Notre Dame escapes the unfriendly confines of Knoxville, Tennessee with a thrilling 34-29 victory over the 9th-ranked Volunteers
By Andy Hilger
1990 Scholastic Football Review
Knoxville, Tennessee, is nothing if not an exceedingly hostile environment to take a football team into. Football is a religion and the Tennessee Volunteers are gods. Opposing teams have been known to be shaken to their very souls. Notre Dame held strong though, and escaped with a win, their number one ranking and a ticket to Miami.
Rod Smith’s fingertip interception silenced the crowd and stunned an explosive Tennessee football team, preserving the victory for the top-ranked Irish. The Volunteers had roared back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit only to watch Smith, starting for the first time since the Michigan game, drift back and snag Andy Kelly’s pass five yards away from an uncovered Carl Pickens.
Smith, who had been burned by Alvin Harper on a similar play moments earlier, correctly read the route and adjusted his coverage. “I wasn’t really supposed to be in that position,” said Smith, “but I knew he was trying to go deep towards the corner of the end zone.” The two teams treated a crowd of 97,123 to “a tremendous college football game,” in the words of Lou Holtz. “We deserved to win the game. Tennessee could say the same thing.”
The victory locked up a second straight trip to the Orange Bowl for Notre Dame who, although top-ranked, were slight underdogs against the Vols. Ricky Watters’ discovery of a tough running style helped propel the Irish to victory. In addition to his own touchdown carries of 10 and 66 yards, the senior captain from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, threw a key block to spring Raghib Ismail for a 44-yard run which made the score 34-23 late in the fourth quarter.
Watters, after fumbling twice in the loss to Stanford, had seen reduced playing time in the four games since. Meanwhile, after a shaky outing against Michigan, Holtz revamped the secondary, landing Smith a spot on the sidelines.
“We were both on the outs,” said Watters, although both their silenced critics with with fine performances that day. But there was more than critics to be silenced. The second largest crowd in Neyland Stadium history erupted during every Tennessee uprising. The tremendous throng in attendance, accompanied by blaring loudspeakers, continuously rained down the chorus of “Rocky Top” upon the visitors. The Irish were prepared for…