Lou Holtz, ubiquitous college football coaching voice and Notre Dame’s last champion, dies at 89

Lou Holtz went to Woodruff, S.C., to sell his imagination.

Barely settled into the job as Notre Dame’s head coach, Holtz sat in the living room of Mary Rice to recruit the grandmother of an option quarterback who had never left his home state. Notre Dame was Holtz’s sixth head coaching job. He said it would be his defining one. The grandmother of Tony Rice bought in.

“I didn’t know Notre Dame was in Indiana,” Tony Rice said. “It was all based on the delivery of Coach Holtz, and he did a great job because at the end of the day it was her decision. He was totally different than those other coaches. He wasn’t trying to sell me, he sold himself to her, so I was gonna follow that little man.

“When they made Coach Holtz, they broke the mold.”

On Wednesday, the 89-year-old Holtz died in Orlando, Florida, his family announced in a statement. For all that Holtz accomplished in his 34 seasons as a head coach, he will be remembered as the man who returned Notre Dame to college football’s summit. He’s the last Irish head coach to win a national championship, with Rice running his option offense. Rice had a sign in his room at Notre Dame that read, “The Lord Is My Shepard, but Lou Holtz Is My Coach.” Holtz produced the program’s last Heisman Trophy winner, too, in receiver Tim Brown.

Holtz dragged Notre Dame into the modern college football era of his time, signing the program’s last No. 1 recruiting class, installing the “Play Like A Champion Today” sign players tap on their way to the field and presiding over the program at the start of its television contract with NBC. That national title in the 1988 season included an iconic win over No. 1 Miami, remembered as the “Catholics vs. Convicts” game. When Notre Dame hosted the Game of the Century against Florida State five years later, it also hosted the first on-campus broadcast of ESPN’s “College GameDay.”

Holtz went 249-132-7 as the head coach at William & Mary, NC State, Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame and South Carolina, with a single NFL season as New York Jets head coach that ended when Holtz resigned with a 3-10 record and one game to play. He won an ACC title at NC State, won the Southwest Conference at Arkansas and turned around South Carolina from 0-11 in his first season to 8-4 in his second. He won multiple bowl games at all three of those programs and notched multiple top-20 finishes.

But Holtz’s 11 years at Notre Dame set his legacy, resulting in 100 wins and a bronze statue of the coach that sits outside the southwest corner of Notre Dame Stadium by Gate D, known as the Lou Holtz Gate.

Controversies and angst are part of the Holtz story, too. His departures were rarely clean, from his mysterious firing at Arkansas to an acrimonious split with Notre Dame after he clashed with the university over admissions.

After retiring at Notre Dame, Holtz spent two seasons as an analyst for CBS before returning to coaching at South Carolina. The Gamecocks ended the previous season on a 10-game losing streak and proceeded to go 0-11 in Holtz’s first year, scoring a woeful 7.9 points per game. But just a year later, they went 8-4 and reached the first of back-to-back New Year’s Day bowl games.

Holtz was unable to return to that level in his next two seasons. He announced his retirement in 2004, two days before the regular-season finale against rival Clemson, which ended in an ugly brawl between the teams that caused both schools to ban themselves from a bowl game. A year later, the school self-reported five major NCAA violations under Holtz, primarily involving academic impropriety by athletics personnel, and served three years’ probation. Notre Dame and Minnesota also received probation stints as a result of violations under Holtz.

Holtz did not shrink from the spotlight in his post-coaching life, from his work as an analyst at ESPN to his forays into politics that included speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention when Donald Trump sought reelection to a second term as president. During Trump’s first term, he was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At Notre Dame, Holtz led the program out of the wilderness of the Gerry Faust era, leaning into the school’s traditions while pushing them forward. Faust, whom Notre Dame inexplicably hired straight from Moeller High School, went 30-26-1 in five seasons, capped by a 58-7 loss at Miami the week after Holtz was announced as his successor.

Even though Holtz declared himself no “miracle worker” during his introduction, he performed them for the next decade while remaining endearingly quotable and resembling the school’s leprechaun mascot. He embodied Notre Dame’s ability to punch above its weight. That approach created a new generation of fans whose sons and daughters are now Notre Dame students.

Notre Dame went 22-15-1 against top-10 opponents under Holtz; the five coaches who followed Holtz are a combined 9-30 in top-10 games. Even though Brian Kelly eventually surpassed Holtz (and Knute Rockne) atop Notre Dame’s career wins leaderboard, Kelly was just 4-10 in those top-10 games, a far cry from the big stage performer that Holtz was. Holtz even ripped Kelly’s greed when Kelly departed for LSU without a major bowl victory and just one victory over a top-ranked opponent. Holtz won five major bowl games and knocked off No. 1 twice.

Bob Davie went 1-7 against top-10 teams. Tyrone Willingham went 3-5. Charlie Weis was 1-8. Marcus Freeman is 4-6. Holtz reengaged with the program during Freeman’s tenure, returning to Notre Dame for the Texas A&M game in early September and attending the win at Arkansas weeks later as a guest of the Razorbacks.

It wasn’t just the results that mattered with Holtz, it was how he achieved them.

In the aftermath of the iconic 31-30 upset of Miami in Holtz’s lone national championship season, the coach claimed postgame that “this game was won by the Notre Dame spirit. You owe it to the student body, everybody that’s been here at Notre Dame, it’s the spirit that did it.” That kind of romanticism endeared Holtz to a generation.

Holtz quotations could fill a book — he has wrote more than half a dozen of them — and helped make him a college football character on top of a coach. His proclamation, “Those who know Notre Dame, no explanation’s necessary. Those who don’t, no explanation will suffice,” has become almost a tribal chant for alumni. He once described his record at William & Mary this way: “The problem is we have too many Marys and not enough Williams.” Those who attended motivational speeches by Holtz can recite without thinking, “Everybody needs four things in life: Something to do, someone to love, someone to believe in and something to hope for.”

Yet sentimentality had little place in how Holtz ran the Notre Dame program. For whatever folksy persona Holtz put out for public consumption, he was exacting in private. Holtz averaged three staff changes per season at Notre Dame, some triggered by better opportunities, some because Holtz wanted a better coach. His Notre Dame staffs included Urban Meyer, Barry Alvarez, Joe Moore, Charlie Strong and Rick Minter. His tenure featured coordinators being shown the door in-season and a projected certainty that whatever Holtz did schematically was right.

Not only was Holtz his own offensive coordinator, but he could also double as defensive coordinator when necessary, including in the 1992 Sugar Bowl when Notre Dame upset Florida and second-year head coach Steve Spurrier.

Input from assistants on game plans may have been welcome, just as long as it agreed with what Holtz wanted to do. Special teams was no different. Minter once tried to suggest a punt protection scheme to Holtz during a staff meeting.

“Lou turned to me, then turned back and kept writing it the way he wanted,” Minter said. “I got the message.”

The idiosyncrasies Holtz brought to Notre Dame stuck with players and coaches who entered his orbit. He made appearances around the football program even after his departure and would address the team. He didn’t hold back on his takes, whether the current head coach needed them or not, something Kelly learned all too well.

Freeman heard from Holtz in his early days while assembling his first Notre Dame staff. As the first-time head coach vetted candidates, he weighed what he needed in a defensive coordinator. Did Freeman need a sounding board? An ally? A counterargument? Naturally, Holtz had thoughts on all of that, some of which led Freeman to hire former Temple and Miami head coach Al Golden to his staff.

“I talked to Lou Holtz all the time. He says, ‘I’m gonna give you my advice, but not my opinion,’” Freeman said. “It’s something he says every time I talk to him. I’ll give you my advice, but not my opinion.”

Maybe that was a distinction without a difference for Louis Leo Holtz, born in Follansbee, W.V., raised in East Liverpool, Ohio, and forever remembered around college football. When Holtz talked, people listened. From a living room in South Carolina through a magical run at Notre Dame to his life after coaching, that part of the Holtz story will endure.