It's OK to go after Lou Holtz

It might not have been the best look, but go off, Ryan Day

In the minutes immediately after his team beat Notre Dame 17-14 in a matchup of top-10 teams playing under the shadow of Touchdown Jesus, Ohio State coach Ryan Day wasn’t thinking about the Buckeyes’ game-winning one-yard touchdown run with one second remaining or the 15-play, 65-yard drive that preceded it.

He was thinking about an 86-year-old man.

“I’d like to know where Lou Holtz is right now,” Day said in a post-game interview with NBC. “What he said about our team, I cannot believe. This is a tough team right here. We’re proud to be from Ohio. It’s always been Ohio against the world. And it will continue to be Ohio against the world. I love those kids, and we’ve got a tough team."

Day’s impassioned comment was a response to Holtz, the former Notre Dame coach, who said two days earlier in an interview on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Ohio State’s previous losses under Day occurred because the opponents were more physical than the Buckeyes.

Holtz’s remarks came as he was being interviewed by someone dressed as and impersonating Holtz’s distinctive voice and cadence. Earlier this week, and coming off Ohio State’s bye week, Holtz dropped the Buckeyes five spots on his Football Writers Association of America ballot.

The simmering beef between the two is objectively and undeniably funny. But in the aftermath of Day’s NBC interview, there was a strain of widespread criticism for going after Holtz, who is nearly exactly twice as old as Day. Why are you, the head coach at one of the historical powerhouses of the sport and the overseer of a current top-five team, picking a fight with an octogenarian who hasn’t coached in two decades?

It’s an argument that is flawed in a couple of ways. For one, Day wasn’t going after Holtz, per se. Rather, Holtz was a convenient proxy for a vocal group of Ohio State fans and notable former Buckeyes players who have espoused the same beliefs about Day’s teams.

Then there’s this – even among all of the flawed individuals who have chosen coaching major college football as their life’s work, Holtz, as he has shown throughout his career, is something much worse.

He buddied up with a segregationist

In the early 1970s, while a young and ambitious thirty-something coach at N.C. State, Holtz stuck up a relationship with a powerful ally – first-term U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.

It’s not uncommon for a college football coach to rub elbows with politicians in their state, but what developed between Holtz and Helms was something more.

Holtz repeatedly spoke of Helms’ character in glowing terms, but, of course, there was one glaring problem with Helms’ character – he was an ardent opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing it was a state matter that the federal government had no business trying to legislate. Helms entered the Senate nine years after the law’s passage, but if he and others that were ideologically aligned on the issue had their way, millions of Black people across the south would have been subjected to the abuses of codified segregation for many more years or perhaps even decades.

In 1990, while running for re-election against Charlotte mayor Harvey Gant, who was vying to become the first Black U.S. Senator in the state’s history, Helms ran an infamous ad in which a pair of white hands crumpled up a rejection letter while a narrator read a brooding script.

“You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota,” it said. “Is that really fair?”

In a 1977 editorial, the Arkansas Gazette wrote that Helms was “a senator situated philosophically somewhere between Louis the Sun King and Attila the Hun: Helms is so far right that he threatens to displace Old Strom Thurmond as the most troglodytic figure in the U.S. Senate.”

Whenever his relationship with Helms would draw scrutiny, Holtz would insist that he didn’t agree with the Senator on every issue. He merely admired who he was as a person. 

Over the years, that friendship morphed into public advocacy. Holtz spoke at Helms fundraisers, even years after he was coaching in North Carolina.

In 1983, Holtz recorded two television commercials from his office at Arkansas, where he was the head coach at the time, supporting Helms’ re-election campaign – which, mind you, was taking place hundreds of miles from Holtz in a state in which he hadn’t lived for eight years.

That year, Helms was conducting a 16-day filibuster to try to prevent the passage of a federal law honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the time, and in contrast to the state of affairs in 2023, public sentiment on such a holiday was split almost evenly, as public polling at that time showed King didn’t enjoy anything close to the near universal favorability he posthumously has today. Still, even Holtz said he didn’t agree with Helms on the subject.

The ads never aired, but for Holtz, the damage had been done. His actions received swift backlash from many in Arkansas. More selfishly for the Razorbacks, there were worries over how his endorsement of a man most famous for championing the continued existence of Jim Crow would affect Holtz’s ability to recruit Black athletes. Perhaps most damningly, the controversy swirled as the Razorbacks went 6-5 in 1983, Holtz’s worst record in his seven years there. He had a wandering eye at the time, too, as he had reportedly threatened to resign at least four times in a 14-month span.

Though there was uncertainty over whether he resigned or was fired by athletic director Frank Broyles, the end result was the same – Holtz was out as Arkansas’ coach in Dec. 1983.

He might have said a team honoring the memory of a dead teammate was “living a lie”

In the final days of preparation before Notre Dame was set to face Colorado in the Orange Bowl, Holtz delivered a speech to his players he hoped would inspire them just over a month after a lopsided loss at Miami ended their dreams of an undefeated season.

"Let me tell you what, they've been living a lie, living a lie all year," Holtz said. "...There can't be any skier [sic] high than what they're going to be. We just have to make sure we take care of our football team…we're going to whip them."

In a vacuum, there was nothing inherently wrong with Holtz’s choice of words. Coaches often deliver addresses meant to rouse their players, particularly before a high-profile, high-stakes game.

In the case of his opponent that particular week, though, there was some important context. 

Colorado entered the bowl matchup with an undefeated record and a No. 1 national ranking. That dramatic rise for the upstart program even came with an uplifting human interest story, albeit one rooted in tragedy. That September, three games into the season, Sal Aunese, the Buffs’ starting quarterback the previous two seasons, died from stomach cancer at 21 years old. Following Aunese’s death, and even in the final weeks of his excruciating battle, Aunese’s teammates had dedicated their season to their quarterback, teammate and friend, and while doing so, they won a school-record 11 games.

Unfortunately for Holtz, his speech was given during a 15-minute window in which photographers and television crews were permitted to shoot the Fighting Irish’s practice. Holtz’s words were captured and aired by Denver television station KCNC and got back to understandably irate Colorado players and coaches.

Holtz said his comments weren’t in reference to Aunese and that they were merely meant to motivate his team. Rather, he had been talking about Colorado’s level of competition that season in the Big Eight Conference, specifically mentioning Kansas State, and that frustration would set in for the Buffs’ offense as the game went on. It was a strange sentiment considering Colorado that season had scored 38 against a top-10 Illinois team, 28 against a ranked Washington squad and 27 against Big Eight powerhouse Nebraska, which was No. 3 in the country at the time of the game.

Holtz apologized with his own personal twist on “I’m sorry if they were offended” and spoke to Buffs coach Bill McCartney about the matter.

In fairness to Holtz, there is at least some reason to believe that he might not have been talking about Aunese.

At an Orange Bowl luncheon, Holtz mistakenly told the crowd of about 1,400 that Aunese was Colorado’s quarterback. Later in the luncheon, McCartney was asked by Bob Griese, the former Dolphins quarterback who was emceeing the event, to list any negatives about Notre Dame.

“First of all, they don’t know who our quarterback is,” McCartney said. “Our quarterback is not Sal Aunese. He’s dead. Our quarterback is Darian Hagan. They’re in trouble right there because they’re going to think we only have 10 guys on the field.”

He was accused of mistreating and juicing his players

In the early 1990s, Holtz was the subject of two pieces of journalism that removed some of the veneer of his work in rebuilding Notre Dame into a championship program.