Only one coach beat Notre Dame this season. Let him tell you about it.
The wonderland of this long college football season sits just off Interstate 88 way west of Chicago and just down a boulevard named for Annie Glidden, the famed farmer who lived from 1865 to 1965 while coaxing the soil into wonders. It’s a wonderland that went 8-5 but a wonderland no less, dammit, because of the storybook day it gave itself and the country Sept. 7. It proved how a sunny day can shine even into January when the horizon looks barren and the winter wind means serious business.
You might have heard mention of this place repeatedly while Notre Dame has advanced and advanced and advanced to Monday’s College Football Playoff national championship game against Ohio State. There’s that term again, “Northern Illinois,” sounding maybe mystical as if behind a moat, perhaps unfamiliar to those unaware of its past successes such as an Orange Bowl berth in 2012 or a win at Alabama in 2003. There’s coach Thomas Hammock, delighting at the TV mentions and the recruiting boost even as he stews about the turnovers that enabled four of the five losses, and there’s somebody out there having to chug again in at least one “Northern Illinois” drinking game that apparently exists. Somehow, and because good football players lurk in more burgs than people care to realize, Notre Dame’s 15-game slog through a heady season has gone spotless save for one fanciful day in South Bend near the outset when Northern Illinois won 16-14 on Kanon Woodill’s 35-yard field goal with 31 seconds left, and Hammock, a 2002 Northern Illinois graduate, did a famed on-field interview wherein he couldn’t have stanched the tears if he had tried.
“It’s definitely interesting,” he says now, “from the standpoint of, I worked extremely hard to get where I am, and I’ve done a lot of great things in this profession” — with Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Baltimore Ravens as an assistant for five seasons — “and on that particular day that’s what people remember the most. But really I want people to remember the whole body of work, how we’ve been able to overcome. In COVID [2020], we went 0-6, we had 77 true freshmen, and then the very next year we came back and won the [Mid-American Conference] championship. I’ve always been a guy that has overcome every obstacle and adversity in my career, and so to me, that’s what I want to be remembered by — not just, you know, we went out there and beat Notre Dame, because to be honest with you, we expected to do that, and that’s how our kids played.”
That’s a tricky proposition in a noisy sports world, where, on Sept. 7, the Huskies became somewhat like the very good golfer who shoots a 59 one day (only they’re much bigger) or the musician who hatches a hit everyone wants to hear over all the others (only they’re much more collaborative). They had a day both among all the days and above all the days.
So in this wonderland, the hallway to Hammock’s office finds Dan Wolfe, football operations director, who tells of spending Sept. 7 certain a narrow doom would intrude and of spending the pregame trying to sort out a technology glitch wherein Notre Dame’s iPads worked but Northern Illinois’ did not. He tells of how phone calls went to various commissioners, and then the Fighting Irish decided they didn’t need the devices even if it meant the abundant eyeballs of their populous football staff couldn’t detect the subtle twitches of the Huskies’ defenders so as to make adjustments. “A tremendous advantage in our favor,” Hammock would say of a team that needed no luck.
It says “No Luck Needed” on many of the T-shirts that hail the outcome — echoing Hammock’s postgame speech of, “We did not need luck” — and even when the officials fumbled the late clock management and supplied Notre Dame a possession it wouldn’t have had, it wound up allowing for the entry into lore of one Cade Haberman, given his block of a 62-yard field-goal attempt to conclude the first win by a MAC team against a top-five opponent. It had been some day, and further down the hall in Hammock’s office it breathes on shelves and on walls in photos and on footballs, including one with Hammock’s likeness painted upon it. The season has cleared and the agony over the turnovers and the mostly narrow losses to Buffalo, North Carolina State, Toledo, Ball State and Miami (Ohio) have gone into the books and the sighs. Hammock can retell.
The team bus convoy reached Oz — sorry, Notre Dame — on the first Friday afternoon of September. Hammock thought it prudent to shepherd the players to the stadium to take any photos and dislodge any awe, and next he continued his weeklong mull of words for his Friday night remarks, in a week he had begun by telling his players: “This is not a David and Goliath situation. This is not a ‘shock the world’ moment. I’m telling you guys right now, we match up well on the line of scrimmage.” He stood before them at the hotel and said, “You know that Rocket Ismail is not coming out of that tunnel tomorrow.”
They stared as if puzzled.
“I’m not sure anybody had an idea of who ‘The Rocket’ Ismail was,” he says.
He went on to Joe Montana and Jerome Bettis and reminded them they would play against a 2024 team and not a legacy. He slept well and alone; Hammock had recommended his 11-year-old son play in his youth football game that weekend so as to be a good teammate, and Hammock’s wife, Cheynnitha, whom he met at NIU, had stayed back to oversee the two children and — get this — work the chains at the youth game. “We’re just humble, hardworking people,” Hammock says at his desk, calling Cheynnitha a “pillar of our family.”
He rose early per ritual. He went down to get coffee per ritual. He took a little walk with that coffee per ritual, sorting through the maddening number of football details and possibilities. He met with coaches, discussed wind and sun and 2-point conversions and fourth-down tactics. They went to the game. He met Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman for the first time, and they chatted amiably. The iPads issue came and went. The game began. Notre Dame romped down the field and scored. Northern Illinois mishandled a kickoff and started from its 2-yard line.
Yet one third down-and-5 play later, when running back Antario Brown caught a slant from quarterback Ethan Hampton and escaped all traffic for an 83-yard touchdown, confidence congealed. “You could feel it, yes,” Hammock says. “You could feel the energy shifting in that moment.” That confidence hung in the air through a 13-7 lead, a 14-13 deficit, a 16-14 win, a gracious congratulations from Freeman, a TV interview during which he cried as he does sparingly in general, and a few moments on the field when players rejoiced and Hammock tried to concoct a locker-room speech in which five words would reign: “We did not need luck!” A team that would lose 20-9 in November to a Miami that would lose 28-3 to Notre Dame in late September would not need luck against Notre Dame on Sept. 7, because days go like that sometimes.
He rode in the front seat of the bus. He “realized that we probably did something that nobody in the world thought we could do.” He fielded 500 or 600 texts even as “I don’t even know if I know that many people.” He treasured ones from John Harbaugh, Ozzie Newsome, his college coach Joe Novak. He marveled at one from Aaron Boone, the manager of the New York Yankees, whom he had loved since childhood in New Jersey. He vowed to reply to all because he knows from his budding days how it feels when people don’t. He and his team arrived in DeKalb late at night. A crowd waited. He walked off the bus into a TV light. He answered questions.
He went home. He expected a silent night. He opened the door. Cheynnitha and Tierra, his 15-year-old daughter, and Thomas, his 11-year-old son, deluged him with hugs and joy. They relived the game and reveled a very good while. Then three of them went to bed and the coach sat alone. He sat at a time before Notre Dame would win 10 straight regular-season games, a home playoff game against Indiana, a Sugar Bowl against Georgia, an Orange Bowl against Penn State. He had no idea he would sit in January with Notre Dame still afloat and say, “The thing that’s so interesting to me is, the team that we played is so drastically different than the team they’re [deploying] now, from an injury standpoint.”
Neither he nor anyone knew any of that then as he sat up until 4, marveling. He just knew that good football players abound and that his had the right confidence and that they had given each other and all the dreamers out there a day.