There has been a lot of talk about the ceiling of the Notre Dame football team since the Cotton Bowl loss to national champion Clemson. “The Irish have hit their ceiling” Dan Wolken of USA Today wrote in his 2019 mini-preview, essentially dismissing them as a title contender with that sentence. (That’s literally what he wrote. “Notre Dame seems to have hit their ceiling.” That’s it, that’s the take.)
This is of course lazy, you ever hear people talk about Stanford in terms of having a ceiling? Of course not. And if folks insist on using the phrase, they could talk about why they feel that way.