When Notre Dame junior John Egan suffered a compound leg fracture during an interhall football game in October 1926, physicians said it was the worst bone break they had ever seen.
Egan was in St. Joseph’s Hospital for weeks and faced large medical bills.
Fellow students came to his aid. After the November 13 Notre Dame vs. Army varsity gridiron game in Yankee Stadium — which the Irish won, 7-0 — a group of students returned to campus with the game’s wooden goalposts. They promptly cut the posts into pieces and sold them as souvenirs, with proceeds going to the John Egan hospital fund.
That’s just one bit of Notre Dame lore contained in The Interhall Football Bible — interhallfb.com — a comprehensive website created by rising junior Gray Nocjar, who has done all the research himself over the course of several years.
The website went live in 2021, when Nocjar was a high school student in Germantown, Maryland. It currently includes records of every game played by every interhall team, from the very first contest between Sorin and Brownson Halls in 1890 through 1999. The 2000s, 2010s and 2020s are “coming soon,” the site promises. Nocjar has added hall stat sheets, stories from alumni and his own division of the history of Notre Dame interhall football into eight eras.
Nocjar launched his passion project in August 2020, given the extra time he had on his hands during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, he has scoured the digitized archives of The Observer and Scholastic, as well as local newspapers like the South Bend Tribune, to confirm the outcome of almost every game of interhall football ever played.
He is working toward a “final data point” of the win-loss-tie-unknown record for every Notre Dame interhall football team. “So, I would know at least what the season would look like in terms of the round-robin tournament, even if I didn’t know the results of all or any of those games,” he says.
Confirming a season’s record takes Nocjar a few days. Depending on the year, student media sometimes published a whole record, sometimes covered all the games in separate stories and sometimes only covered a few games. From there, he says, it’s a process of elimination.
“If there’s a 5-1 team, and I have five wins on my computer for the other games, I know that they lost that game against this last team,” Nocjar explains.
Interhall tackle football began at Notre Dame in 1890, organizing under a round-robin schedule in 1909 and continuing until the program’s elimination in 2023. Several hiatuses have paused gameplay over the years — after the death of sophomore Dick Sullivan, for instance, from injuries he received in an interhall football game in 1935, and also during World War II.
Some seasons are harder to confirm than others. In some years, Notre Dame teams traveled around the Midwest, even competing against a group of prisoners at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City in the 1950s, Nocjar says. The high school students living in old Carroll Hall (a dormitory in the Main Building) had a team, as did Notre Dame’s minims — grade school students who lived in St. Edward’s Hall. Residents of early halls, such as Brownson and Sorin, even participated in extensive intrahall football competition.
The Interhall Football Bible is the only database of these game results and is by far the most extensive chronicle of Notre Dame’s interhall football history.
Nocjar, an electrical engineering major with minors in energy studies and journalism, doesn’t have much time between his coursework, his job as managing editor at The Observer and his dedication to the Keenan Hall Revue to continue his interhall research. During this past winter break, though, he was able to knock out 15 more seasons.
He is a third generation Domer, following in the footsteps of his father, Aaron Nocjar ’95, and grandfather, David Nocjar ’73J.D. He says some interhall games still cannot be discussed in the Nocjar household because the losses were too painful. While Gray was growing up, his father’s best friend, P.J. Whalen ’95, would come over to their house and recount stories from his glory days.
“[Interhall football] was one of many Notre Dame quirks which drew me to the school,” Nocjar says. “But it was definitely something that stuck with me, particularly because of how obscure it was in the grander scheme of, not even tradition and colleges, but just Notre Dame traditions.”
So, at the peak of pandemic boredom, he decided to look into it. He found mentions of championships on a few dorm websites and some scattered photos online. One photo — of an interhall team from 1894 — caught his attention. “I was like, ‘This must have such a storied, mythical history. I’m curious what it is,’” he says.
At the outset, he assumed no information would be available. Luckily, his subscription to a newspaper archives website from a previous project had not expired, and he began to build what would become The Interhall Football Bible.
Of the 190 interhall champion teams — men’s and women’s — the website currently lists 189. But the winner of the 1965 championship remains a mystery. Nocjar knows that two joint teams — Farley-Stanford and Howard-St. Ed’s — competed, or were scheduled to compete, in the final game.
“I needed to confirm this championship game, and I knew there [were] living alumni for it. And so I started reaching out,” he says. He had created a spreadsheet of every single person who had played interhall football and was mentioned in the Scholastic and The Observer. He sent out hundreds of emails in search of the unknown champion.
Tom Bettag ’66 offered his “vague recollection” of Howard-St. Ed’s winning, but Nocjar’s theory is that the game was snowed out. The case remains open, despite his connecting with some 150 alumni during his search. Several contributed their own interhall play tales, while others just wanted to call him and chat. (Alumni can contribute interhall football stories of their own at interhallfb.com/stories.)
“People were giddy. People were rushing into their basements to pull out old Observer articles in the hope that they would help me,” Nocjar says.
One alumnus who lived in Morrissey Hall had a playbook from a former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, which afforded Morrissey’s team a few professional plays to practice with. Another had a VHS tape of his team’s championship game.
Many alumni recall interhall football dynasties, which Nocjar says were relatively common because of the size of certain dorms and friend groups that traveled across dorms together. Dillon Hall has by far the most championships of the men’s dorms with 21 trophies, compared to No. 2 Keenan Hall’s 10. Badin Hall was the first team to achieve a perfect 7-0 record — in the 1954 season, when they were undefeated, untied and unscored upon.
Female students have played interhall football ever since Notre Dame became fully coeducational in 1972. The website includes their team records.
The Observer didn’t cover women’s interhall football until the 1974 championship game but referenced Walsh Hall as the defending interhall women’s champion for 1972 and ’73. By 1992, 13 women’s teams competed, only one fewer than the 14 teams in the men’s league. “But by the ’80s, every women’s interhall game was being reported alongside the men’s, and honestly, especially in the modern times, from some of the recent alumni conversations that I’ve had, the women’s interhall league has been more popular than the men’s because of safer practices,” Nocjar says. From the outset, the women played flag football instead of tackle, he explains.
Sue Augustus ’77 told Nocjar how she ended up interviewing for a job with her former interhall football coach. Augustus says she was hired in part because her coach remembered her as “a fast and aggressive football player.”
Each kernel of discovery pushed Nocjar forward. Now he is a walking catalogue of interhall football facts.
For example, Knute Rockne coached the 1913 Corby Hall team while he was a senior end on the varsity.
In the 1960s, some halls struggled to field enough players for a team, which led to the creation of consolidated teams. Fisher-Pangborn, Lyons-Morrissey and others became regulars in the interhall football league for several years.
From 1970 to 1974, student residents of St. Joseph Hall at nearby Holy Cross Junior College fielded a team in Notre Dame’s interhall league. One captain of that team was Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger ’76, before he transferred to Notre Dame.
Norman Barry, a 1921 graduate, was the only known interhall player to start on the minims team and work his way up to Notre Dame’s varsity before entering the NFL.
Prior to 1913, many interhall football players went on to play for the varsity. As the Irish became more nationally competitive, this phenomenon became rare. One notable exception: kicker Reggie Ho ’89, who walked on in 1988 after getting his start with Cavanaugh Hall.
Nocjar intended to join the Keenan Hall football team when he enrolled at Notre Dame, “despite having no tackle football experience and being not really built to play tackle football,” he says. “I thought, well, I’ve done all of this. I’ve learned more about this tradition than probably anybody in the whole world, so at least I’m gonna go and be a part of it.”
But in 2023, just before he matriculated as a freshman, University administrators decided to end the program because of declining student interest and a lack of students with prior organized tackle football experience.
Nocjar attended one Keenan Hall game before the cancellation went into effect. “It had just been fading out of the mind of the Notre Dame student, which made this even more important in my eyes, because it was . . . no longer even a living tradition. It was just history untold,” he says.
The final years of Notre Dame interhall football — as well as countless unpublished stories from alumni — still need to be added to the website. Nocjar is also working on a compilation of the trophies awarded to interhall football champions since 1909, which ranged from gold pins to traditional trophies to a letter jacket. But he says he’s always excited to learn more.
“I felt like Notre Dame was something to love. I had grown up with that love because my family were avid Notre Dame fans, and that was just a part of my life,” Nocjar says. “Being able to be better connected, just like in any relationship with anything, to know more about [Notre Dame], to be more proximate to it, was something that would bring [me] joy.”
Kathryn Muchnick, an English and economics major and journalism minor, was the magazine’s spring intern. She is a reporter for The Dallas Morning News.