships and marked particularly dominant, or in some cases resurgent, decades of the twentieth century. Rockne became one of the most famous men in America, and his death in a plane crash in the 1931 off-season only solidified his legend. Within a decade, a movie piled on with the mythmaking that historian Murray Sperber meticulously unraveled in two books.

Leahy managed those pre- and postwar teams of the 1940s, rendering the Irish in the minds of many as practically unstoppable. Parseghian turned the tide beginning in 1964, won it all, even after settling for a tie with Michigan State in 1966, and beat the Alabama Crimson Tide in the 1973 Sugar Bowl, resulting in a second national title.

In three years’ time, Holtz revived the Irish as national champions in 1988. And though he never repeated that title (thanks in part to a wounded duck of a field goal from a Boston College kicker that ruined an undefeated season in 1993), he fielded some great teams throughout an eleven-year run.

In its history, Notre Dame has only had five coaches with tenures of ten years or more. Brian Kelly, who took over in 2010, joined Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian, and Holtz on that list with his tenth season in 2019. Though without a national title, Kelly has seemingly righted the ship, playing for the national championship after the 2012 season. Many fans were hoping that season, Kelly’s third, would be as charmed as Parseghian’s third season as coach in 1966, Dan Devine’s in 1977, and Holtz’s in 1988. Even Leahy won his first national championship in his third year (1943). Unfortunately, the Irish weren’t so lucky with Kelly: his team was outmatched by a powerful Alabama team in a 42–14 loss.

After an undefeated season in 2018, Kelly led his team into the four-team championship playoff, which had begun in 2014. The

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Irish, however, were outplayed again, losing 30–3 to the eventual champion, the Clemson Tigers. If it’s any consolation, those Tigers defeated the Tide, the defending national champion, by an even larger margin, 44–16.

In the upside-down world of 2020, Notre Dame, the great independent, found themselves playing in a conference—running the table to a 10-0 finish in the Atlantic Coast Conference. In November, the Irish upset top-ranked Clemson in double overtime. But those same Tigers extracted revenge in the December ACC Championship game with their All-American quarterback Trevor Lawrence back in the lineup. The expected number-one draft pick had been sidelined due to COVID-19 protocol in the first matchup.

Still, Notre Dame made it to the four-team championship dance that included three teams that have regularly been there—Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State. Playing the number-one seed (and eventual national champions) Crimson Tide, the Irish again looked outmatched by the best of the best. Alabama hardly had a third down in its first three touchdown drives. Even though Kelly’s team seemed much improved from their meeting with the Tide seven years prior, a double and triple threat of Heisman candidates from Tuscaloosa made the 31–14 final score not nearly as close as it sounds. And as unfair as the knock may be, Kelly, who will likely surpass Rockne’s Irish win record in 2021, is criticized as a coach who cannot beat the elite on New Year’s Day. Following any legendary Irish coach is challenging. Rockne’s former players, Heartley “Hunk” Anderson and Elmer Layden, effectively split the 1930s with three and seven seasons, respectively. Both finished with winning records, but neither engineered a national championship. Following Leahy, Brennan found the toughest sledding in the middle of his five-year tenure when, in spite of the

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highlights from Hornung’s Heisman season, the Irish suffered their worst win-loss record (2-8) in school history up to that point. Otherwise, he maintained an impressive record through four years. Overall, he was 32-18 (.640). Joe Kuharich, who replaced Brennan, fared much worse, posting a 2-8 season of his own and finishing with a losing record (17-23). He even bailed on the fifth year of his contract, forcing the audible interim call to Hugh Devore in 1963.

In his six seasons after Parseghian, Devine had a high winning percentage (.764) and captured the 1977 national championship. Yet his reluctance to put Joe Montana in the starting lineup, even with demonstrated comebacks, puzzled many Irish fans. Years later, the producers of the movie Rudy, after characterizing Devine as “the heavy” in the penultimate movie scene, may have been a bit heavy-handed in portraying a full-scale mutiny threat of Irish players turning in their jerseys should the title character not get into the game.

After five years with Gerry Faust, from 1981 to 1985, Domer fans may have missed Devine. By then, they’d be absolutely lovesick over Parseghian. With just four more wins than losses through five seasons, including four consecutive losses to an undersized Air Force, the Irish were particularly embarrassed by the Miami Hurricanes.

Michael Janofsky, in his lead for the New York Times, quickly summarized the “end of times” for Faust. He wrote, The University of Miami Hurricanes, already assured of a trip to the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day, finished their season in stunning fashion today. Scoring nearly every time they had the ball, they ended Gerry Faust’s five years at Notre Dame by handing the Irish their fourth-worst defeat ever and their worst loss in 41 years. The final score: 58-7.

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From a Faustian bargain to simply a poor choice for a coach, the first half of the 1980s seemed like the darkest of times under the Golden Dome. The savior, for the football program anyway, would stride onto campus demanding respect from players who may have lost it for the previous coach. Skinny and with a pronounced lisp, Coach Holtz broke through with discipline and humor, soon winning over both the team and its anxious fans.

After his very first game, a one-point loss to rival Michigan, Holtz claimed there were no moral victories at Notre Dame. Dave Anderson, another New York Times writer, quoted the new coach as saying he hoped to be the “luckiest coach Notre Dame ever had.” Lucky, he clarified, by getting the right people to fall into place. Lou’s third-year Irish luck panned out with the national championship season in 1988.

“It’s different for me here,” Anderson quoted Holtz as saying.

“Everywhere else I’ve been, I’ve had to promote the team, try to be quotable, try to sell tickets. But here all I have to do is coach.”

“And win,” Anderson concluded. An outcome Holtz regularly achieved, compiling a record of 100-30-2. He walked away from Notre Dame amidst rumors of battles with the admissions office and a certain ill-at-ease feeling about eclipsing Rockne’s 105 wins, a record he would have surely broken in a twelfth season, given the fact that there were only two seasons when a Holtz-led team failed to win at least eight games.

Yet, since 1988, Holtz’s young defensive bone crushers, comprised of the likes of Wes Pritchett, Chris Zorich, Michael Stonebreaker, and Frank Stams, as well as offensive dynamos like Tony Brooks, Tony Rice, Rocket Ismail, and Ricky Watters, have become middle-aged men. And Notre Dame hasn’t won a national championship since.

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Five-Year Men Beyond those five 10-year coaches at Notre Dame, the average tenure since Rockne has been five seasons. Where Anderson left after a turbulent three years, Layden lasted seven. Father Edmund Joyce, executive vice president and Father Hesburgh’s longtime right-hand man, apparently refused Faust’s invitation to fire him after four seasons. “This was the Notre Dame way,” Jerry Barca wrote in Unbeatable, his book about the 1988 national championship team. “Under the leadership of Hesburgh-Joyce every football coach had five years.

Period.”

That strategy had played out since Father Theodore Hesburgh, then the new president of Notre Dame, hired the twenty-five-yearold Brennan to replace Leahy in 1954. Brennan’s dismissal on December 21, 1958, even after five years, caught many by surprise, including Edward “Moose” Krause, Notre Dame’s athletic director.

In the wake of Holtz, Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham, and Charlie Weis all struggled to be consistent winners, especially in big games.

Davie, from 1997 to 2001, finished only ten games over .500. Willingham, his successor, got off to an 8-0 start but faded quickly after, ending up with the same winning percentage as Davie (.583). Yet Willingham, with Hesburgh and Joyce retired, didn’t get the five-year plan. He was gone after three seasons, though that may be more a sign of the competitive times as big programs expect a quicker turnaround. Perhaps unrealistically so.

Weis, a Notre Dame alumnus (though not an Irish football player), came from the coaching staff of the New England Patriots.

With an East Coast swagger and a reputation for creating championship offenses, Weis, by the end of his five years, proved that the apple could fall far from the Bill Belichick coaching tree. He had almost the same record as Davie, losing just three more games to

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finish 35-27. Among the losses were a pair to Navy, the first of which, in 2007, ended the Irish’s forty-three-game winning streak over the Midshipmen.

Out of the gates quickly in 2005, though not as good as Willingham in terms of wins and losses, Weis did much better on the contract front. After a 5-2 start, which included a close loss to top-ranked Southern California in October, Notre Dame extended the first-year coach’s contract ten years—through 2015. Let go in 2009, Weis continued to be one of the university’s highest paid employees up to seven years after his firing.

Of course, coaching comparisons are inevitable, perhaps even necessary for journalists to bring some historical context to presentday dramas. Some likened Brennan to Faust since both came to campus after having been successful high school coaches—Brennan at Mount Carmel in Chicago and Faust at Moeller in Cincinnati.

Though Brennan, who played for Leahy on back-to-back national championship teams and coached the Irish freshman team in 1953, certainly knew more about the Notre Dame culture. Other than 1956, which will always be the outlier in his five-year campaign, Brennan fielded much better teams than Faust.

There’s a long-running one-liner, attributed to sportswriter Beano Cook, about the three toughest jobs in America—the president of the United States, the mayor of New York City, and the head coach of Notre Dame football. Though former Irish coaches might either concur with or brush aside such comparisons, most could grumble about how much politicking is actually involved in a football gig. The faint of heart certainly need not apply.

As Brian Kelly was about to seal his deal with the Irish in December 2009, Tim Keown of ESPN.com weighed in on the high-stakes madness. “This is the ultimate hired-to-be-fired position in sports,”

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Keown posited. “As soon as someone accepts the position—remember, this is immediately after it’s been built up as the greatest job in sports—the media and Notre Dame boosters and Notre Dame haters start looking for reasons why the guy should be fired.”

But at least you’ve got five years to get through it. Or three if you’re Willingham. Or five plus another decade of payments if you’re Weis. For his comparison to the latter, Brennan may take the greatest exception. In a November 30, 2009, article for Blue & Gold Illustrated, Lou Somogyi posed the question: “Haven’t We Been Here Already?” In side-by-side records, perhaps not unreasonable in a comparison, Somogyi looked at good two-year starts for both coaches, followed by third-year busts (2-8 for Brennan, 3-9 for Weis), and two seasons that could be seen as rebounds.

Brennan, by then eighty-one years old, wasn’t having any of it.

In his written response, also published in Blue & Gold, he replied, “I have nothing against Charlie, but I don’t want to be compared with him.”

The old coach began with the difficulty of comparing college football eras fifty years apart, the first of which was governed by the NCAA’s one-platoon system, which had players playing both offense and defense and substituting whole units at a time, versus the free substitution in today’s game. Furthermore, Brennan wrote, “the university also had different policies regarding football under Fr. [Theodore] Hesburgh, the university president in the 1950s, than it does under the current administration.”

Brennan, who earned his law degree in 1953, offered “a more complete accounting of the facts”: Because of the decisions made by the administration in the 1950s and my predecessor, Frank Leahy, I was never on an

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even playing field with my opponents academically or with scholarships.

As you pointed out, academic standards at Notre Dame were increased—dramatically. Beginning with my tenure as head coach, Notre Dame required the college entrance board exam (now called the SAT) out of Princeton for entrance to Notre Dame. The only schools that used that exam at the time were Notre Dame and the Ivy League. There were no uniform minimum academic standards for eligibility at the national level.

Also, at the start of my coaching years at Notre Dame, the school unilaterally cut our scholarships in half. In Leahy’s last year (1953), the administration put forth a policy where scholarships would be 80 over a four-year period. At the time, every other football program was bringing well in excess of that number.

As usual, Leahy ignored the rules and brought in over 30 players—which didn’t leave much for the next three years.

The group he brought in were seniors in 1956 (when the team finished 2-8). It wasn’t the strongest recruiting class.

Though freshmen played on their own squads in the 1950s, redshirting and transfers were allowed throughout college football, except at Notre Dame. To make matters worse, Leahy, “who was angry at Notre Dame,” Brennan wrote, “took his wrath out on me through the press.”

Still, in spite of the uphill battle that Brennan faced, his winning percentage (.640) was better than that of Weis, who played a much softer schedule. Take, for example, Notre Dame’s opponents in November 1957, when the Irish posted a 7-3 record, finishing ninth in the coach’s poll and tenth in the A.P. Navy, Michigan State, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Southern California were on the billing for five straight Saturdays. Talk about no rest for weary Irishmen. Brennan’s

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boys shocked the Sooners with the road upset and took care of Southern Cal but stumbled against Navy, Michigan State, and Iowa. By December 2, when the final A.P. polls were released, four of those teams ranked third through sixth in the nation—Michigan State (3), Oklahoma (4), Navy (5), and Iowa (6).

Brennan’s winning percentage, even with an eight-loss season, surpasses that of Barry Alvarez and Joe Tiller, both considered legendary Big Ten coaches at their posts in Wisconsin and Purdue, respectively. And it’s likely that at any place other than Notre Dame, Brennan would have been given three or four more years to continue rebuilding the program dismantled by lack of scholarships.

Yet respect, by almost any measure, is not guaranteed within the college coaching ranks. It may come through historic hindsight, but only if you’re paying attention. Brennan wouldn’t be the first coach put in an unreasonable position. At Notre Dame, he certainly wasn’t the first to battle priests about the importance of fielding a good football team. Rockne himself felt exasperated by university president Father Matthew Walsh and the faculty board for not wanting to build a decent stadium for one of the nation’s premiere teams (though it was eventually built to Rockne’s specifications). Worries of becoming a “football factory” frequently came up in discussions about how to allocate funding. Though it all gets a bit thorny when the administration favors academics over athletics, the fact is, college football brings in the big dollars.

In covering the era, Jack Cavanaugh wrote, “For his part, Rockne was able to note that during the 1924–25 academic year, Notre Dame football had generated almost $300,000 in revenues, and that after operating expenses more than $200,000 went into the university general fund. That a varsity sports program could raise that much money for campus projects was extraordinary, and Rockne knew it.”

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Not that it all comes down to money. In his rebuttal to the Weis comparison, Brennan expressed envy for “Charlie’s checkbook,” knowing he was way ahead of him when it came to salary. He also noted, “I did not write this to hurt anyone, but only to tell the facts as they were many years ago. I coached under restrictions that no other Notre Dame coach ever faced.”

So it is here—with some historical context both before and after his mid-century arrival at Notre Dame—that we embark on a fuller telling of the Terry Brennan story. It’s his story.

Telling Terry’s Story I have a memory of my father, though it’s really something he planted because it happened nearly two decades before I was born. It’s more of an ingrained image, like a black-and-white scene from an old newsreel. As a skinny twenty-two-year-old kid who never would grow into his long arms, my father had hitchhiked from Indianapolis to South Bend to see the Army-Notre Dame football game. Just one year prior, in 1946, the “Game of the Century” between the same two powerhouses ended in a 0–0 deadlock at a packed Yankee Stadium.

There would be no scoreless tie on November 8, 1947; Terry Brennan made sure of that immediately. Snagging a line drive with an overthe-shoulder catch on an opening kickoff that would have landed in the end zone, he turns, in a millisecond, like an outfielder back to the field in front of him. Scooting around a few charging Black Knights, he quickly finds the left sidelines. From there, as if blasted from a cannon, Brennan flies toward paydirt, veering toward the center of the field only after crossing Army’s 20-yard line. Covering 97 yards in all, the quick six sets the stage for a 27–7 Irish victory in what would be their second straight national championship season.

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Moments after Brennan’s score, my father, in the stands—in my memory bank from his frequent retellings—throws those long arms over his head in a touchdown celebration. He screams for five minutes. Or so he said.

I grew up a Notre Dame fan because of my father. The youngest of eight kids, as well as the youngest of thirty-two grandchildren to Irish immigrants on my mother’s side, I first became aware of Fighting Irish football with Joe Montana’s comebacks of the mid-1970s. My brother Mick graduated from Notre Dame in 1973, but any of the rest of us who hung on every Saturday play, my father included, were “subway alumni.” That is, of course, fans who never attended the school. And I never thought to look up the origin of that phrase until recently.

In 1987, my brother-in-law Glenn, a Chicago attorney, still newly married to my sister Kathleen, drew the ire of my father for questioning Tim Brown’s Heisman Trophy worthiness. My dad, “tired of hearing his crap,” said he didn’t know what he was talking about. In our good-natured ribbing, we still laugh about it. As Glenn sometimes asks me how I could root for a school I never attended, I ask him why he loves the Cubs so much without ever having played for them.

To Glenn’s point, and I suppose he has one, I cheered for old Notre Dame because we grew up Catholic. Maybe it had something to do with being Irish Catholic too, but I don’t think my grandparents followed them, perhaps wondering why the school with the French name called itself the Fighting Irish.

I surely got caught up in the whole mystique of football under the Golden Dome—the fight song, the Rockne legend, all the storybook stuff that still gives me goosebumps. My cousins lived in South Bend next door to George Kelly, a longtime linebacker coach who was on the sidelines with Ara Parseghian. On those football Saturdays, big parties streamed through both houses. I saw Heisman Trophy

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winner Johnny Lattner throwing back drinks with my Aunt Annie in my Aunt Mary’s kitchen. My Uncle Pete, retired from Indiana Bell, helped set up headset communications from the coaching box to the sidelines for three Irish coaches: Gerry Faust, Lou Holtz, and Bob Davie. Pete had his own national championship ring from 1988.

Through the late 1970s and high school in the early 1980s, I was lucky enough to get to about one game a year. More than once, I dashed by old security men in yellow jackets and squeezed into the student section. From there I stormed the field after Harry Oliver kicked a 51-yard field goal to beat Michigan in 1980. Ten years later, Mick and I went to the Miami game where Rocket Ismail did his best Terry Brennan impression, returning a first-half kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown in an Irish 29–20 win.

A few years later in Chicago at Columbia College, I took a graduate course where we were asked to create a hypothetical small-press publication. Growing up with Sports Illustrated, I figured we could focus on storytelling but not afford the great photographs. So I came up with Sport Literate, which might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s a journal focused primarily on creative nonfiction. Putting out a shingle, we called for well-crafted truths over box scores. Launched in 1995, we reached our twenty-fifth anniversary in 2020. Still a small press, we have nevertheless published many great essays under the tagline of “honest reflections on life’s leisurely diversions.” Some thirty of those writers have been recognized in anthologies like Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing.

Late in the 2019 football season, Benedict Giamo, an emeritus professor of American studies at Notre Dame and one of our “Best Americans,” happened to be the “friend of a friend” who recommended me to Gary Jansen at Loyola Press for this book project.

As big a fan of Notre Dame as I consider myself, I honestly didn’t

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know much about Terry Brennan, though his name rang a bell. I looked back to Sport Literate’s first issue to rediscover that I’d already written about him, describing my father’s ecstatic reaction to Brennan’s touchdown against Army.

The facts of Terry Brennan’s life are relatively close at hand.

Google and Wikipedia can lead anyone to statistics from his playing and coaching days. Those great Fighting Irish teams of the 1940s coached by Frank Leahy, some say, are among the greatest of all time.

Back then it was mostly white men roaming the fields. So, “greatness labels” may be limited by who was allowed to compete.

Brennan’s coaching record is there too, the 1956 season sticking out like a sore thumb. Take that season away, and his four-year record is 30-10. I knew Paul Hornung won the Heisman Trophy on that losing team, a first then for an award twenty-one years old and something not repeated since. I didn’t know Hornung’s greatness came in spite of his own sore thumbs while a slew of teammates’ injuries left too little fight in a young Irish squad. The boys aged and healed in 1957 and 1958. But there are, sadly, no asterisks for a single season of mediocrity. Brennan’s other teams finished in the top 10 three times and the top 20 once.

I spent some of the winter months of 2020 in a deeper dive about Brennan’s life. Dave Warner’s biography, appropriately titled Terry Brennan of Notre Dame and written just prior to the 1956 season, tells the story of a successful young family man. Just three losses in two years still had the spoiled Irish faithful confident of an impending national championship. But, outside of Hornung, whom some openly compared to Notre Dame great George Gipp, I suspect Brennan knew the cupboard was bare. Though, in custom with his manner, seemingly even-keeled to this day, he didn’t over-celebrate the victories or give in to much fear about the future.

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The accounts of some of Terry’s most trying times are in the public record. I dug into the university’s online archives, discovering Scholastic, the student magazine that covered Fighting Irish football in weekly publications and a year-end review. Sports Illustrated, launched in 1954, spent many words on college football and on Notre Dame in particular.

I started tracking down players, too, first Chuck Lima, then a few of his teammates, including Jim Morse, Dick Royer, and Dick Selcer. Some of those Notre Dame players connected me with their old friends and classmates, including Marty Allen, a team manager, and Joe Bride, a student publicist. All Notre Dame men with nothing but respect and praise for Terry Brennan. How someone remembers you sixty years later speaks volumes.

You need not be a history buff to quickly learn that Terry Brennan should never have been fired a few days before Christmas 1958, and not just for the ugly timing. Fired after a 6-4 season, and the fourth of five where his teams finished in the top 20, Brennan was replaced by a coach who never matched that 6-4 record—Kuharich finished 5-5 three times and 2-8 once. The NFL coach whom the Notre Dame priests had coveted turned out to be a bust.

As good as Notre Dame had been, maybe misguided administrators and perhaps delusional fans believed they could win on reputation alone. Hesburgh wrote about the “Notre Dame way” in first-person articles dating back to 1954. The university, intent on building its academic reputation, would not bend the rules for any lad from western Pennsylvania, or Chicago, or God knows where, who couldn’t handle the classroom rigors alongside his game-day assignments. To his credit, in his thirty-five years as president, Hesburgh helped turn Notre Dame into an elite university. Going back to the 1950s, he stood arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in the earliest days of the civil rights movement and served U.S.

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presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon on the Civil Rights Commission. At the same time, as he admitted in a Sports Illustrated article, he knew nothing about football.

Though there’s not always a “simple truth,” it’s possible for more than one thing to be true at the same time—Hesburgh had grander dreams for the university than football. Under his leadership, Notre Dame created an atmosphere of academic excellence that attracted preeminent scholars as faculty members and legions of high school valedictorians who became mere freshmen on campus. The trouble is that many deep-pocketed alumni craved national championship football teams.

No other Notre Dame coach would be as hamstrung by university policies as Brennan. The limited scholarships and tougher entrance standards for athletes, which later evolved (and eased), created a double-edged sword. Unlike basketball, where a great player may carry the load and even make his teammates better through an all-around game, football is a game of numbers. And with too few good players, the odds were stacked against the Irish in 1956, even with the great Paul Hornung.

Terry’s story presented a few unique challenges in its telling. For starters, our protagonist was more excited to talk about the athletic exploits of his brother Jim, whom he followed to Notre Dame, than much of anything he did himself on the field. A rather no-nonsense player and (later) coach, Terry favored action over locker-room theatrics. Schooled in football fundamentals that came with Leahy’s brutal practices, he stressed the same basics without trying to maim any of his own troops as a coach. Given the chance, he’d also rather talk more about his brothers and sisters in recalling the faraway past or his children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren from more recent times.

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In telling Terry’s story, we’re presenting the facts for anyone who wasn’t around at the time. I think it’s one of those stories that if you knew it, you know it. But not enough people are familiar with all of those facts. The bulk of the book focuses on the 1957 season because that is the quintessential comeback year for the coach who found himself stuck between an administration pulling in the athletic reins and a Notre Dame nation of alumni and subway alumni pulling out their hair after the 1956 season.

Since Terry is not one to beat his own chest, let alone recall the dayto-day details of those long-bygone days, I knew this book would be stitched together from many sources. His own writings, dispersed in italics in the chapters that follow, show the inner workings of a practical man concerned with making his team better and telling the truth about his life. In many ways, the writing felt like conducting an orchestra of sorts, bringing together historians and journalists to help in the retelling.

Beyond the interviews with Terry, as well as the men who knew him, I hoped the many books, magazines, newspapers, and newsreels would offer insight into the times. What did the world think of the young man back then? I also wanted to explore some of those axioms or throwaway statements that rationalize a coach’s dismissal. Brennan was too young to be head coach of Notre Dame. Yet, at ages twenty-six and twenty-seven, his record was 17-3. Great players don’t make for great coaches. Though he knew the game inside out and could teach players without embarrassing them. He didn’t hire or make good use of his assistants. Both demonstrably false statements based on whom his assistants were and what they accomplished together. In the end, a biography, or a history, or whatever this book is, should be a matter of truth telling. We’ve done our best to tell it here.

PART I “Oh, I don’t know, I’ll be 26 in a few months.”

—Terry Brennan, when asked if he was too young to be the head coach of Notre Dame at 25 years old

Chapter 1

The Young Irishman

The first third of Terry Brennan’s life was frequently associated with his own youth. It made for headlines across the nation when he was named the head coach at Notre Dame at just twenty-five years old. “Brennan Youngest Head Coach of Major Eleven,” the Springfield Union declared on February 2, 1954. The Massachusetts paper also ran a photo of the “New Irish Coach and Family,” which then included wife Mary Louise, newborn Denise (Dinny), and two-yearold Terry Jr. sitting atop his father’s back looking ready for a living room ride.

A few years prior, the young Brennan would have hardly entertained the thought of a return to Notre Dame’s campus, outside of a football alumni reunion weekend. After graduating in 1949, his plan to enter law school coincided with an opportunity to coach football at Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. Through some sympathetic scheduling from the Carmelite priests that allowed him a relatively light teaching load, Brennan could coach football and attend law school at DePaul University at night.

Though a young coach who could boast Movietone News highlights from recent playing days, Brennan was nevertheless just another newbie teacher and coach on a high school campus. Years later, he recalled some of those early coaching experiences.

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We worked hard in the spring and early fall to get ready. The school always maintained good discipline and it carried onto the field. However, I had one incident that helped to improve discipline. The players obviously knew I was young and just out of college, so the temptation was there to test me. These were rugged, tough, strong kids—just what you want for your team.

Brennan’s first test came from a couple of tough linemen who would go on to play college football. “They knew I had boxed in the Bengal Bouts at Notre Dame, but at 175 pounds I didn’t look too dangerous,” Brennan wrote. “Someone brought the boxing gloves, and we went into the training room, moved the tables, and were ready to go.”

In a time when corporal punishment may have been accepted in schools, Brennan simply turned a confrontation into a contest—a fair fight, if you will. His first opponent, Brennan wrote, was strong but unskilled. “After a few bobs and weaves I caught him with a left hook.

He bounced off the locker and slid to the floor. He had enough.”

The second player, “equally tough but a better boxer,” held in a little longer. “But soon, he had enough too,” Brennan wrote. “They left the room, and I had no discipline problems from then on.”

With the locker room bouts behind him, Brennan focused on building those Mount Carmel teams. After a 5-4 first year in 1949, his teams won three consecutive city Prep Bowl championships. It was an unprecedented achievement, noted to this day whenever the Chicago Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune wax nostalgic about the greatest high school teams in Illinois history. That particular Mount Carmel dynasty, beginning with the 1950 team, often tops those lists. Though obviously not on the same level as Notre Dame’s, these games had much of Chicago looking on. A 1937 battle pitting the Chicago Catholic League champions against the Chicago Public League champions drew more than 120,000 fans to Soldier Field. For

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years it was the most-attended football game at any level, high school, college, or pros. For Terry’s young wife, the Chicago job served as something of a primer for the “fishbowl” existence that came with coaching the Fighting Irish.

In an era often defined by the authoritarian leadership of teachers and coaches, the young Brennan began defining his own style. Still a student of the game, he attended a coaching clinic where Bud Wilkinson, the famed Oklahoma coach whom he’d soon battle on Saturdays, taught the split-T formation. To combat the drudgery of after-school practice, he incorporated some fun “without losing an ounce of work.”

To better lead the high school boys, including several—Dan Shannon, Paul Matz, Tom Carey, Dick Frasor, and Ziggie Zajeski—who went on to play for Leahy at Notre Dame, Brennan became both a taskmaster and relationship builder. “I found out you can’t kid the players,” he told Dave Warner for a 1956 biography.

“Just be fair with them and talk to them, and they’ll do the best they can for you.”

The idea of loyalty as a two-way street served him well. “We all came to like him very much because he didn’t preach but showed us what was right by good example on and off the field,” said Dick Prendergast, who played for Brennan at Mount Carmel and cocaptained the 1957 Fighting Irish. “He had the loyalty of every member of the squad from the big wheel down to the last scrub.”

Sweet Home, Milwaukee Long before Chicago, Terence Aloysius Brennan was the sixth of seven children, born to Martin and Katherine Brennan on June 11, 1928. Terry followed Joe, Bill, Kathleen, and Jimmy; and he is a few years older than the youngest of the Brennan children, Eileen. He

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must have never liked that middle name; he swapped out “Aloysius” for Patrick after graduating high school.

Martin had been quite the college football player himself in those old, free-rambling days that predated many rules established by the NCAA. He played for Creighton University, Notre Dame, and eventually Marquette. At the final spot, close to the home where he settled and started a family and a law practice, he scored Marquette’s lone touchdown in a 5–5 tie against Notre Dame (touchdowns were worth 5 points then) on November 24, 1910, in Milwaukee. Football was a more violent game in its earliest days, and sportsmanship was not as emphasized as it is now in the development of young players. Playing against some former teammates and friends who took some cheap shots at him, Martin was told that Frank Longman, the Notre Dame coach, ordered them to take him out. At the game’s end, instead of a handshake, Martin coldcocked Longman.

Though the family found success and occupied a relatively prosperous position in Whitefish Bay, a north-shore suburb of Milwaukee, life was not without tragedy. There had been another son, Lawrence, between the two oldest boys Joe and Bill, who was swept away in a flooding current at four years old. His body was never found.

For the youngest Brennan children, born a decade later than their oldest siblings, life was often about banging around outdoors.

The children were encouraged to go out and play as long as they maintained good grades. Outside they discovered baseball, basketball, track, and of course football.

Terry and his brother Jim, just a year older, usually found themselves in the same circles, though they occasionally mixed it up through some roughhousing. “I was always fighting with somebody as a kid, mostly with my brother Jimmy,” Terry told Warner. “I

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fought with the neighborhood kids and with other members of the family, too. I was known as a pretty mean, nasty little kid in the neighborhood. Had a real chip on my shoulder. I just wanted to have things my own way and wouldn’t listen to anyone.”

One neighborhood kid, Mary Louise Kelley, recalled Terry letting the air out of her bicycle tires. Though she says he never confessed to it, she thinks justice was ultimately served. “I guess I got even, though; he later married me,” said the woman known as Kel Brennan after the union.

To channel the energy of the rambunctious boys, an uncle who made his living in the lumber business built hurdles and a pole vault pit for the backyard. Terry parlayed that homemade equipment into statewide success in high school track. But it was football they loved most, especially Jim and Terry, who would occupy the same backfield at Marquette University High School.

Terry did garner some attention from his mother as he sat beside her to learn piano. Of the boys, he was the only one to really take to it. “Joe was a great older brother, not a great piano player,” Terry recalled. “He tried but had the touch of a blacksmith.”

Joe became a partner in the family’s law firm, as did brother Jim, who also later served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Both brothers would go into battle during World War II. Jim ended up in the Navy, and Joe won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

“Joe spent three years flying The Hump over India,” Terry said.

“They lost more planes there than in bombing Berlin. Mount Everest was 30,000 feet and the planes topped out at 18,000. So pilots were weaving through the mountains for 500 miles south to Burma Road.”

Brother Bill, who graduated from the same high school seven years before Terry did, became a Jesuit priest and spent seventeen

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years working with the poor in Honduras. In his 2012 obituary, Kitty Brennan, his niece and now a retired Wisconsin Court of Appeals judge, said her smart and intellectual uncle, who was “excellent at playing chess and telling stories,” was pulled to “the contemplative life of the Jesuits.”

For the young athletes, talk of football strategy often arose when they weren’t playing. And, for all his speed and building confidence, Terry probably admired the skillset of his brother more than his own.

“Jim was built like a tank,” Terry said. “He was a terrific running back. In the last game of his senior year, his sub got hurt against a bad team. Jim scored six touchdowns and kicked six extra points.”

In those days, the best athletes usually played on both sides of the ball, even booting it around as kickers. Through Jim’s success as a senior, Terry, a junior, battled a knee injury first incurred in the final scrimmage before the opening game on a rainy September day.

In the rain and the mud, we wore longer cleats called mud cleats.

I took a handoff from my brother Jim on a reverse play. I broke into the secondary and had one man to beat. I faked to the right and cut left. Unfortunately, the cleats in my right shoe stuck in the mud. I tore the cartilage in my right knee.

The injury kept Terry from playing much the rest of that season, but through some off-season conditioning, which included hockey and track, he strengthened the muscle above his knee. He even set his school record for the pole vault and high hurdles.

With a knee brace from his father, which he said weighed about five pounds, Terry toughed his way through his senior football season in 1944. “I threw the knee out a couple of times but was able to get it back into place and continue to play,” he said.

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A team captain, Terry led the squad to the conference title, calling the plays from his halfback position. He led the conference in scoring, too. But surviving a fall season of football wouldn’t leave much for his knee to do in spring sports. It called for drastic measures.

In early spring 1945 my right knee kept getting worse in an era that a knee injury usually ended a player’s career. I had surgery on my knee that spring to remove loose cartilage. It’s commonplace now but wasn’t then. Lucky for me, it was successful, and I had a second chance to play.

A raging world war was making more news than Milwaukee high school football in the mid-1940s. As upperclassmen, entry into the war loomed as a possibility for both Jim and Terry. Rather than get drafted after high school graduation, Jim was advised to join the Navy. After a stint at Naval Station Great Lakes, he landed at Notre Dame for officer training in fall 1944. The circuitous route brought him to one of the elite programs in college football, but he was not eligible until the last three games of the season. Still, he made an auspicious debut, scoring four touchdowns in those three games.

The Notre Dame Scholastic recapped the action from the November 18 shutout of Northwestern, 21–0. “Among other highlights, the game unveiled a fast, tricky 155-pound flyer, one Jim Brennan, who scampered for two touchdown runs in the opening minutes, from which Northwestern never recovered.”

A week later in Atlanta, the Irish beat Georgia Tech by the identical 21–0 score. And Jim garnered more copy in the same publication.

“Little Jimmy Brennan kept up his twelve-point-a-game pace, and Bob Kelly looked as good as new in scoring the other touchdown.”

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Walter Kennedy, of the South Bend Tribune, waxed more poetic with comparisons to a greater battle between northern and southern states. He wrote, “Eighty years ago General Sherman started on his way to fame when he marched from Atlanta to the sea during the Civil War. This afternoon young Jim Brennan, Notre Dame’s 155-pound halfback, did a bit of marching himself in Atlanta, grabbed himself a bit of fame, and led the inspired underdog Irish eleven to a 21–0 victory over Georgia Tech.”

Not surprisingly, the more recent war put college football into a period of flux. Notre Dame fielded strong teams, even benefitting from officer training spots on campus, which attracted athletes like Jim. But with most able-bodied men either preparing for war or off to fight it, the service academies stood head and shoulders above most programs. In back-to-back November Saturdays in 1944, the Irish were pummeled by Navy (13–32) and Army (0–59).

On campus one afternoon to visit Jim, Terry and his father took in a typical, Leahy-inspired teeth-rattling practice where the full contact often looked like a prizefight. Suddenly concerned for his son who wasn’t “built like a tank,” Martin Brennan said, “Come on, Terry. Let’s find a school where they’re not so big and rough. We’ll find a school where you’ll be more in your league.”

Undaunted, Terry suggested that his father get him his new knee and “I’ll be all right here with these fellows.”

After his late-season heroics, Jim led Terry into the locker room and introduced him to Ed McKeever, Notre Dame’s interim coach.

Leahy was off on Navy duty that allowed for some serious recruiting.

Keen on having the speedster’s brother on the team, McKeever offered a scholarship, or so it seemed to Terry. The revolving door opened again, however, as McKeever soon after took the head coaching job at Cornell. Hugh Devore became the next short-timer in

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Spring 1945. Shortly after that, Jim would be shipped off to California on naval duty. Terry recalled how Jim may have saved the day for his little brother, or at least the scholarship.

Before leaving for the West Coast, brother Jim stopped in to talk to Devore and told him the story about McKeever. Devore said that Jim did a good job for Notre Dame. He hoped the genes were good and that little brother would do the same. A few days later I received a letter offering me a scholarship. Being 17 years old also helped. I wouldn’t be drafted for another year.

Turns out, he wouldn’t be drafted at all. From his first fall, Terry suited up for the varsity squad at Notre Dame—a rarity in college football, only because rookies were eligible to play and not relegated to freshman teams because of the war. With war veterans soon returning to campus, many as old as twenty-six and twenty-seven, Terry Brennan would continue to feel like a kid again. At least for a while.

Notre Dame Dynasty If World War II was a minor setback for Fighting Irish football, its completion was a boom for a four-year reawakening that featured one of the most dominant teams of all time. With Leahy back in place, Notre Dame went 36-0-2 from 1946 through 1949, winning three national championships. Of the two ties, the Yankee Stadium double-naught tie (0–0) with Army in 1946 didn’t move them from the top spot. But a draw with the Trojans of Southern California in the last game of 1948 knocked them to number two behind Michigan. Through four years, however, they seemed unbeatable. And some of the players over that span never lost a game.

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There’re plenty of documented stories and video about those Irish teams. With Leahy’s official Navy duty as a first lieutenant “in charge of recreational activities for submarine crews in the Pacific,” he recruited a deep and rugged cast of characters from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima.

Between the new GI Bill, effectively a scholarship for any military veteran, and invited returnees, some two hundred men tried out for Notre Dame’s team in the summer of 1946. Terry Brennan, a youngster perhaps measuring himself up against some grizzled survivors of war, had one season under his belt as a starting halfback and defensive back. But the onslaught of men from the Army, Navy, and Marines made the roughneck game even rougher.

One of two “kids” to keep his starting spot (along with Bill Fischer), Brennan surely wondered how he might fit in at Notre Dame in the postwar era, especially with Leahy, a coach he hadn’t played for. A few years later, Brennan recalled his thinking for Warner. “I wasn’t worried about their reputations,” said Brennan, who proved his physical fitness in the first spring practices. “They still had to prove they could take a job away from me. Then, too, I had the job half licked anyway. I could play good defense and a lot of them couldn’t.”

As a sophomore, he may have felt like a newbie on campus again, if only for that difference in life experience. In 1945, he dealt with some pretty tough characters on the football field. Guys tend to size you up on first sight, and Brennan’s own size and good looks may have belied his toughness. Now he’d be dealing with men who’d seen the absolute worst of humanity in a world war. Luckily, he had cast aside some ill-considered shoes from his freshman year. He wrote about those first days on campus:

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I noticed very early that there were a lot of good athletes from all over the country. I also noticed some rough-looking guys from Chicago and western Pennsylvania looking at me funny. They were looking at my brown and white saddle shoes. Lots of kids wore them in Milwaukee, but these guys figured you were a little odd for wearing that kind of shoe. I knew things would be tough enough, so the saddle shoes were retired to the closet for the duration.

From his towered perch on the practice field, Leahy oversaw survivalof-the-fittest contests in brutal practices that made game days look like walks in the park. From the “Murderer’s Row” to the “Box Drill,” players rolled through vicious hit cycles that busted noses and left several unconscious. No concussion protocol back then: it felt more like “last man standing.” Or eleven sound enough to play both ways on Saturday.

Before the NCAA made any official restrictions, Notre Dame’s spring football practice began on February 15, 1946, and did not end until the first Saturday in June, Brennan recalled. Practice resumed in mid-August, and the season lasted through the final game in early December. With little off-season for recovery, Terry thought about hanging up the cleats after two years.

At Christmastime in 1946 I told my dad I wanted to leave Notre Dame. I was fed up with football and burned out at the ripe old age of 18. I was the starting halfback for most of the games in 1945 and 1946, so I wasn’t complaining about not having a chance to play. With so much practice, I was physically and mentally tired and it was very difficult to study.

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His father talked Terry out of quitting, of course, preserving the historic moment of a kickoff touchdown return against Army, as well as yeoman efforts in a backfield bursting at the seams with talent going four- and five-men deep. Terry played alongside Johnny Lujack on both offense and defense, carrying on conversations for sixty minutes with the 1947 Heisman Trophy winner every fall Saturday. The duo came up with big defensive plays in the Army stalemate of 1946.

Lujack’s diving leg tackle of Doc Blanchard surely saved a touchdown. Yet the drive continued, and Brennan intercepted a Glenn Davis pass headed toward the Irish goal line, ending the drive and securing the tie.

“I think the 1946 Army game was the best I ever played,” Brennan told Warner. “They had me carry the ball 14 times—69 yards.

I started the game in a backfield that had Johnny Lujack, Red Sitko, and Jim Mello in it. It was a real rock ’em game; you were on your toes and ready to do something every minute. The rough going in that game was something I always liked, for the harder the contact, the better you like it if you really have the bug.”

Leahy would second-guess his decision not to kick a chip-shot field goal in the second quarter of that famed defensive struggle. If a field goal seemed like failure, then there appeared to be no pleasing the pessimistic coach who apparently fretted about each opponent, regardless of how much talent he had on his side. With the 1947 team as loaded as the previous year’s, some veterans grew tired of Leahy’s tactics, especially the war vets.

George Connor, the Outland Trophy winner who had been encouraged by Leahy at Pearl Harbor to transfer from Holy Cross to Notre Dame, enlisted the help of Warren Brown, the sports editor from the Chicago Herald-Examiner, to talk some sense into the coach.

As Brennan remembers it, Leahy was reading the team the riot act

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after an early season win (22–7) at Purdue. Against an eight-man front, the Irish ran all day, though Lujack hooked up with Brennan on one long touchdown pass and had a second one called back because of a penalty. “We could have passed all day but didn’t,” Brennan said.

In the locker room after the game, I was talking to Bob Livingstone. Bob was a good guy and a good player. We played the same position. He had also spent three years in the jungles of New Guinea fighting the Japanese and didn’t appreciate being treated like a child. He told me we should throw the next game and send the idiot to Mayo’s . . . the idiot being Leahy and Mayo’s meaning the Mayo Clinic.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I had a lot of respect for Bob and the other veterans who were about fed up with Leahy and his chickenshit approach to things. The strategy seemed to be beat up on everybody during the week and those not injured played on Saturday. We had three times as much talent as any of our opponents, but we were not getting the best out of it.

Brown, the sports editor, reportedly hated Leahy but loved Notre Dame. Three of his sons were Irish grads, and one of them, Roger Brown, played football. He put aside personal feelings about Leahy to warn him of the disgruntled team. “Leahy finally listened and eased off,” Brennan wrote. “The team took off like a rocket and mutiny was averted.”

Part of that rocket launch came with Brennan’s vivid dash to the end zone with the opening kick from Army. In a team so stacked, even returning veterans like Jim Brennan struggled for playing time.

But the brothers, not too far removed from their romping days in the backyards of Whitefish Bay, shared some special moments in games.

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As Army took to the air in a desperate attempt to erase a 20-point deficit, Jim helped seal the final deal. “And it was a Brennan who ended the game just as a Brennan started the Irish off on the right foot,” Jim Butz wrote in the Scholastic. “Jim Brennan, brother of Terry, intercepted a wayward Cadet aerial to finish the day’s activities.”

Late in the season, in a bittersweet game for the Brennan clan, Terry picked off a pass at Tulane early, ran for an 18-yard score, and caught a Lujack pass for another TD. As the Irish rolled up on the Green Wave in a blowout, big brother Jim “carried on the family tradition with an 11-yard dash into the same corner brother Terry had previously visited in the first quarter.” But the younger Brennan was carried off on a stretcher with a torn ligament in his knee.

Terry Brennan was a teenager then, still a half year away from turning twenty. He missed the game against Southern California to end the national championship year but nevertheless led the team in scoring (66 points on 11 touchdowns). No one else had scored more than five. He also led the team in receiving yards (191) and, up until the final game that he missed, rushing yards (404).

Toward the end of the 1947 season, Charlie Callahan [Notre Dame’s legendary publicity man] called me aside and started talking about All-American teams, which was the furthest thing from my mind. He told me I was having an All-American year, but it wouldn’t happen. I was a junior, he said, and my time would come.

It was hard to get one guy on the All-American team, let alone two from the same school. But with George Connor and John Lujack, Notre Dame had two and there wouldn’t be three.

You certainly couldn’t argue with George and John. They were two great players richly deserving of being All-Americans.

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But with another knee injury (this time to the left), certainly unforeseen in the conversation with Callahan, the All-American nod would never come. “With two shaky knees I couldn’t do much my senior year,” Brennan wrote. “I was a couple steps slower, and the left knee would move about a half inch sideways at times. I played very little.

And so it goes.”

Brennan was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, and he even had dinner with a representative of the team. But without a yearlong no-cut contract that would make Brennan consider risking his knee again, the two men couldn’t come to an agreement.

The bad knees may have been Brennan’s Achilles’ heel all along as an athlete. The ability to adapt—as a player, then a coach, then a businessman—kept him successful. “I think those bad knees of mine led me into coaching,” he told Warner. “I knew then I would have no chance for pro football. So I guess the knees just gave me more time for thinking football instead of playing it.”

Fishbowl Fame Life clipped happily along, even in the busiest of times. Mary Louise Kelley spent her own college years at nearby Saint Mary’s when Terry attended Notre Dame. By then over his bicycle shenanigans, he’d hang out with his girl and then hustle back to campus to beat the midnight curfew. After graduation, they got married on July 14, 1951, at St. Monica’s Church in Whitefish Bay. Children soon followed, one before they left Chicago as he answered the call from Notre Dame.

Blending coaching, teaching, and law school was difficult. We added another element in the summer of 1952. Kel was expecting our first child. I had switched from night school to days the

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previous September, but I had to attend summer school to pick up some extra credits I couldn’t get in night school. I was working at U.S. Steel during the day and going to school at night. I told Kel I was open Thursday nights and Sunday for the baby to be born. Our first son, Terry, was born on Sunday morning. God was good to us.

All along, Terry’s goal had been to earn the law degree and practice law. His undergraduate major in philosophy would help prepare him for the mental gymnastics of the profession. As president of his sophomore class, the cool Brennan had apparently impressed Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, in a radio debate about Aristotle. Football brought him a certain amount of notoriety in his youth, but when a single bad knee seemingly doubled down on itself, he knew two of them wouldn’t carry him very well through the NFL. Always one to shrug off the perceived pressure of any situation, he looked at the coaching stop at Mount Carmel as a way to help some kids transition into young adulthood.

The success of three consecutive Chicago championships in a football-frenzied city, however, did not go unnoticed. Terry got offers to join other coaching staffs and was considered for the head coaching job with the professional Chicago Cardinals as early as 1952. Apparently turned down because of his age, he laughed it off saying, “Why, those pro fellows would be tucking me into bed at night.”

That old bugaboo of youth. How could you be any other age than the one aligned with your birthdate? From the teenaged touchdown leader on a team of World War II vets, where he served as an unofficial altar boy whenever the team attended Mass, to the twenty-yearold coach who wasn’t old enough to sign his contract with Mount Carmel (his father had to sign it), Terry Brennan steered through it all with quiet confidence and a disarming smile.

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Father Hesburgh must have admired that confidence. Before becoming Notre Dame president, he had taught Brennan in a religion course. “I was really impressed by this boy’s attitude in class,” Hesburgh said. “He impressed me more than any other football player I ever had in my class.”

Likewise, Brennan remembered the priest everyone called “Father Ted,” who liked to take the wind out of the sails of seniors by handing out low Cs on papers. “He wanted to be a tough guy teacher,” Brennan said.

Hesburgh and Brennan had one thing in common. They were both youthful overachievers—Brennan the head coach at Notre Dame at twenty-five and Hesburgh the university president at thirtyfive. When his old religion teacher wanted to pay him a visit in Chicago, Terry figured he better not shrug it off.

I graduated from law school in June 1953 and fully intended to practice law. Then something unusual happened. Father Hesburgh, the new president at Notre Dame, visited Kel and me in Chicago. He urged me to take the assistant coaching job at N.D. I’m not too smart, but when the president of the university goes out of his way to visit you, it must mean something.

He was sincere, but there was something I didn’t know then.

He had a hidden agenda.

Hesburgh, with an agenda hidden or otherwise, would surely be relieved to have the powerful Leahy out of his way. It was Leahy, after all, whom Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to shake hands with on a campus visit in 1952. The football coach perhaps seen as more Notre Dame than the university president. The younger Brennan would not have that political

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pull. Although the priest would learn that the young coach was no pushover.

There was no mention of Brennan’s assistant position being a steppingstone to the head coaching job. Terry’s job at Notre Dame involved joining Leahy’s staff of assistants, scouting, and coaching the freshman team. Behind the scenes, Hesburgh, the young president, battled a legendary coach, typical of the push and pull of university priorities that harkened back to the Rockne era. Of course, with Rockne, and now Leahy, the national championships and alumni adoration can put the coach in a favorable position. Their successors, however, such as Hunk Anderson, maybe not so much.

Rumors of Leahy’s tactics and recruiting strategies that swirled back then could invite investigation today. Allegations emerged that alumni were using a bagman to pay players recruited by Leahy. Brennan was called into Father Hesburgh’s office sometime early in the spring semester of 1955. Given the fact that the coach and the president weren’t ones to simply “shoot the breeze,” (nor would they ever be), Brennan braced himself for the meeting.

Hesburgh began the meeting by questioning Brennan about a payment that had been brought to his attention by the widow of an Notre Dame alum. It seems that the widow had been presented with a $2,000 reimbursement claim against her late husband’s estate by a low-level employee in the Notre Dame athletic department to a player on the football team who the widow identified by name.

Hesburgh couldn’t answer the widow’s questions about the claims.

However, Hesburgh’s questioning of Brennan indicated that he was concerned that this might be the smoking gun confirming the rumors that had swirled around the football program under Brennan’s predecessor, Frank Leahy, about players actually being paid. Hesburgh pointedly questioned Brennan whether he was aware of the payment

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and whether this payment was part of a larger scheme. Hesburgh was also concerned that, if this payment was part of a larger scheme, how wide-spread was it? Coach Brennan explained to Father Hesburgh that he had no knowledge of the payment or what it would have been for. Brennan also had no idea whether the payment was part of a larger scheme since it happened before his time as head coach.

To young Brennan, a straight shooter who generally led younger men by his own hardworking example, the question felt like a gut punch. Or a roundhouse to the side of his head that gave him a headache for two weeks after his Bengal Bouts’ championship in 1947. Here he sat before a bewildered priest, who had a well-deserved reputation for ironfisted management, without any answers. Brennan too had no idea why there would be a claim against the alumnus’s estate by the athletic department employee in question. After the meeting, even though the payment occurred before his time as head coach, Brennan’s Irish blood was boiling. Brennan thought (and later wrote) that, if this payment was part of a larger scheme as Hesburgh feared, “Imagine what it would do to the image of Notre Dame if this got out?” If true, surely this wasn’t the first, or last, sin committed in college athletics, or even at Notre Dame. In January 2021, the NCAA levied minor penalties and fines against Fighting Irish football for an assistant coach’s illegal contact and recruiting violations of a Seattle high school player.

Most any coach can claim plausible deniability, especially when it comes to a rabid fan base and alumni boosters doing Lord knows what. Yet suspicions loomed, rumors swirled, and Brennan certainly heard that talk. After Leahy’s final national championship in 1949, Notre Dame dropped to .500 in 1950. In the nine-game season, the once untouchable Irish finished in a true sister kiss of 4-4-1. The overwhelming postwar talent had run its course. But even prior to

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that, with the GI Bill opening school to all veterans, just landing the nation’s best football players was competitive business. It’s not hard to imagine secret deals that might include cash, jobs on campus, or other perks. But, with Leahy eventually sidelined due to “health reasons,” no one would ever know the true scope of any recruiting transgressions. “The party line was that Leahy was in bad health,” Brennan wrote.

Though Leahy lived another twenty years after retiring from Notre Dame, there were some legitimate reasons to be concerned about his health. Some pregame drama before the Georgia Tech game in October 1953 preceded a sideline incident where people thought Leahy might die on the spot.

The game was supposed to be played in Atlanta, but because Notre Dame had two African American players—Wayne Edmonds and Dick Washington—the Yellow Jackets refused to host it. This was in the days before the civil rights movement. So Georgia Tech, ranked fourth in the nation, headed north to play in South Bend.

The top-ranked Irish scored a touchdown early, but Leahy suddenly doubled over with a “severe abdominal spasm.” The South Bend Tribune reported, “Doctors feared a heart attack when Leahy became dizzy and lapsed into a state of semi-consciousness, complaining of severe chest pain.”

Father Edmund Joyce delivered last rites to Leahy in the locker room before an ambulance whisked him away to St. Joseph Hospital.

A day later, the paper declared the illness, soon after diagnosed as pancreatitis, was “sudden but probably not serious.”

More importantly to fans who take games so seriously, the Irish prevailed over the upstart Yellow Jackets 27–14, ending Georgia Tech’s unbeaten streak at thirty-one games—then the nation’s longest.

Led by Johnny Lattner’s 101 yards, on his twenty-first birthday no

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less, the team was glad the victory wasn’t overshadowed by the death of its coach.

Another tie, this one against Iowa, likely kept the Irish from being national champions that year. A couple months later, whether it made Leahy sick to his stomach or not, he’d announce his retirement from Notre Dame.

Brennan signed a three-year deal for $12,000 annually. On hand for the pictures and the signing was new athletic director Moose Krause, an Irish legend in his own right as a football and basketball player, as well as an assistant coach to Leahy. According to Warner, Brennan’s first biographer, in spite of swooping real estate agents pressing $50,000 homes on him, “Terry kept his head, bought a modest, white, two-story house on a 50-foot lot at about $16,000.”

For the many fans who knew Terry Brennan as a player, millions more would come to know him as the famous family man who led the lads from Notre Dame. The lights of the fishbowl grew infinitely brighter. Terry Jr., at four and five years old, could spot his father on television. The whole family was on Person to Person, Edward R. Murrow’s popular show where he interviewed celebrities, young Terry tucked behind the wing of his mother as if she were Jungle Jim Martin, clearing a blocking path down the field for his speedy father.

On the football field, Brennan hoped to take Leahy’s famed T formation and package together a team to replace six departing All-Americans to “turn out a representative team.” Notre Dame finished 9-1 in 1954, avenging three consecutive losses at the hands of Michigan State and beating a tough Iowa team on the road. Their lone loss came at home to rival Purdue, a victory sealed by Lamar Lundy, the six-foot, seven-inch end who grabbed a short pass just as two Irish defenders collided and glided into the end zone some 70 yards away. Purdue’s first Black scholarship football athlete, Lundy

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went on to become one of the Fearsome Foursome of the Los Angeles Rams. Alongside Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, and Rosie Grier, he wreaked havoc on one of the best NFL defensive lines of all time.

Even beneath the glare of the Golden Dome, it had been a great first year for Coach Brennan. Sports Illustrated was celebrating its own first year in existence. In “taking it from August to August,” Gerald Holland wrote of the promising niche magazine where “some of the world’s best writers turned up as sportswriters in Sports Illustrated.

William Faulkner, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, covered hockey and the Kentucky Derby. John P. Marquand and John Steinbeck, also Pulitzer Prize winners, wrote of country clubs and fishing, respectively. Budd Schulberg, who won the Academy Award for his screenplay On the Waterfront, covered the fights.”

Notre Dame stumbled twice in 1955, on the road against Michigan State and in the last game at Southern Cal. “Against USC we gained 625 yards in the game but had six turnovers,” Brennan wrote.

“Same old story—turnovers kill you.”

Turnovers are a constant in the college game, and not just from mishandled balls and errant passes. With just three years of eligibility, there’s a turnover of players, too, from one class to the next. A coach hopes that the sophomores become stronger, smarter juniors. The seniors, ideally, take the leadership reins and play the best ball of their college careers. Talented freshmen turned sophomores, however wet behind ears tucked into helmets, contribute in meaningful ways to the team. With the promise of the 1956 season, no one knew better than Brennan what lay in wait for the Fighting Irish. It may have kept him up nights.

Francis Miller/ The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Notre Dame coach Terry Brennan with his wife Kel, son Terry Jr.,and newborn daughter Denise (Dinny) in South Bend, Indiana, 1954.

Bettmann/Getty Images Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Coach Frank Leahy and his Notre Dame “invalids” are shown in a huddle during a light workout at Bear Mountain, New York, in preparation for the all-important game with Army at Yankee Stadium. Left to right: George Strohmeyer, center; Johnny Lujack, quarterback; Bob McBride, guard; Zygmont Czarobski, tackle; Floyd Simmons, halfback; and Terry Brennan, halfback; November 8, 1946.

Terry Brennan playing with his son,Terry Jr. and his daughter Denise (Dinny), at their home in South Bend.

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images John G. Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

New Notre Dame coach Terry Brennan receiving encouraging words from former coach Frank Leahy (left), January 1, 1954.

Notre Dame quarterback and eventual Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornung (5) in action vs.

Michigan State, South Bend, Indiana, October 20, 1956. The #2 Spartans defeated the Fighting Irish 47–14.

Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

University of Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh sitting in his office, January 1, 1957. Fr. Hesburgh was appointed President of the University of Notre Dame in 1952 at the age of 35. During his thirty-five years a president, Fr. Hesburgh helped transform Notre Dame into an elite university.

Terry Brennan on the sidelines during the Notre Dame vs. Army game, October 11, 1958.

The #3 Black Knights defeated the Fighting Irish 14–2.

Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Bettmann/Getty Images

Head coach Terry Brennan, center, attending a meeting, October 1, 1957.

Terry Brennan (center), starting his first season as coach of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish talks with four of the previous season’s starters at the opening practice session. Left to right: Ralph Guglielmi, quarterback; Don Schaefer, fullback; Brennan; John Gaffney, halfback; and Joe Heap, halfback. Brennan replaced famed coach Frank Leahy, who retired at the end of the previous season because of ill health.

Uncredited/​AP/​Shutterstock Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock

Oklahoma’s Carl Dodd (22) runs the ball downfield as Notre Dame’s Nick Pietrosante (49) is upended by Oklahoma blocker Dennit Morris (51) during the first quarter of the game in Norman, Oklahoma. Notre Dame has had some great victories in its 125 years of playing college football, yet none was as improbable as the 7–0 victory over second-ranked Oklahoma on November 16, 1957. That victory ended the Sooners’ NCAA-record winning streak at 47 games and came just a season after the Sooners beat the Irish 40–0 in South Bend, still the most lopsided home loss in Notre Dame history.

Head coach Terry Brennan is carried off Owen Field by Jim Just (44) and other players following Notre Dame’s 7–0 win over Oklahoma on November 16, 1957.

Notre Dame’s Ron Toth (43) and Jim Colosimo (41) also celebrate the final.

Document provided by the Brennan family

Page from the 1957 Notre Dame playbook featuring the “70 Defense.” Because players played both offense and defense in the platoon system of the 1950s, the diagram shows the defensive backfield with the offensive positions. Terry Brennan’s teams were wellknown for their fundamentals and preparation. This particular defensive scheme has over 14 pages of instructions, detailing how each position would respond to in-game situations.

Scan the QR code to view additional memorabilia from Terry Brennan’s life and career.

Photo by Kathleen Brennan. Provided by the Brennan family.

Photo by Joseph P. Brennan. Provided by the Brennan family.

Jim Brennan (left) and Terry Brennan, Sr. (right) being inducted into the Marquette High School hall of fame.

They are joined by Terry Brennan Jr. (center.) Jim, Terry Sr., and Terry Jr. were all-conference players and conference scoring champions in the Milwaukee Catholic Conference while playing at Marquette High School.

Photo by Aiden Forsi. Provided by the Brennan family.

Terry and Kel Brennan at Green Lake, Wisconsin, celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary.

The extended Brennan family gathered together at his daughter Jane’s house to celebrate Terry’s 90th birthday in June 2018. Terry (seated in the center) and Kel had six children, twenty-seven grandchildren, and thirty-one great-grandchildren. His family remains Terry’s greatest legacy.

$17.99 U.S.

A SEASON LIK E NO OTHER

BRENNAN

BIOGRAPHY / SPORTS

ON NOVEMBER 16, 1957, an unranked Notre Dame football team squared off

Though the Odds Be Great or Small chronicles the story of legendary coach Terry Brennan, from his days as a player at Notre Dame under Frank Leahy, to his selection as the head coach in 1954, to the high-intensity comeback season of 1957 in which Notre Dame finished in the top 10 overall. This book provides the social, cultural, and athletic context to understand college football before and after 1957—a year that changed how the game was played at Notre Dame for decades.

The 1957 season remains one of the most important seasons in Notre Dame football’s storied history. In Though the Odds Be Great or Small, Coach Brennan shares his version of what happened in the trenches and on the sidelines during a time when a college football game had the power to keep an entire country on the edge of its seat.

TERRY BRENNAN played halfback at the University of Notre Dame from

1945 to 1948. In 1954, at the age of 25, he became Notre Dame’s youngest football coach, serving as head coach until 1958. In his five seasons as head coach for the Fighting Irish, Terry Brennan compiled an overall record of 32–18 while playing one of the most challenging schedules in college football history.

WILLIAM J. MEINERS is a writer, an editor, and the founder of Sport Literate, which celebrated

its 25th anniversary issue in 2020 as a preeminent journal for all things sports.

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GR E AT OR SM A LL

against the No. 2 Oklahoma Sooners. It was supposed to be an easy Sooners win.

But despite being 19-point underdogs, the Fighting Irish, guided by their young and tenacious coach Terry Brennan, maneuvered their way to a 7–0 upset, ending the Sooners’ NCAA-record 47-game winning streak.

AND

NOTRE DAME’S 1957 COMEBACK SEASON THE YEAR THAT CHANGED COLLEGE FOOTBALL

THOUGH THE ODDS BE GR EAT OR SMA LL

ISBN: 978-0-8294-5123-8

TERRY BRENNAN    foreword by JOHNNY LUJACK