Where I Come From: Favorite Notre Dame Player

In anticipation of the launch of NCAA Football 2011, EA Sports is sponsoring a series of posts across the SBNation college blogs about the essence of fandom.  Specifically, the fandom of you, the reader.  Everyone is starting to get the early signs of football fever, so join us in the comments to tell the story of your all-time favorite Notre Dame players.

It's easy to get excited and put your full effort in when your team is winning.  Even the truest of fans will find that extra level of energy for a big-game when their rooting interest is on a hot streak, and they'll all find themselves a little bit less into a game when things aren't going well.  It's nothing but human nature and we're all guilty of it.  It trickles down to players in sports all of the time, which is why you never hear of a losing team with great chemistry, and only on occasion will you read about a championship team that won it all despite hating each other.   

So when a team is in the middle of the single worst season in school history and there are leadership issues from the coach down, it would be easy to imagine a player losing interest or not putting forth his best effort on every play.  In 2007, as Notre Dame was mired in a 3-9 season that sucked the life out of nearly everyone associated with the program, Trevor Laws put together one of the best seasons from a defensive tackle I've ever seen.

Do you remember Ndamukong Suh?  Of course you do.  He was stellar all season for Nebraska, came within a hair of winning the Heisman and almost went number one overall in the draft.  During Suh's excellent 2009 campaign, he accumulated 85 tackles, an absolutely ridiculous number for a defensive tackle.  In 2007, Trevor Laws had 112 tackles.*  He averaged nearly ten tackles a game from the defensive tackle spot when opponents double and triple-teamed him at every turn because he was the only consistent force in the Irish front seven that season. 

* Should any Cornhusker fans happen upon this, the last thing I'm trying to do is say that Laws is better than Suh.  There are so many other factors going into the tackle count, but just putting those numbers out there to show how incredible Laws' season was.  Like I'm going to disrespect a guy whose name means "House of Spears."

In addition to the absurd tackle count, had four sacks (teams didn't pass on the Irish too often in 2007, which is one reason for the high tackle total), two fumble recovers, seven quarterback hurries, five passes broken up (as a defensive lineman!) and three blocked kicks.  Laws got a lot of help from fellow lineman Pat Kuntz, but more often than not he was a man on a triple-teamed island.  Because nothing is shadier than voting of any kind in relation to college football, Laws wasn't a first-team All-American despite the laughable difference in stats and contribution.

There have been flashier players (MoSto, The Shark, Golden, Floyd) and bigger names (Quinn, Clausen, Zbikowski) in my time as an Irish fan, but the way Laws never gave up on a team that found itself out of a lot of their games by halftime earns him a special place.