From Knute Rockne to Joe Montana and beyond, a look at 102 years of Notre Dame’s green jerseys
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
These days, it seems as though every college football program has a mall department store’s inventory of alternate uniforms. Color schemes and patches and stitches, presented as tributes to days gone by, futuristic twists stolen straight from the Lucasfilm costume closet and, honestly, a whole lot of “WTH were they thinking?!”
But the roots of rotating regalia reach back, naturally, to the place where it feels like most college football ideas seem to have been immaculately conceived: South Bend, Indiana, where when it comes to alternate uniforms, OG stands for Original Green.
On Saturday, the ninth-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish will defend their very green home grass (OK, it’s artificial turf) against the No. 6 Ohio State Buckeyes, and will do so clothed in the latest iteration of the uniform that both excites and frustrates those who spend their fall Saturdays living to wake up the echoes: their green jerseys.
You had me at hello.#IrishWearGreen | #GoIrish☘️ pic.twitter.com/2qyCus58bH
— Notre Dame Football (@NDFootball) July 31, 2023
“We want to see a lot of green in here,” Marcus Freeman said Monday, ahead of what is easily the biggest home game of his 19-game tenure as Irish head coach. The former Ohio State linebacker stood at the podium in a dark green jacket and light green dress shirt. “We’ve got green jerseys, and I don’t know if they’re calling it a ‘green out,’ but we want to see a lot of green. … Let’s get as much green in this stadium as we can.”
It seems like an easy assignment, right? Yet there remains a not-small contingent of Notre Dame faithful who turn a little green in the gills when it comes to the idea of wearing green. Some still regard jade jerseys as a bit of a curse, always a particularly sensitive topic when it comes to people who believe in leprechauns and kissing stones for luck. And in their defense, there does seem to be a fairly thick folder of evidence to back those claims. But there is also a deeper history behind the team’s green jerseys that even the most hard-core Johnny Lujack and Paul Hornung-loving Notre Dame fan might not be aware of.
“Green on the uniforms is just like anything else whenever you are talking about Notre Dame football,” explained Lou Holtz, who coached the Irish for 11 seasons, including their last national title in 1988. “Whenever you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of it, there’s a whole other layer of history behind it.”
Green looks good in 4K UHD
The current era of college football alternate uniform wackiness goes back roughly 25 years, when a team that has never had any issue with green started donning different kelly-covered clothing on a weekly basis. The long-lowly Oregon Ducks rose to national prominence via equal parts winning big games and trotting onto the field donned in increasingly loud game-day attire. A large chunk of the copycat college football world began to follow, ahem, suit.
However, the classic programs, the ones that had been great at football for a century or more, found themselves hung up like a loose thread caught in a zipper. How can you be next-gen cool in the eyes of teenage recruits while also appeasing those sections of gray-haired traditionalist season-ticket holders who are also the donors who pay all the bills?
“We call them the gold seats,” recalled Brian Kelly, who coached the Irish for a dozen years, from 2010 to 2021. “Every decision made at Notre Dame is made with careful attention paid to tradition, but also explaining to those who are rightfully dedicated to that tradition that it’s OK to occasionally think outside the box.”
Kelly, now at LSU, is referring to the Shamrock Series, a Notre Dame marketing plan introduced the year before his arrival. The Irish started scheduling games against brand-name opponents at neutral sites around the nation, from Yankee Stadium to Las Vegas and, yes, introducing alternate uniforms that have dipped heavily into the green. That cracked the crayon box open just enough for Kelly to employ green jerseys for Senior Day. In all, his record with lime liveries was 5-1, the only blemish being a 35-31 heartbreaker at Michigan in 2011 while his team wore green numbers on white shirts.
Speaking of green numerals …
Bettis barreling in beryl
During the years before Kelly’s arrival, the idea of mixing green in with Notre Dame navy and gold began to be viewed like the green that grows on copper pipes right before they fall apart and flood one’s basement.
When Holtz took over in 1986, charged with recharging college football’s once-proudest program, he immediately established navy blue as the team’s dominant color, harking back to the Ara Parseghian era of 1964-74, when the team racked up nearly 100 wins and earned two national titles. The lone exceptions were both bowl games in an effort to ignite a spark in his underdog roster. The first one worked — and did so famously.
“It was the [1992] Sugar Bowl against Florida, and a lot of people were saying we shouldn’t be in that game, that we were only there because we were Notre Dame and not because we were as good as them,” recalled a still-bristling Jerome Bettis. “Coach Holtz showed us an old movie, ‘Wake Up The Echoes,’ about Notre Dame football history. Then we got into the locker room and we had green numbers on the jerseys and green socks. All we had worn the whole time I was there was navy and white. Man, it was on.”
Bettis ran for 150 yards and three touchdowns, and the Irish outscored Steve Spurrier’s Fun ‘n’ Gun Gators 39-28.
Unfortunately, that era’s other wearing o’ the green didn’t go so great. Holtz’s other emerald effort was a 41-24 loss to Colorado in the 1995 Fiesta Bowl. His successor, Bob Davie, selected green jerseys for the 1999 Gator Bowl … and Notre Dame lost to Georgia Tech by a touchdown.
Davie’s heir, Tyrone Willingham, had his 2002 team sitting 8-0 and ranked fourth in the nation amid cries of “The Irish are back!” Then it lost 14-7 to unranked Boston College while wearing green jerseys. Notre Dame dropped eight of its next 12 games, and by the end of the next season, Willingham was out.
The soul-crushing Bush Push loss to USC in 2005 … yep, green jerseys. Just two years later, coach Charlie Weis pulled them out again against USC … and the Irish lost 38-0. Why did they keep insisting on wearing their verde versions against the Trojans? Because of the game that many still mistakenly believe was the day the Irish first went with the full-on sage smocks.
‘A Green Machine?! Look at the jerseys!’
Keith Jackson could barely contain himself. The greatest voice in the history of the game cracked as he spotted Notre Dame walking out of the tunnel behind a massive Trojan horse, the 11th-ranked Irish taking the field to face No. 5 USC. It was Oct. 22, 1977. Jackson’s heightened sense of excitement was nothing compared to that of the 59,075 in attendance at Notre Dame Stadium, many of whom instinctively jumped the stone wall that separated the student section from the field and ran out to form an impromptu tunnel extension for quarterback Joe Montana and his teammates to stride through.
“We actually warmed up for that game in our regular blue jerseys, like normal, but when we got dressed, we had green socks, and that wasn’t normal, so a lot of the guys were wondering what was up with that,” Montana said. “When we came back in from warmups, there were green jerseys with gold numbers, and man, a lot of our guys went crazy over that.”
Coach Dan Devine had cooked up the scheme with basketball coach Digger Phelps and called his captains into his office earlier in the week to pitch the idea. They loved it. (Again, young people, right? That hasn’t changed.) The Irish won the game in a rout, 49-19, and went on to win the national championship via another lopsided victory, over Texas in the Cotton Bowl.
“I think people forget this now, but that became the uniform,” Montana reminded us. He’s right. Devine’s teams wore green unis for the remainder of his tenure, fully green at home and green numbers on the road, all the way through 1980. His record in green? 31-9-1.
What’s more, it wasn’t the first time they’d done that.
Frank Leahy, true Irishman
In 1941, Frank Leahy was named the head football coach at Notre Dame. He was Nebraska-born, was the son of Irish parents, had played tackle at Notre Dame and had coached at Boston College. The man was only slightly less Irish-Catholic than Saint Patrick. So when he took over the program, he draped his footballers in green, first using them as alternate uniforms before going green full time at the onset of World War II. He never went back.
Leahy’s teams posted an overall record of 87-11-9, and after switching to green for good, they had a run of 39 games without a loss (37-0-2). The most famous of Leahy’s players was 1947 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lujack, who made the cover of Life magazine on Sept. 29, 1947, in his sparkling technicolor green jersey.
“I have signed so many copies of that magazine cover over the last 70 years,” Lujack said in 2017, sitting in a booth in a sports bar adjacent to Notre Dame Stadium, pointing to a framed copy of that very cover hanging on the wall. Lujack died earlier this year at age 98. “I think that green has gotten brighter over the years. Almost as bright as the jerseys they wear now from time to time.”
After Leahy retired in 1953 with four (many argue it should be five) national titles, the Notre Dame program slid into hard times before Parseghian’s arrival a decade later. All those losses gave the green jerseys an unfair reputation as being a jinx. That long malachite malaise also altered the story of where the OG Original Greens had first been stitched together.
The creator couldn’t have been … wait … could it?
Do you see what the Rock is sewing?!
Knute Rockne has been dead for 82 years, killed in a plane crash in 1931. But even now, he might be the most famous college football coach who ever stalked a sideline. He still owns the highest winning percentage of any modern-era coach (.881). He introduced defensive and offensive tactics that still have shadows in today’s hyperspeed game, most famously popularizing and modernizing the forward pass.
And that’s why he introduced green jerseys.
The idea of lucky laundry was to help his quarterbacks better spot their passing targets downfield against opponents who wore similar uniform colors as his team did. Back then, that was pretty much everyone. It was a sea of grays, whites and navy blues. Not even gold or yellow helmets helped amid a schedule packed with the likes of Army, Navy, Purdue and Iowa.
Green immediately stood out. Notre Dame historians have long claimed that it was a game against the Hawkeyes in 1921 when Rockne first pulled green shirts off the rack. Oddly enough, that was also the only game the Irish lost that season, 10-7. There is also zero photographic evidence that this actually happened. Hey, it was the 1920s. Everything was in black and white!
We do know for certain that Notre Dame sported green five years later against a navy-and-white-clad opponent in Penn State. The Irish won that contest 28-0. Multiple newspaper stories tell tales of an emerald Irish look in other games, all against other similarly dark-and-drab-dressed foes. Rockne’s predecessors also used green selectively, until his former player Leahy went evergreen years later.
So on Saturday night, as we all watch the Irish run into the stadium that Rockne designed, let’s take a moment to pause and think of the All-American himself, perpetually stuck in black and white, watching from the Great Green Beyond as Notre Dame sparkles in viridian splendor, in all its 4K UHD glory.
The Rock will no doubt be green with envy.
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Kiley McDaniel
MLB held its fourth annual draft lottery at the winter meetings in Orlando on Tuesday, and the Chicago White Sox landed the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 MLB draft.
It’s still very early in the draft process, but it’s a perfect time for a quick five-pick mini-mock draft to see how things could play out in July. Four of the five players in last winter’s edition of this exercise landed in the top 11 picks on draft day, so it’s fair to think we have a reasonable idea of how the top picks will play out even though a lot can change in the seven months ahead.
Here is my early prediction for the first five picks in the 2026 MLB draft, after consulting with industry sources combined with my own scouting.
1. Chicago White Sox: Roch Cholowsky, SS, UCLA
Cholowsky was a big name in the 2023 draft, ranking 32nd on my final board as a standout defender with solid tools, but questions on his overall offensive upside along with a big asking price. His bonus price wasn’t met and he was solid as a freshman at UCLA, then took a huge jump forward as a sophomore, hitting 23 home runs last season.
He is still a standout defender but now both his (above-average) hit and (plus) power tools have developed, allowing evaluators to go back over the last decade and find comps at the tops of previous drafts, like Dansby Swanson or Troy Tulowitzki. Cholowsky has a pretty solid lead on the pack for the top pick right now, but it isn’t insurmountable due to the solid group of up-the-middle, high-upside talents in this class.
The lottery couldn’t have gone better for the White Sox after a 102-loss season, landing the top pick in a year where there is a clear preseason favorite to be the top pick. Chase Meidroth and Colson Montgomery are solid shortstop options in the big leagues with Caleb Bonemer and Billy Carlson as Top 100 types in the low minors, but Cholowsky would give the White Sox a great problem: too many good players at the most important position on the field.
2. Tampa Bay Rays: Grady Emerson, SS, Fort Worth Christian (Texas) HS, Texas commit
Emerson has been touted as the top prep prospect in the 2026 class for years and has held that title through the summer showcase season and fall workouts. He’s a 6-foot-2, left-handed hitting shortstop who projects as above average to plus at almost everything on the field. He may not be truly plus-plus at anything right now, but he’s still only 17 years old, so that could develop.
Given his long track record of being an elite prospect and being in the most desirable player demographic in the draft, he’s a consensus talent in this pick area, even for teams that don’t normally take high school players at the top. The Rays are not that team, taking a prep shortstop in the top two rounds in each of the last three drafts; Tampa Bay also loves left-handed hitters. Emerson is the rare prep prospect who is a safer pick than the vast majority of college players but also comes with more upside.
3. Minnesota Twins: Justin Lebron, SS, Alabama
Lebron was scouted as part of the loaded 2023 prep class alongside prep teammate Antonio Jimenez, who was a third-round pick of the Mets out of UCF in 2025. Lebron’s hitability and athleticism each jumped a tick right when he got to Tuscaloosa and the 6-foot-2 shortstop is now a plus runner, thrower and defender with above-average raw power. His pitch selection is fine with the only question being about his bat-to-ball ability due to worse-than-average miss rates last season, fueled somewhat by an uphill, power-driven approach. If Lebron can find a happy medium between his swing plane, contact and power, he could challenge Cholowsky as the top pick.
The Twins haven’t been scared of a little swing-and-miss if it comes with big upside in recent drafts, like with Billy Amick, Brandon Winokur and Quentin Young the last three years, but also love taking collegiate shortstops like Kaelen Culpepper, Marek Houston and Kyle DeBarge. Lebron threads the needle of certainty given his tools and positional profile but also untapped upside due to his contact/power balance being a little off kilter at the moment.
4. San Francisco Giants: Drew Burress, CF, Georgia Tech
Burress was a pick to click of mine in the 2023 draft, ranking 40th overall on my board (among the highest ranks among media and teams), but ultimately proving unsignable to the teams that also had him in that range. He stands only 5-foot-8, so impact power wasn’t expected at that point, but he had more power than you might think given his size, along with a long track record of hitting for average, plus speed and center-field defense.
Burress exploded at Georgia Tech, particularly when it comes to power — hitting 25 homers as a freshman then 19 in his sophomore year — fueled by what is now above-average raw power. He grades as above average or plus in all five tools, but his approach/swing is more power-oriented than in high school, so balancing his abilities at the plate in pro ball could be key to reaching his ceiling. The Giants have picked college position players with their top three picks each of the last two years and will likely be staring at a best available player from that same demographic in 2026.
5. Pittsburgh Pirates: A.J. Gracia, OF, Virginia
Gracia had almost no national scouting profile coming out of a New Jersey high school as a two-way player in 2023 before heading to Duke. He immediately showed scouts he should’ve been considered a real pro prospect out of high school, hitting .305 with 14 homers as a freshman, then following it up with more walks, fewer strikeouts and 15 homers as a sophomore. Gracia transferred to Virginia after the season, following much of the Duke coaching staff.
He is a 6-foot-3 center/right field tweener for now who is above average at almost everything in the batter’s box, especially his ability to lift/pull the ball in games, though his swing can get too uphill at times.
The Pirates seem to be turning the corner with Konnor Griffin and Bubba Chandler joining Paul Skenes and Co. while they’re also looking to spend money in free agency, so I see them leaning into the college position-player group that is a strength in this class.
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Dan Murphy
After another week of frustrating setbacks, at the end of a frustrating year trying to bring stability to their industry, a growing number of college athletic directors say they are interested in exploring a once-unthinkable option: collective bargaining with their players.
Dozens of athletic directors will gather in Las Vegas over the next few days for an annual conference. They had hoped to be raising toasts to the U.S. House of Representatives. But for the second time in three months, House members balked last week at voting on a bill that would give the NCAA protection from antitrust lawsuits and employment threats. So instead, they will be greeted by one of the Strip’s specialties: the cold-slap realization of needing a better plan.
“I’m not sure I can sit back today and say I’m really proud of what we’ve become,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey told ESPN late last week. “There is a solution. We just have to work together to find it, and maybe collective bargaining is it.”
Athletic directors see only two paths to a future in which the college sports industry can enforce rules and defend them in court: Either Congress grants them an exemption from antitrust laws, or they collectively bargain with athletes. As Dickey said, and others have echoed quietly in the past several days, it has become irresponsible to continue to hope for an antitrust bailout without at least fully kicking the tires on the other option.
“If Congress ends up solving it for us, and it ends up being a healthy solution I’ll be the first one to do cartwheels down the street,” said Tennessee athletic director Danny White when speaking to ESPN about his interest in collective bargaining months ago. “But what are the chances they get it right when the NCAA couldn’t even get it right? We should be solving it ourselves.”
Some athletic directors thought they had solved their era of relative lawlessness back in July. The NCAA and its schools agreed to pay $2.8 billion in the House settlement to purchase a very expensive set of guardrails meant to put a cap on how much teams could spend to acquire players. The schools also agreed to fund the College Sports Commission, a new agency created by the settlement to police those restrictions.
But without an antitrust exemption, any school or player who doesn’t like a punishment they receive for bursting through those guardrails can file a lawsuit and give themselves a pretty good chance of wiggling out of a penalty. The CSC’s plan — crafted largely by leaders of the Power 4 conferences — to enforce those rules without an antitrust exemption was to get all their schools to sign a promise that they wouldn’t file any such lawsuits. On the same day that Congress’ attempt crumbled last week, seven state attorneys general angrily encouraged their schools not to sign the CSC’s proposed agreement.
In the wake of the attorneys general’s opposition, a loose deadline to sign the agreement came and went, with many schools declining to participate. So, college football is steamrolling toward another transfer portal season without any sheriff that has the legal backing to police how teams spend money on building their rosters.
That’s why college sports fans have heard head football coaches like Lane Kiffin openly describe how they negotiated for the biggest player payroll possible in a system where all teams are supposed to be capped at the same $20.5 million limit. Right now, the rules aren’t real. The stability promised as part of the House settlement doesn’t appear to be imminent. Meanwhile, the tab for potential damages in future antitrust lawsuits continues to grow larger with each passing day.
Collective bargaining isn’t easy, either. Under the current law, players would need to be employees to negotiate a legally binding deal. The NCAA and most campus leaders are adamantly opposed to turning athletes into employees for several reasons, including the added costs and infrastructure it would require.
The industry would need to make tough decisions about which college athletes should be able to bargain and how to divide them into logical groups. Should the players be divided by conference? Should all football players negotiate together? What entity would sit across from them at the bargaining table?
On Monday, Athletes.Org, a group that has been working for two years to become college sports’ version of a players’ union, published a 35-page proposal for what an agreement might look like. Their goal was to show it is possible to answer the thorny, in-the-weeds questions that have led many leaders in college sports to quickly dismiss collective bargaining as a viable option.
Multiple athletic directors and a sitting university president are taking the proposal seriously — a milestone for one of the several upstart entities working to gain credibility as a representative for college athletes. Syracuse chancellor and president Kent Syverud said Monday that he has long felt the best way forward for college sports is a negotiation where athletes have “a real collective voice in setting the rules.”
“[This template] is an important step toward that kind of partnership-based framework,” he said in a statement released with AO’s plan. “… I’m encouraged to see this conversation happening more openly, so everyone can fully understand what’s at stake.”
White, the Tennessee athletic director, has also spent years working with lawyers to craft a collective bargaining option. In his plan, the top brands in college football would form a single private company, which could then employ players. He says that would provide a solution in states where employees of public institutions are not legally allowed to unionize.
“I don’t understand why everyone’s so afraid of employment status,” White said. “We have kids all over our campus that have jobs. … We have kids in our athletic department that are also students here that work in our equipment room, and they have employee status. How that became a dirty word, I don’t get it.”
White said athletes could be split into groups by sport to negotiate for a percentage of the revenue they help to generate.
The result could be expensive for schools. Then again, paying lawyers and lobbyists isn’t cheap either. The NCAA and the four power conferences combined to spend more than $9 million on lobbyists between 2021 and 2024, the latest year where public data is available. That’s a relatively small figure compared to the fees and penalties they could face if they continue to lose antitrust cases in federal court.
“I’m not smart enough to say [collective bargaining] is the only answer or the best answer,” Dickey said. “But I think the onus is on us to at least curiously question: How do you set something up that can be sustainable? What currently is happening is not.”
Players and coaches are frustrated with the current system, wanting to negotiate salaries and build rosters with a clear idea of what rules will actually be enforced. Dickey says fans are frustrated as they invest energy and money into their favorite teams without understanding what the future holds. And athletic directors, who want to plan a yearly budget and help direct their employees, are frustrated too.
“It has been very difficult on campus. I can’t emphasize that enough,” White said. “It’s been brutal in a lot of ways. It continues to be as we try to navigate these waters without a clear-cut solution.”
This week White and Dickey won’t be alone in their frustration. They’ll be among a growing group of peers who are pushing to explore a new solution.
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