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Finally, there was Linebacker Jim Carroll, a 225-lb. Georgian who was to be the key man in Parseghian's prostyle 4-4-3 defense. Last year Carroll was credited with 59 tackles; this year he has already made 120, to lead the team. He shrugged off a painful knee injury to stack up a last-ditch Pitt drive two weeks ago, and he was easily the angriest man on the squad last week when newsmen suggested the possibility of Michigan State's upsetting the top-ranked Irish. Maybe that's because he is Irish. "Listen," he growled. "We're No. 1. I've played with losing teams all my life, and nobody's going to take No. 1 away from me."
Nobody is going to take it away from Ara Parseghian either—not if the everliving, ever-loving spirit of Notre Dame can help it. On a "Clobber Board" in the Notre Dame locker room, messages supposedly sent by rival teams are posted to stoke the fires of effort. "Your luck has run out," read one signed The Panther. "I will beat you this Saturday because I am bigger and stronger and meaner than you are." Everywhere the team goes, the coach goes—instructing, cajoling, just being there to keep an eye on everything. After the Wisconsin game, Parseghian told his wife Kathleen not to meet him at the airport—"I want to go with the team to the campus." Before the Navy game in Philadelphia, local Notre Dame alumni had a motorcade all arranged to whisk Irish officials from the airport to the hotel. Parseghian turned down the car, insisted on riding in the team bus.
For Ara Parseghian, the man who cannot stand to lose, the day begins at 5:30 a.m. with four cups of coffee, usually ends with a tranquilizer and the Late Late Show. Even when he eats, he has a pencil in the other hand, diagramming a play. Is there something he has forgotten, some minuscule detail he has overlooked, some new way to win? There has to be, there always is at Notre Dame. Last week, bone-weary, he paused in Memorial Building to confront a bust of Knute Rockne. "You," he said softly. "You started all this."