Countdown to kickoff: Notre Dame vs. Ohio State only 64 days away

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This daily series of 99 stories celebrates by the numbers some of the most notable names, dates, moments and memories related to the past and present of Notre Dame football. 

With 64 days left, we look back at the first season of Ara Parseghian‘s legendary career as the head coach at Notre Dame.

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After failing to win more than five games in a five-season stretch from 1959-63, Notre Dame needed to go in a different direction with its head coach. Joe Kuharich just wasn’t working out.

The manner in which Kuharich left is murky. Some say he was pushed out by the administration, who had pressure from fans because of a 17-23 record in four years. To that point, he was the only losing coach in Notre Dame history. Others say Kuharich read the writing on the wall and left on his own accord.

However it happened, Kuharich stepped down from his post in the spring of of 1963. Notre Dame executive vice president Edmund P. Joyce said it was too late to hire a new coach, so Hugh Devore, a former Fighting Irish football letter-winner under Knute Rockne in 1930, was named the interim for the second time in his career. The first was in 1945 when Frank Leahy went off to war.

1963 was worse than Kuharich’s previous two campaigns. The Irish went 2-7.

“Unfortunately, as a coach, he was over the hill,” Joyce said of Devore.

Parseghian was not.

Only 39 at the end of the 1963 season, Parseghian called Joyce to ask where Notre Dame was headed coaching-wise in 1964. Notre Dame had exclusively hired alums as head football coaches to that point. Parseghian went to Miami (Ohio). But desperate times called for desperate measures. Why wouldn’t the Irish want the coach who beat them four times in a row from 1959-62, including a 35-6 trouncing in the last of those matchups?

“When he called and said he was leaving Northwestern, my heart leapt with joy,” Joyce said. “It was like a gift from heaven.”

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Notre Dame won the first nine games of Parseghian’s tenure. The Irish did not face one ranked foe, but they played like that was the case. They didn’t beat an opponent by less than 19 points in the first six games. There was a close call at Pitt, 17-15, in the seventh game. Back-to-back blowouts of Michigan State and Iowa followed.

All that stood in the way of Notre Dame and a national title in Parseghian’s first year was a trip to Los Angeles to play rival USC. The Irish led 17-0 at halftime. They were 30 minutes away from winning it all for the first time since 1949 and finishing a season undefeated for the first time since 1953. But it all came crashing down on a holding penalty that prevented them from taking a 24-7 lead in the fourth quarter.

The Trojans triumphed in shocking fashion, 20-17.

“I was out in los Angeles 10 years later,” Parseghian said. “The TV guy who did their play-by-play was putting together a half-hour show of that game. He went through and picked out all the key plays. So this guy says to me, ‘Boy, you guys were screwed.’ I said, ‘It took you 10 years to figure that out?'”

Notre Dame didn’t win the national title in 1964. But it got back to being Notre Dame. Quarterback John Huarte became the sixth Heisman Trophy winner in program history. Parseghian emulated former head coaching greats who took the team to the top, and he’d go on to win two national championships with the blue and gold.

The way 1964 finished was a gut punch. But the way it set Notre Dame up for the future was everything.

“There’s new electricity. There’s new confidence,” Parseghian said. “Notre Dame is regaining its reputation. It’s returning to greater days established by Rockne and Leahy.”