Marquette-Notre Dame: This time, it's slightly less personal (because we've graduated) ...but personal nonetheless

While the Marquette-Notre Dame basketball rivalry may not grab the interest of the entire country, or even all of the teams' current players, this game always means a ton to us MU faithful--especially those of us from the Chicago area.

Like a lot of rivalries, MU-ND stems as much from academics and socioeconomics than from actual gameplay. Both schools offer Catholic-based educations and have historically held a storng presence in the midwest--particularly around Chicago. By reputation, Notre Dame is more provincial, prestegious, and acadmeically selective while Marquette is more welcoming to students of a less refined, lower achieving ilk.

From the Marquette perspective, Notre Dame is a blue-blooded, elitist club whose lofty standing far outpaces its true academic and social merit. From the Notre Dame perspective, Marquette is a harmless speck, a rung or two down the academic ladder, and its students are unruly drunks who harbor bitterness for their own failure to gain admittance to ND.

Of course, these are just extremes of the stereotypes, but they come out in full force each time the teams match up. Whether it's posterboard signs claiming a greater share of God's love or some bitchy, uptight lady scolding Nate, Mike and I for cheering too loudly at the Joyce Center, the MU-ND game always seems to reinforce these stereotypes.

To this day, Digger Phelps hates Marquette and is pretty bad at hiding it. If you'd watched him closely on ESPN last year, you'd have thought the Irish were the 10-6 team, and Marquette was the team struggling to make the Big East tourney.

The Marquette that Digger knew was the Marquette of Al McGuire, who--in their many matchups when both schools were independents--was constantly showing up the refs, showing up Digger's team, and showing up Digger. Also, Digger is a huge baby and hasn't gotten over a couple incidents when Marquette fans screamed profanities at him and his team.

This year, both teams are doing rather well, and both teams want a win pretty badly Saturday afternoon, so expect this year's atmosphere to be intense. If you have ESPN Full Court (the game is also on ABC), you may even catch a glimpse of YCS's Mike and Danny if you look hard enough (and if you know what they look like).

So if us MU grads on the YCS staff take a little extra pleasure in this game, should we win it, we just want you readers to know where we're coming from. We strive on this blog to be as objective and self-critical as we can be. But as a general rule, we really dislike Notre Dame and enjoy slandering their name.

You know, just so you understand where we're coming from.