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Who really said it

The next flag they plant will be all white, and it'll be surrender

Attributed to Lou Holtz 1937–2026 · college football coach; Notre Dame national champion, 1988
Attributed In copyright

Widely credited to Holtz, and entirely in character for him: on 17 September 2005 Michigan State beat Notre Dame 44–41 in overtime and planted a Spartan flag on the Notre Dame Stadium turf, and Holtz — Notre Dame’s head coach from 1986 to 1996, by then in his first season as an ESPN analyst — was asked about it. But the only citation anyone offers is a Sports Illustrated column two days later whose web address is dead, and we could not read the archived copy. We have not confirmed the wording against a source we could open.

Last verified 30 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“The next flag they plant will be all white, and it'll be surrender” attributed to Lou Holtz, on Michigan State planting a flag at midfield after beating Notre Dame 44–41 in overtime at Notre Dame Stadium on 17 September 2005. Wikiquote files the line as attributed, citing a Sports Illustrated column of 19 September 2005 that is no longer retrievable; no primary source has been read.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Lou Holtz). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Lou Holtz — American college football coach · Notre Dame, 1986–1996. Theme: "The next flag they plant will be all white, and it'll be surrender". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The next flag they plant will be all white, and it'll be surrender". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Wikiquote section
Attributed — the page has no sourced section
Citation offered
John Walters, “Cool Hand on the remote,” SportsIllustrated.com, 19 September 2005
Status of that link
Dead — the host no longer resolves; archived copy unreachable from here
The occasion
Michigan State 44, Notre Dame 41 (OT), Notre Dame Stadium, 17 September 2005
Rival claimants
None — no other Wikiquote page carries the phrase

“The next flag they plant will be all white, and it’ll be surrender.”

Quoted as a single sentence everywhere it appears. No fuller transcript of the remark has been located, so there is no wider context to show.

Wikiquote’s Lou Holtz page, Attributed section

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote ↗ files this line under Attributed, which is its own signal: the page has no sourced section at all, and every quotation on it carries the same kind of second-hand citation.
  • The citation it does give is John Walters, “Cool Hand on the remote,” SportsIllustrated.com, 19 September 2005. The host sportsillustrated.cnn.com no longer resolves. An archived capture is recorded in the Wayback Machine, but web.archive.org is blocked from our network, so we have not read the column and are not counting it as corroboration.
  • The occasion, however, is solid. Michigan State’s 2005 schedule ↗ records a 44–41 overtime win at Notre Dame Stadium on 17 September 2005 over the tenth-ranked Irish, and Wikipedia’s article on flag planting ↗ names that game as one of the era’s flag-planting incidents: Michigan State players planted their flag on Notre Dame’s field. The column Wikiquote cites is dated two days later.
  • Holtz was well placed to be asked. His biography ↗ has him coaching Notre Dame from 1986 to 1996 and working as an ESPN college-football analyst from 2005 until 2015 — so in September 2005 he was a first-season broadcaster commenting on his old programme being humiliated at home.
  • A phrase search across the whole of English Wikiquote returns only the Lou Holtz page for this sentence. That is a meaningful negative in one direction — nobody else is claiming it — and no help in the other, because an uncontested attribution is still an unsourced one.
In copyright

This is a 2005 remark by a named American broadcaster, so nothing about it is in the public domain: everything published in the United States from 1931 onward remains under copyright protection. Treat it as in copyright and quote it as a quotation, with attribution, rather than reusing it as free text.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What we could not check

Nobody else is credited with this line, so there is no rival claimant to rule out. The weakness here is not a competing name — it is the citation itself.

John Walters, SportsIllustrated.com, 19 September 2005 documented but unverified

Wikiquote’s only citation for the line. The URL it gives is dead and the archived copy is unreachable from our network, so we can neither confirm the column contains this sentence nor see what it cites in turn. Wikiquote’s Lou Holtz page ↗

Michigan State’s flag on the Notre Dame turf, 17 September 2005 documented

This part is confirmed independently of any quotation source: Wikipedia’s flag-planting article ↗ records the incident and Notre Dame’s 2005 season ↗ the 44–41 overtime defeat that prompted it.

The joke fits the man and the moment exactly. That is a reason to keep looking for the source, not a substitute for one. Wikiquote, Attributed ↗

Context

Why it mattered

Planting a flag on a beaten opponent’s field was still a rare provocation in 2005, and Notre Dame Stadium was a pointed place to try it. Michigan State had just won there 44–41 in overtime, against a team ranked tenth in the country, and drove their Spartan flag into the turf in front of 80,795 people.

Holtz had spent eleven seasons as Notre Dame’s head coach and won the programme its most recent national championship. He was in his first season as a television analyst. The line does the two things his reputation was built on at once: it defends his old school and it gets the laugh.

The next flag they plant will be all white, and it’ll be surrender.

Read the full story

The joke has aged into something close to prophecy, which is part of why it still circulates: flag-planting went from an oddity to a recurring flashpoint in college football over the following two decades, eventually drawing brawls, a Nick Saban condemnation and a proposed Ohio law.

It is worth being clear about what is and is not established here. The game, the flag and Holtz’s position at the microphone are all documented. The sentence itself is not — it rests on a single column nobody can currently open. On a site about provenance that distinction is the whole point, so we have marked the line attributed rather than verified.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Failure Success

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Lou Holtzen.wikiquote.org

The attribution and its one citation. Note that the page has an Attributed section and no sourced section.
Lou Holtzen.wikipedia.org

Biography: Notre Dame head coach 1986–1996, consensus national champion in 1988, ESPN analyst from 2005 to 2015.
2005 Michigan State Spartans football teamen.wikipedia.org

The schedule entry for 17 September 2005: a 44–41 overtime win at Notre Dame Stadium before 80,795.
2005 Notre Dame Fighting Irish football teamen.wikipedia.org

The same game from the other side — the home defeat that prompted the flag and the joke.
Flag plantingen.wikipedia.org

Documents the 2005 Michigan State flag-planting at Notre Dame and the practice’s later history in college football.

The author

About Lou Holtz

Lou Holtz

1937–2026 · American college football coach · Notre Dame, 1986–1996

Lou Holtz was an American college football coach who led six different programmes to bowl games — William & Mary, North Carolina State, Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame and South Carolina — and finished with a career college record of 249–132–7. His 1988 Notre Dame team went 12–0 and was the consensus national champion. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008 and worked as a television analyst for CBS and then ESPN, where the one-liners that fill his quotation pages mostly come from.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Wikiquote, s.v. “Lou Holtz,” Attributed section, citing John Walters, “Cool Hand on the Remote,” SportsIllustrated.com, September 19, 2005 — a URL that no longer resolves and which we were unable to retrieve from any archive. No primary source read. For the occasion: “2005 Michigan State Spartans Football Team,” Wikipedia, schedule entry for September 17, 2005.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The next flag they plant will be all white, and it'll be surrender’?” Last verified 30 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-next-flag-they-plant-will-be-all-white-and-itll-be/

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