2016 served as a humbling reminder of what the Notre Dame Fighting Irish has been post-Lou Holtz - that is, despite occasional seasons of brilliance, largely mediocre.
For fans born in the from the 90s onwards, the Irish have not once been a consistently dominant team. And for a program that so often throughout its history had been the undisputed pinnacle of college football, this was highly problematic.
Notre Dame was “irrelevant”, “stuck in the past”, “soft”, and they “couldn’t compete”. These statements were, for the most part, true. Sure, irrelevant is never the case with the Irish, but the other slights bear some truth to them.