The Game Of The Century: Michigan State vs. Notre Dame, 1966
In a world where coaching decisions are more meticulously scrutinized and mathematically plotted than ever before, Parseghian’s decision remains as controversial as it was 50 years ago.
“We’d fought hard to come back and tie it up,” Parseghian said at the time. “After all that, I didn’t want to risk giving it to them cheap. They get reckless and it could cost them the game. I wasn’t going to do a jackass thing like that at this point.”
Later, he would say, “Strategically, I knew what I was doing in the game. You have to remember Duffy kicked the ball back to me. My starting quarterback, starting center, starting left tackle and all my top guys were over on the bench with me. We hadn’t completed a pass in the last seven or eight attempts.”
Hanratty also defended his coach after the game. “Ara caught a lot of crap for going for the tie, but no one ever talks about Duffy punting the ball back to us…” he said. “He could have easily gone for it, more than we could have from our 20-yard line. If we screwed up from where we were, we would have lost the game.”
“I simply wasn’t going to give away cheaply the tie our crippled team fought so hard to obtain,” Parseghian said after the game, “If we had been in the middle of the field, it might have been different. But with the ball on our 35, I wasn’t going to risk a pass interception because of the great kicking ability of Michigan State’s Dick Kenney. After all, the Spartans almost lost the game that way a few plays earlier when we intercepted and were in field goal position.”
Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote that Notre Dame “took the easy way out.”
“I think I gave Ara credit at the time for running out the clock because he felt arrogantly sure that Notre Dame could win the polls with a tie, not just over Michigan State but also over an undefeated and untied Alabama,” Jenkins told ESPN years later, “but I still think it was chickens***, and I stand by my position that he tied one for the Gipper.”
Notre Dame would remain first in the AP Poll after the game, although UPI gave the Spartans the number-one nod. The Irish removed all doubt from any pollsters’ minds the next week, though, when they trounced #10 Southern California 51-0 and claimed the number-one spot in all the polls that mattered.
The debate over whether or not Parseghian was justified in his decision still rages across the Midwest, as does the argument over which team was better on that season and that Saturday. The week after the game, Notre Dame and Michigan State’s debate teams met at the University of Detroit to officially argue about which team was better. Notre Dame won the debate, 2-1. Of course, that debate didn’t really solve anything, as it continues to play out today, even among the two generations of fans that never saw the game.
Michigan State apologists argue that the Spartans had out-gained the Irish 284-219 and gained 13 first downs to Notre Dame’s 10. The Irish claim that they had a more difficult schedule, playing four ranked teams while Michigan State played only two, and that they were more dominant in their victories, winning most of their games in shutouts.
Bubba Smith more or less came to terms with the result. “As it was happening I was yelling, ‘you’re playing for a tie,'” he later said, “but I’ve since apologized to (Parseghian) for the anguish that game has caused him. I later realized it was a brilliant move because Notre Dame had one more game to showcase their team, and we didn’t because back then you could not go to the Rose Bowl in consecutive years.”
At the time, of course, he was not happy. “I don’t think any other school would have won the championship if they had done that,” he said. “All the sportswriters are Catholic.”