For 13 seconds, Rice had the No. 1 team in the country right where it wanted them.
On November 5, 1988, the winless Owls walked into Notre Dame Stadium and did something few expected. They took the opening kickoff and marched 70 yards against Lou Holtz’s undefeated Fighting Irish, eventually settling for a 23-yard Clint Parsons field goal and a 3-0 lead. It was Notre Dame’s first week defending the No. 1 ranking, and after a less-than-convincing victory over Navy the week before, the Irish were facing questions about whether they truly deserved to be there.
For 13 seconds, those questions may have felt a little louder.
Then the Owls kicked the ball to a freshman named Raghib Ismail.
Learning to Be No. 1
Notre Dame entered the afternoon 8-0, riding an 11-game home winning streak and attempting to start a season 9-0 for the first time since the 1973 national championship team.
The Irish had already survived one of the most memorable games in college football history, defeating No. 1 Miami 31-30 in South Bend three weeks earlier. That victory had helped propel Notre Dame to the top of the polls, but the previous week’s lackluster performance against Navy had given critics reason to question whether the Irish belonged there.
Holtz wasn’t particularly interested in debating whether his team was the best in America. His concern was much simpler.
“I don’t care who else is better than us, just as long as it wasn’t in this stadium today,” he said after the Rice game.
His players, however, knew they hadn’t looked like the nation’s best team against Navy. Offensive guard Tim Grunhard said Notre Dame entered the Rice game with something to prove.
“Our number-one goal was to get back to basics and get that attitude we had at the beginning of the season,” Grunhard said.
At first, that attitude seemed to be missing. Quarterback Quentis Roper led Rice on a 70-yard opening drive, helped along by two Notre Dame offsides penalties and missed assignments in the Irish secondary. The Owls reached the Notre Dame six before the defense finally stiffened and forced Rice to settle for Parsons’ field goal.
“We came out a little sluggish, but from then on, we started to tighten up,” linebacker Michael Stonebreaker said.
Before the defense had another chance to tighten anything, Notre Dame’s special teams took care of the deficit.
Here Comes the Rocket
Parsons’ field goal gave Rice a 3-0 lead. Thirteen seconds later, it was gone.
Raghib “Rocket” Ismail fielded the ensuing kickoff and exploded through the Rice coverage. With a key block from reserve quarterback Steve Belles helping spring him, the freshman raced 87 yards for a touchdown and a 7-3 Notre Dame lead.
Rice coach Jerry Berndt knew almost immediately how the play was going to end.
“We made two crucial mistakes. We had a couple of guys out of lanes. But as soon as he hit it, I knew he had a touchdown,” Berndt said.
Ismail’s nickname had been given to him by his eighth-grade track coach because of the way he exploded out of the starting blocks. By the time he arrived at Notre Dame, the freshman had reportedly been clocked at 4.28 seconds in the 40-yard dash, the fastest time on the Irish roster. Rice had just received a firsthand demonstration of that speed.
Yet afterward, Ismail wanted little of the credit.
“I have to give credit where credit is due, and none of it goes to me,” he said. “The whole key to the returns was getting through the first line of blocking, and nobody got a clean shot at me.”
One of the men helping make that happen was Belles. Buried on the quarterback depth chart behind Tony Rice, Belles knew opportunities to contribute under center would be limited. Earlier in the season, he had approached the coaching staff about playing special teams instead. Soon, the 6-foot-4, 211-pound reserve quarterback was throwing his body into blocks on kickoff returns. Against Rice, that willingness to find another way to help paid off, as Belles delivered key blocks on both of Ismail’s touchdown returns.
Back to Basics
Once Rocket erased Rice’s early lead, Notre Dame began looking much more like the team that had earned the nation’s No. 1 ranking. The Irish went back to what they did best, relying heavily on a ground game that saw 14 different Notre Dame players carry the football.
Notre Dame rushed 52 times for 294 yards. Mark Green led the way with 66 yards on only five carries, including a 40-yard first-quarter run that helped set up the Irish’s second touchdown. Fullback Anthony Johnson scored on runs of two and three yards, while Tony Brooks added another touchdown from a yard out.
The Irish scored on four of their five first-half possessions, with only a Ricky Watters fumble at the Rice 21 keeping Notre Dame off the scoreboard on the other.
The defense recovered from Rice’s opening drive just as dramatically. Notre Dame recorded a season-high five sacks, with sophomore Chris Zorich accounting for two of them, while Stonebreaker finished with 13 tackles. By the end of the afternoon, the Irish had forced four Rice turnovers and held the Owls to just 32 rushing yards.
One of those turnovers came from an unlikely source. With 7:33 remaining in the first half, 6-foot-7 defensive tackle Jeff Alm intercepted a Roper pass at the line of scrimmage.
“I didn’t expect the ball, it kind of just fell into my hands,” Alm said afterward, giving much of the credit to the defensive backs whose coverage forced Roper to throw short.
Notre Dame turned the interception into points when Brooks scored from one yard out and Johnson followed with a successful two-point conversion. The teams exchanged field goals late in the second quarter, and by halftime, that surprising 3-0 Rice lead seemed like a distant memory.
Notre Dame led 31-6.
The Rocket Launches Again
Freshman Rodney Culver added a 19-yard touchdown run midway through the third quarter, extending the Irish lead to 38-6. With the outcome no longer in much doubt, Holtz began reaching deeper into his bench and giving his young players an opportunity to see the field.
Rice opened the fourth quarter with Parsons connecting on a 45-yard field goal to make the score 38-9. That meant the Owls had to kick the ball back to Notre Dame, and despite trying to squib the kick and disrupt the return, they once again gave Ismail an opportunity.
The Rocket picked up the ball, cut toward the left side of the field and took off. Eighty-three yards later, he was in the end zone for the second time that afternoon.
“The last one we were just trying to squib it and take away their rhythm, but they still hit on us,” Berndt said.
With his second touchdown return, Ismail became just the fifth player in Division I-A history to return two kickoffs for touchdowns in the same game and the first to accomplish the feat since Southern California’s Anthony Davis did it against Notre Dame in 1972.
For Notre Dame, the record stretched back even further. The only other Irish player to return two kickoffs for touchdowns in a single game was Paul Castner, who had done it against Kalamazoo in 1922. Sixty-six years later, a freshman called Rocket had finally matched him.
One More Piece of History
The game still had one unusual moment to offer.
Notre Dame added a Billy Hackett field goal and, with 46 seconds remaining, reserve tailback Joe Jarosz scored on a six-yard run to make it 54-9. All that seemingly remained was the extra point.
Instead, Rice’s Nigel Codrington blocked Hackett’s kick. Bill Stone picked up the football and raced 85 yards in the opposite direction, all the way to the Notre Dame end zone, giving the Owls two points.
It was more than simply a strange ending to a lopsided game. The NCAA had adopted a new conversion rule that season allowing the defense to score on a failed conversion attempt. Stone’s return marked the first time the new rule had produced a defensive score in Division I-A play.
The final score was Notre Dame 54, Rice 11.
One More Step Toward a Championship
Notre Dame was 9-0.
On that same Saturday, No. 4 West Virginia also improved to 9-0 with a 51-13 victory over Cincinnati. Around college football, speculation was already beginning about the possibility of the two undefeated teams eventually meeting with a national championship at stake.
They would.
But on November 5, there was still plenty of football standing between Notre Dame and a championship. The Irish had an open date ahead before hosting Penn State and then traveling to Los Angeles for a showdown with No. 2 USC.
Against Rice, however, they had answered many of the questions raised by the previous week’s performance against Navy. Notre Dame amassed 439 yards of total offense, rushed for 294, forced four turnovers and turned an early three-point deficit into a 43-point victory.
Holtz had spent much of the season downplaying his team’s accomplishments, even as the victories kept piling up. After this one, he allowed himself to think about what it might be like if being No. 1 eventually became normal.
“I would like to get to the point that everybody says, ho-hum, we’re number one and no big deal,” Holtz said.
There wasn’t much “ho-hum” about what was happening in South Bend that fall.
Notre Dame would defeat Penn State two weeks later before traveling west and beating No. 2 USC 27-10. And on January 2, 1989, the team that had also moved to 9-0 on this November afternoon—West Virginia—would be waiting for the Irish in the Fiesta Bowl. Notre Dame won that one, too, completing a perfect 12-0 season and claiming the national championship.
Looking back at the Rice game in the 1988 Notre Dame Football Review, writer Mike Farnan suggested that the 54-11 victory might ultimately be remembered “as not being very memorable.”
Maybe that’s understandable. When a season includes Miami, USC and a national championship, a November blowout of a winless Rice team can easily disappear into the background.
But championship seasons aren’t built only from the games everyone remembers. Sometimes they’re built on an ordinary November afternoon, when the No. 1 team in the country has to prove it can handle being No. 1.
And sometimes, one of those supposedly forgettable afternoons gives a freshman named Rocket the chance to take off.
Twice.
Go Irish! Beat Owls!
(Research gathered from The Scholastic: Notre Dame Football Review 1988, the Notre Dame Observer, and UPI.)
