2005 USC-Notre Dame named 11th most influential game this century
The Athletic recently came out with a list of college football’s 20 most influential games this century.
2005 USC-Notre Dame checks in at a very modest No. 11. That really seems to undervalue the enormity of that day. If you look at the 10 games in front of 2005 Trojans-Irish, several are substantially less memorable and landscape-changing.
Here’s what the article said about the game, played 17 years ago:
Should officials have thrown a flag when USC quarterback Matt Leinart got pushed into the end zone by Reggie Bush with three seconds remaining to give USC a 34-31 lead? Yes. While that play would be legal now, it wasn’t in 2005.
But that wasn’t the truly lasting impact of this game. Notre Dame officials were so excited that the Fighting Irish had almost beaten USC — and so worried that an NFL team might scoop up first-year Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis — that later that month they gave Weis a 10-year contract with a massive buyout. Notre Dame fired Weis in 2009 but kept paying him through December 2015, more than a year after he was fired following a disastrous tenure at Kansas. In total, Weis received $18,967,960 to not coach at Notre Dame.
That contract paved the way for future fully guaranteed deals and giant buyouts. Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, Michigan State’s Mel Tucker, USC’s Lincoln Riley and LSU’s Brian Kelly should all thank Weis. So should Gus Malzahn, who pocketed $20.5 million from Auburn after being fired in 2020 and then taking the UCF job.
That’s the takeaway from the game? Not that 4th and 9 is one of the most iconic plays in the 153-year history of college football? Shrug.
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