When Football and Music Collide at Northwestern and Notre Dame

Tomorrow, Notre Dame and Northwestern University will face each other for the first time since Northwestern's famous upset win against ND in 1995. That win for Northwestern was the first in a string of successes that ultimately led to NU playing in the Rose Bowl.

In perhaps the most memorable play of that game, NU wide receiver Dave Beazley was running for a touchdown when ND's Allen Rossum shoved him out of bounds and into the Fighting Irish marching band. That collision was captured on video. The scene of Beazley hurtling into the drum set happens at 1:09:

Dave Beazley recently described that memorable TD run in an interview with Lake the Posts, a blog about Northwestern sports:

"If a pass could ever be described as pretty, this was the one. The sun was perfectly overhead as I stretched out my arms and snatched the ball, still running at full speed," he told Lake the Posts.

"I chopped my feet in bounds just as Allen Rossum pushed me and all my momentum into the Notre Dame marching band, and specifically into the drum set. It was the perfect literal crescendo to our first offensive drive of the game... Immediately after the catch, I had to untangle myself from multiple instruments and somehow push myself off of the snare drum, which ended up inauspiciously underneath me."

Football and music don't often collide in such a literal way. But it should be noted that both Northwestern and Notre Dame are schools with strong music traditions, which have become bound up with football mania in intriguing ways on both campuses.

An hour before kickoff at Notre Dame home games, the trumpets of the Band of the Fighting Irish gather under the Golden Dome of the main building and play for a standing-room-only crowd. Their playing echoes through the enormous dome, sending strains of "Notre Dame Our Mother" and the "Notre Dame Victory March" down to the enthusiastic crowd below.

Notre Dame has many football traditions, but it's hard to beat this one for sheer beauty and emotional impact:

The Northwestern University Marching Band (NUMB for short) serenades football fans before each home game in Wildcat Alley, the pre-game fan festival held on the football practice field. The NUMB musicians love to get creative with their renditions of the NU fight song. Here's a recording by the Boneheads (the NUMB trombones), playing "Go U Northwestern" at a number of recognizable landmarks on the NU campus:

Few people know that Northwestern has its own Mariachi band, Mariachi Northwestern, which is pretty unusual for a school this far north of the Rio Grande. Here they are showing their purple pride: