Sacred & profane

Holy pigskin!

by Jeffrey Gantz

What! College football already? Penn State and Arizona? Pass the No Doz. Florida State and Louisiana Tech? That'll be competitive for the first three minutes. Texas and NC State, yeah, sure. Notre Dame and Kansas, yawn.

No, wait, Notre Dame and Kansas? As in the Jesuit school whose university press put out the anthology Evolution and Creation and the university whose state board of education just tried to put evolution out of business by decreeing that local schools can teach creationism instead? Now you're talking. This could be bigger than the Hebrews versus the Egyptians. The Christians versus the lions. The Crusaders versus the Saracens. Irish Catholics versus Irish Protestants. The pope taking on Jimmy Swaggart.

College football being the predictable beast it is, Notre Dame will probably run out comfortable winners, without incident. But if NBC were smart, it would find a way to pump this Saturday afternoon's match-up into a holy war that would have America glued to the screen. Just imagine:

First quarter: catching Kansas off guard with a quick kick from their peptide punt formation, the Fighting Irish score first. The student section goes into its "Nucleic Acids Rule" cheer.

Second quarter: the Jayhawks' "Holy Roller" offense gets into gear, and they regain the lead. NO MONKEY BUSINESS AT KANSAS goes up in the card section.

Halftime: the Kansas band play selections from Haydn's Creation while the students burn Touchdown Jesus in effigy and chant "Evolution bites!" Notre Dame's "Salute to Copernicus" has the band marching into spiral-galaxy formations while playing "Stardust." The NBC cameras catch NOBODY BUYS CREATIONISM and NAZARETH, BETHLEHEM, CALVARY signs in the stands.

Third quarter: the Kansas players come out with JOHN 3:16 stitched on their jerseys. Notre Dame calls time-out and makes a quick switch to jerseys emblazoned with string-theory equations.

Fourth quarter: Kansas ditches its regular play-calling vocabulary ("Red 14 Break, hut, hut, hut . . . ") in favor of Bible verses ("Daniel 3:12: Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego"), confusing Notre Dame's Darwin defense and negating its Big Bang blitz. But the Fighting Irish counter with their carbon-ring huddle, Doppler shift, and evolutionary no-end formation; they even have the sign-language gorilla, Koko, on the sidelines signaling in the plays. With 1:17 (on the clock, not in Genesis) left, Notre Dame calls its last time-out and a water boy who's actually a priest runs on to the field to bless the team with holy water -- but when the Kansas players try to appropriate the bucket to baptize a team member who's just converted, a fight breaks out while both student sections chant, "You're just the Bod Squad/We're the real God Squad." The game never does get finished, but NBC doesn't care: it's too busy trying to match up Brigham Young and Boston College for next week's Theology Bowl.