Motivation Quote by Dan Devine

A sentence like this is less a declaration than a dare to fate. “I’m going to be the next head coach at Notre Dame” lands with the clean, unadorned force of locker-room certainty, but the subtext is pure high-wire act: I belong in the most myth-loaded job in college football, and I’m willing to say it out loud before anyone hands me the keys.

In Dan Devine’s mouth, the line carries the particular voltage of Notre Dame in the 1970s, when the program wasn’t just trying to win games; it was trying to preserve an idea. Coaching there meant inheriting Rockne’s shadow, Parseghian’s standard, and an alumni/public microscope that treats football as a civic sacrament. So the intent isn’t merely ambition. It’s self-positioning in a marketplace where confidence is currency: recruits, boosters, and administrators all respond to the aura of inevitability. Even the definite article - “the next head coach” - matters. It doesn’t allow for competition, contingency, or committee deliberation. It narrates the hire as already decided.

The phrase also betrays the paradox of the job: to succeed at Notre Dame, you have to project control over a machine designed to control you. Devine’s blunt future tense reads like a preemptive defense against the program’s mythology. If the institution is going to turn you into a symbol, you try to seize authorship first.

It’s a coach’s line, built for a world where saying it is part of making it true - until the scoreboard, and history, renders the final edit.