A fun way to remember the Irish in 2000

I think it’s safe to say that we are all just trying to have a fun summer while counting the days until the start of the college football season. In that spirit, we might as well use some AI to get us to the home stretch. Here’s a series that will recap the last 25 Notre Dame football seasons.

Looking Back at the 2000 Notre Dame Football Season: A BCS Trip We’d Like to Forget

The year was 2000. Y2K had just fizzled, Britney Spears was everywhere, and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish were back in a BCS bowl game. Sounds great, right? Well… not exactly.

The 2000 Notre Dame football season was one of those bizarre years that somehow felt both like a step forward and a regression. It was Bob Davie’s fourth season in charge, and despite a few promising stretches, the whole thing ended with Notre Dame getting absolutely trucked in the Fiesta Bowl.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane (or maybe trauma lane?) and relive the chaos.

Early Injuries and a QB Switcheroo

The season opened with some real hope. Senior quarterback Arnaz Battle was supposed to lead the way in Davie’s newly balanced offense. But in true Notre Dame fashion, Battle broke his wrist in Game 2 against Nebraska, because of course he did.

Enter: freshman Matt LoVecchio. Calm, collected, not flashy—but he didn’t turn the ball over, and he handed the ball off like a champ. The offense found a groove behind LoVecchio, Julius Jones, and Tony Fisher. Joey Getherall gave us a few highlight plays. The defense? Legit. Guys like Anthony Denman and Rocky Boiman brought the heat.

After an early stumble to Michigan State (again, ugh), the Irish rattled off seven straight wins and suddenly… we were talking about a BCS bowl bid. Davie had figured it out! Or had he?

The Fiesta That Wasn’t

Notre Dame finished the regular season 9–2, with close losses to No. 1 Nebraska and the always-pesky Spartans. That record was enough to land the Irish in the Fiesta Bowl. Big stage. Big opportunity. Big disaster.

The opponent? Oregon State—led by a bunch of dudes who looked like they’d been grown in a lab for the express purpose of embarrassing us on national television. Jonathan Smith (yes, that Jonathan Smith) threw darts, Chad Johnson torched our secondary, and T.J. Houshmandzadeh played like he was on a Madden cheat code.

Final score: 41–9. It was every bit as bad as it sounds. And just like that, the momentum was gone.

Davie’s Last Stand (Sort Of)

The bowl collapse reset the narrative. Instead of talking about a young QB’s emergence or Davie turning the corner, the conversation turned back to ND’s inability to win a big game. At that point, the Irish hadn’t won a major bowl since the Cotton Bowl in 1993. The BCS monkey stayed firmly on our back.

Bob Davie would get one more year, but 2001 went south in a hurry (5–6), and he was shown the door. The 2000 season, in hindsight, was the high point of his tenure—and that tells you everything you need to know.

What We Learned (or Didn’t)

Notre Dame in the BCS era = heartbreak.
Freshman QBs can steady the ship, but they can’t carry it.
Never trust Bob Davie with momentum.
Oregon State’s 2000 squad was way better than people remember.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to forget now, but the 2000 season had moments where it felt like the Irish were this close to being back. But if you’re old enough to remember watching that Fiesta Bowl live… you know how quickly the wheels fell off.

Notre Dame went to a BCS bowl and came home with a national TV humiliation. So yeah, technically 2000 was “successful” on paper—but in South Bend, paper doesn’t mean much when you’re getting clowned on in January.

Let us know in the comments if you still have nightmares of Chad Johnson running free in the Arizona desert.