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Frank R. Scatoni
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"No Kill Date"

Venture Literary Sells the Inside Story of the Infamous Catholics vs. Convicts College Football Rivalry to Ballantine/ESPN Books

On November 1, 2008, Frank R. Scatoni of Venture Literary sold World rights to Catholics vs. Convicts by Jeff Carroll to Mark Tavani at Ballantine/ESPN Books.

In the early spring of 1989, University of Miami football coach Jimmy Johnson gathered his players for a tearful meeting. The news he had to break was difficult—after a pair of national championships in his final three years at the helm of the Hurricanes’ dynasty, he was leaving to try and revive the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. As he wrapped up his speech, Johnson left his players with three words to remember, three words that captured in pitch-perfect tone the college football zeitgeist at the time: “Beat Notre Dame!”

The footprint that the University of Notre Dame and University of Miami have together left on the sport of college football is simply mind-boggling. The two schools have combined for sixteen consensus national championships, nine Heisman Trophy winners, 240 consensus first-team All-Americans, and fifty-three college football Hall of Famers. Yet the two programs are not linked by this kind of excellence alone. Instead, they are forever united in college football history because their intense rivalry—particularly, three games from 1988-1990—redefined the sport of college football.

For anyone who came of age as a college football fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, Notre Dame and Miami were not merely the two top programs in the game for several years, but they were also the stars of each fall’s most compelling televised drama. From 1988 through 1990, Notre Dame and Miami met each year with the national championship hanging in the balance. But their lofty places in the national polls only tell part of the story—when Miami and Notre Dame met, no less than the soul and future of college football was at stake.

In Catholics vs. Convicts: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Rivalry that Changed College Football Forever, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Carroll documents in narrative form this all-time clash of the titans. The games, of course, were compelling theater on their own accord, but the action on the field was merely one part of what made Notre Dame and Miami’s annual meeting such an important chapter in the history of college football.

Notre Dame–Miami was one of the great rivalries in the history of American sports, a series that burned white hot for a few brief years—so hot, in fact, that it was deemed too contentious to continue. But the rivalry’s legacy lives on—not just because of its intensity, but because it changed college football forever, from the creation of the Bowl Championship Series, through Notre Dame’s status as college football’s lone major independent, and to the way players are recruited today. In Catholics vs. Convicts, fans of both programs, and of college football as a whole, will finally be able to relive the sport’s greatest lost rivalry.

Award-winning sportswriter Jeff Carroll is the University of Notre Dame football and basketball columnist at the South Bend Tribune and the Irish Sports Report.


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