Last year Notre Dame honored former coaching great Ara Parseghian with a statue outside Notre Dame Stadium. This year they will be doing the same for the last coach to bring a title home to Notre Dame – Lou Holtz.
From Yahoo (via Irish Illustrated):
“I am humbled,” Holtz said. “I don’t know of any greater honor I could ever hope for professionally. To be back with the national championship team and to have a statue put in there with Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian…I am really humbled.”
Holtz joins Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Jesse Harper, Ara Parseghian and Dan Devine among former Irish coaches in the College Football Hall of Fame. Forty-two former Notre Dame players also have been inducted, including Chris Zorich in 2007.
“I could never repay Notre Dame for everything it did for me family,” Holtz said. “More importantly, to be able to associate with the people of Notre Dame was a great honor. People like Emil Hoffman, Mike DeCicco, Dean Waddick, Bill Sexton, Colonel Stephens, Moose Krause…
As a younger Notre Dame fan, Lou Holtz is the first coach I remember watching on the sidelines for the Irish and really – any football team for that matter. I grew up as a football fan watching Holtz pace up and down the sidelines picking grass along the way so this news certainly makes me thrilled.
Jeff, Kyle, and I will all be out in South Bend for the Michigan game weekend and I’ll be sure to snap some shots of the statue and post them to the UHND Flickr account (which is now visible on the sidebar of articles and will be visible here as well if I get some time this summer to make some design tweaks to the site).
The Ara statue is actually inside Notre Dame Stadium, not outside.
Sure makes a solid case for the AD job?