ND knows how to treat fans

TWO Jersey guys, Steven Blutig (Lehigh, ’93) and Jason Esralew ( Stanford, ’93), wanted to give their sons a taste of a bigtime college football. So off the four of them went, to last week’s StanfordNotre Dame game.

Blutig: “We walked around campus wearing Stanford caps and shirts, and not once were we even heckled. It was the opposite. We heard, ‘Welcome to Notre Dame,’ and were asked if we needed directions. It was remarkable.

“Lunch for four cost as much as a beer at Yankee Stadium. When the rain came, people offered to share their umbrellas. I was looking for Alan Funt, as if it were all a puton.

“Inside the stadium, the crowd was proNotre Dame — not antiStanford. After a Stanford turnover, a student seated behind me clapped extra loud in my ear — but then he apologized for being a jerk.

“We figured that besides people just being nice, the other reason for the polite behavior was the absence of booze. I did not see one person who appeared drunk.”

During last week’s West Virginia-Texas Tech, ABC/ESPN’s Sean McDonough noted Tech “brought in 11 junior college transfers this season.”

Eleven? Whoa. In many cases, players good enough to play Division I first play junior college ball due to serious academic or social problems. Then again, what has Tech got to lose? Four of its nontransfer players have been arrested since March, including one a few hours after the WVU game.

Next year, maybe TBS can present the playoffs with more than two endlessly repeated commercials — All State’s featuring Kerry Wood and Andre Dawson (cute, but enough!), and the Verizon ad with that kid playing the tuba.