As we ease into the teeth of the celebration of a virgin birth, it seems perfectly reasonable to note that the Arizona Cardinals are still eligible to make the playoffs while the Minnesota Vikings are not.

	Rick Neuheisel is the latest to spurn advances from Notre Dame ... at least so far.

On the other hand, there is the troubling matter of the Vanderbilt coaching vacancy being filled before the Notre Dame job.

Now we can handle just about any silly news thrown at us, from the Montreal Expos being run by those masterminds at Major League Baseball to Alex Rodriguez deferring salary to get Chan Ho Park on his team. We can prepare for all the thinly-disguised brigandry of the Winter Olympics, and of the news that World Wrestling Federation stock now has the same intrinsic value as Enron stock.

Stupid is as stupid does, after all, and sports is the one really stupid thing that separates us from the members of animal kingdom, including claims adjusters.

But this Notre Dame coaching thing has taken on hideous little life of its own. Washington's Rick Neuheisel, who can hear a job opportunity in a sensory deprivation tank, was the latest faux candidate to decline any interest in the Irish job, saying he would rather prepare for the Holiday Bowl, nuzzle a feral wolverine or remove asbestos from an old building with his tongue.

And his hasn't even been the most emphatic refusal.

It has become quite fashionable in the coaching fraternity, in fact, to decline interest in the Notre Dame job of late. You haven't made it as a coach, it seems, until you've treated Notre Dame athletics director Kevin White like a stammering telemarketer.

But the reverse status symbol of the Notre Dame job never became so clear until Sunday, when the perpetually moribund Commodores scooped up Furman's Bobby Johnson while the Irish were being turned down by, for all we know, former Navy coach Charlie Weatherbie.

I mean, Vanderbilt's last winning season was 1982, for God's sake. As coaching opportunities go, this one is strictly mortuary science.

So if Vanderbilt can be filled before Notre Dame ... if Cal can be filled before Notre Dame ... if a new government can be formed in Afghanistan before Notre Dame ... well, I think we've discovered what we can deduce about Notre Dame.

Namely, that its reservoir of prestige has, after all these decades, finally run dry.

Now, we can all see how the Grimm Brothers résumé fiasco of George O'Leary could put any school back on its heels a bit, even the part where he claimed he was Pope Innocent III from 1987 to 1989. Notre Dame might have been a little slow on the uptake there, but one can understand how a school could trust the word of a coach who's been in the business as long as O'Leary.

But it's been near a month since Bob Davie was told he wanted to spend more time with his family, and with every passing day Notre Dame looks more and more like, well, like Vanderbilt.

Part of the problem was the way Notre Dame chose not to get ahead of the rumor wave. They let media wiseacres throw out utterly untenable names like Jon Gruden (under contract to the Raiders and their hyperlitigious owner A. Davis for another year), Steve Mariucci (stands to make more money in San Francisco than Notre Dame would ever consider paying) and Stanford's Tyrone Willingham (never got a sniff) assuming that anyone would love to coach Notre Dame no matter what else they might be doing at the time.

This created expectations Notre Dame could never meet, and when they chose O'Leary, the general reaction among the school's considerable diaspora was, "Touchdown Jesus is not pleased."

So when O'Leary was fired five days later, Notre Dame looked (a) foolish, and (b) lucky to be out from behind a coach with bad p.r. even before the fanciful references were discovered.

But now they just look foolish, because O'Leary is starting to look good even with the fibs. At least he wanted the job, even if he did claim at one point to be Queen Juliana of The Netherlands.

And as time passes, we may come to realize that O'Leary was standing in a surprisingly short line. Notre Dame was never meant to be like this, yet here we are, in an age where anything is possible and nothing seems out of place, where our ability to shock and be shocked is nearly at an end.

Unless, of course, we discover one day early next year that Notre Dame has found its new coach -- former Vanderbilt coach Woody Widenhofer. We know he's available, and suspect that he'd be up to the challenge.

If Notre Dame can sell itself to him, that is.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.