Notre Dame Starts 0-2: Are the Fighting Irish Victims of a Runner-Up Curse?

Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs closed the weekend sharing a dubious distinction as runners-up a season ago now off to 0-2 starts.

For the NFL franchise, the winless start is another piece of anecdotal evidence for those who believe in the Super Bowl Curse; the longstanding tendency for the previous year’s loser in the big game to struggle in the subsequent campaign.

For college football, the Fighting Irish might be falling victim to a similarly growing second-place curse.

The College Football Playoff may have only just grown to 12 teams a year ago, ending with Notre Dame falling in a 34-23 National Championship Game decision to Ohio State. But coming into 2025, the Fighting Irish were trying to become the first team in a half-decade, dating back to the latter half of the four-team Playoff, to return to the postseason tournament after losing in the title round.

Each of the last two runners-up in the four-team Playoff era, TCU and Washington, finished under .500 the following campaign. After Georgia’s memorable comeback to top Alabama in the 2021 season, the 2022 Crimson Tide missed the final four.

So did 2020 runner-up Ohio State in the 2021 season — and, for those who turn up their noses at the idea of cosmic forces at play, consider it was the Buckeyes losing to Michigan for the first time in a decade that denied them a Playoff berth.

One must go back to the bizarre, COVID-19-impacted season of 2020 when the 2019 season runner-up, Clemson, returned to the field. In the Tigers’ case, the effects of any curse took longer than a single offseason to kick in, as seen with Dabo Swinney’s team falling to 1-2 after its loss to Georgia Tech.

It’s much too early to deem Notre Dame eliminated: A 10-game winning streak to close out the regular season probably gets the Fighting Irish into one of those 12 coveted spots.

However, first-year defensive coordinator Chris Ash may need to go four-leaf clover hunting to counteract any bad mojo looming over the Golden Domes.

Marcel Reed finding Nate Boerkircher with 13 seconds left gave Texas A&M a 41-40 win over Notre Dame in Week 3 that deviated from the Fighting Irish’s 2024 season script in a key way.

Last season, the Notre Dame defense was exceedingly stingy on fourth downs, holding opponents to a 36.6 percent conversion rate. The Irish’s yield, eighth-lowest in the nation, was noteworthy in that they faced eight more fourth-down attempts than any other defense ranked in the top 16.

Texas A&M’s fourth-and-goal conversion from the 11-yard line wasn’t the only late-game punch to the gut Notre Dame suffered through its first two games of 2025. In Week 1 at Miami, the Irish rallied from a 21-7 deficit only to surrender a 47-yard field goal with 64 seconds remaining to Hurricanes kicker Carter Davis.

Davis, by the way, transferred into The U from nearby FAU where in the 2024 season he went 2-of-7 on field-goal attempts. Davis was 4-of-11 in his career with the Owls.

To borrow a phrase from downtrodden Glengarry Glen Ross salesman Shelley “The Machine” Lavine: What do you call that? Bad. Luck!

OK — so it isn’t luck that has the first runner-up from the expanded Playoff in an 0-2 hole just eight months removed from the National Championship Game. Notre Dame isn’t executing at the level it did on its run to last season’s title round, particularly on defense.

The 27 points the Fighting Irish allowed at Miami were more than the 2024 Notre Dame defense allowed in all but 2-of-16 games. No opponent scored as many as the 41 points Texas A&M put on the Irish in Week 3.

Marcus Freeman, the program’s defensive coordinator before replacing LSU-bound Brian Kelly ahead of the 2022 season, didn’t pin blame on any one unit.

“You can’t get the outcome that we got and put it on any one play, or one person, or offense or defense or special teams,” Freeman said. “You can say, ‘If we did this, we would have won the game.’ But the reality is, we didn’t play well enough to win.”

While defense is under the microscope, the Notre Dame offense has also endured games of 3.3 and 3.5 yards per carry to start 2025. Quarterback CJ Carr has been solid but hardly world-beating in his first two starts.

If there’s any runners-up curse impacting Notre Dame, it’s self-inflicted.