A Primer on Poaching
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If you didn’t keep pretty well connected to the internets and recruiting news in the last 120 hours, you’d be wondering where these names came from, but ND suddenly has itself 2 new and very key commitments from some previously committed-elsewhere players.
We’ll post more on our thoughts about recruiting previously committed players in a later post, but for now, suffice it to say that what Charlie Weis has managed to do in about a week has been positively Urbanesque! And we love it!
Everyone, please welcome Brian Smith (ILB) and Brandon Walker (K)!
Brian Smith (son of former ND fullback Chris) had been a verbal commit to Iowa, but his real field of dreams had always been located at 46556.
Brandon Walker had been committed to Louisville, but it would seem that the departure of their head coach created a bit of a recruiting ripple.
Welcome to the family, fellas!
Apparently men much smarter than the rest of us have decided to pass down a decree banning all tailgating within a mile of the Orange BowlStadium in Miami Florida on Super Bowl Sunday. Some probably guess that the glorius and righteous forces of capitalism are at work. Afterall, the ban all but guarantees that anyone who is feeling hungry or parched whilst within a mile of the Super Bowl will have to purchase their food and beverage from designated Super Bowl vending locations. However, it takes but a moment of thought to realize that this is really a microcosm of what the late-80s USSR looked like. Since nobody can have any chance at having a tailgate that is superior in quality or size to their neighbor’s, nobody will have a tailgate at all! It’s like blue jeans. Kinda. Or toilet paper.
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Super Bowl ticket holders, seen here, are already wandering the streets of Miami, looking for food, beer, and some TP.
And, of course, any beer, brats, or artificially flavored, coloured (hello, readers from the UK!), cheese-like nacho toppings will have traveled through miles and miles of bureaucratic red tape before anyone can get to them, if they can get to them at all!
How appropriate is it, then, that the Super Bowl is to be held within a stadium of which the walls are crumbling on down?
Hit it, The Boss!

Editor’s Note: Um. Yeah. We can’t read good.
The above headline could be in reference to last night’s recruiting bombshell, or it could be in reference to a certain bottle of Johnny Walker Black. I’ll never tell.
The Roundup:
Hey, speaking of eggs and whiskey, it’s time for lunch!
Bummer.
Free link here explaining the whole thing. It clearly had nothing to do with new schemes with a new DC, better weather, or prevalence of exposed female skin on Florida’s campus. Definitely not the last one. That’s for sure. That would never play into the mind of a 17/18 year old boy staring a DE chart with the depth of the hadopelagic zone in the face.
Visual representation of Notre Dame discussion boards in the last few hours here:

Admittedly, if I were trying to pick a D Line for which I’d like to play based on this past season’s performance, Florida would be right up there, and I’m sure that new shiny mythical national championship trophy makes for one hell of a recruiting tool.
Ah well, tomorrow will be another day, and there’s bound to be some statistical law out there that dictates that ND is bound to recruit more than a few DL recruits in a single recruiting season someday.
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And they’ve got plenty of you!***
Apparently at least one NFL scout isn’t buying into the hype of the all-world, Heisman winning QB and iconic figure of redemption, Troy Smith.
One scout, the Cincinnati Bengals’ Greg Seamon, was quoted on a Web site ridiculing Smith as an overhyped Heisman-winning quarterback who would flop in the NFL or not make it at all, joining a list that includes Terry Baker, John Huarte, Gary Beban, Pat Sullivan, Andre Ware, Gino Torretta, Danny Wuerffel, Chris Weinke, Eric Crouch and Jason White.
“Really, he’s not that fast,” Seamon said of Smith. “He gets run down by defensive ends. He’s not real big. He kind of stares down his targets. You didn’t see those breathtaking, thread-the-needle throws [against Florida] that you’d hope to see from a top-of-the-draft quarterback.”
*** Like how I sort of spun that one around and made it my own? See what I did there?
After post-poning his decision a few weeks back, All-Star RB recruit Robert Hughes announced today that he will be Irish.
Robert, we love that you took your time and made the right decision. Welcome to the family!

Power RB Hughes.
Rivals Profile: http://rivals100.rivals.com/viewprospect.asp?sport=1&pr_key=37805
Edit:
New Picture – I don’t like the Go Wolverines thing at the bottom, and I am too lazy to edit it out, but this shows just how much of a stud this kid is. In High School. The dude is a beast, and I am PUMPED to have him on the squad. I expect big things.

Now that I think about it, I love the Michigan note at the bottom. It reminds them what they missed out on. I’m sure they’ll be reminded time and again as Hughes plows over their hapless LB’s over the next 3-4 years…
Ron Zook: “Yeah! I Know! It’s AWESOME!”

A sports sociologist/communist derided “recruitniks” and sites like Scout.com or Rivals.com, saying such outside factors cause elite 17 year old athletes to become “hedonistic, materialistic, and individualistic. “
Yep, never knew a 17 year old kid in the best shape of his life to be hedonistic, materialistic, and (gasp!) individualistic if it weren’t for the strange world of recruiting.
Not to belittle some of the valid points that this sports psychologist (seriously, how do I get a job like that?) makes, but I have a feeling some of the tendencies he’s noticing among the elite and athletic 17 year olds will also exist in a massive portion of the chubby, not-expected-to-do-much-other-than-get-a-middle-management-job 17 year olds as well.
Now excuse me, I have a TPS report to fill.
Former Atlanta Falcons head coach, University of Washington alum, and now current Seattle Seahawks assistant coach Jim Mora has moved into what we like to call a “staging area” for his impending replacement of Ty Willingham as head coach, Football Program, University of Washington.
This sort of maneuver makes sense. It’ll be much easier to hit the ground running and start work immediately on recovery efforts of the Washington football program if he’s already living in the area when he takes the job. Time otherwise spent on looking for a new home and finding out where the best schools are located can now be spent on firing incompetent assistant coaches, filling massive recruiting voids, and holding press conferences that display levels of competence the Seattle media haven’t seen in years.
In unrelated news, it’s been reported that Ty Willingham’s handicap has shot up 3 strokes in the past week and he’s developed a case of the yips on putts from 3 feet and in.
The Chicago Bears defeated the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship Game today, saving the English language.
The Saints, sentimental favorites of Americans everywhere who love to say things like “irregardless,” “effect” when they should say “affect,” and “but yet,” had a slogan that will be judged by history as the dumbest fucking slogan in the history of slogans: “Who Dat?”
On behalf of English speakers the world over, thank you, Chicago Bears.

The Saints: Disappointing people who say “theatre” with a “hard ‘A’.”
Edit: Crap. I just realized I live in Chicago. This place is going to be insufferable.
SOUTH BEND, Ind.–Former Notre Dame wide receiver Jeff Samardzija, who was drafted by the Cubs last year, has decided to forgo his football career for a career pitching with the Cubs.
Samardzija’s Tommy John surgery has been scheduled for late August.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Announcing the newest members of the University of Notre Dame Football Program Coaching Staff:
Drum roll, please….
Drum roll?
Q asked me to do a 2006 All-Male Revue, which I thought was a strange request, so I asked him if I might be able to just do a Review of 2006. He reluctantly agreed, so here goes nothing (with much thanks to Wikipedia and its submitters for doing the leg work).



is considered a sport.

Americans everywhere say, “Hey, did you catch the Hurricanes-Oilers game?”
Americans are surprised that officials couldn’t tell he is a dope.

“They’re making fun of us because we have three service academies on our schedule this year!” “Making fun of us by using our schedule, despite the fact that we have a harder schedule than most conference schedules?! BRILLIANT!”
Mark Schlabach of ESPN wrote a column about the BCS, and how the in-conference regular season should be used as a kind of playoff system for the BCS. You know, it was fine and dandy in a this-isnt-the-real-world kind of way. Until he took his shots at Notre Dame.
I mean, seriously, these guys can bring any topic back to bashing ND. Hmmm, want to discuss globalthermonuclear war? ESPN Analyst: “Yes. Well…blah blah blah…blah blah…ND sucks.” Throw out the migration patterns of one-legged manatees or the overrated-ness of Katie Holmes and you’ll get the same thing.
Here’s a taste of what Marky Mark had to say, and this is all he gets:
Because Notre Dame has the ability to schedule whichever opponents it sees fit, the Irish are all but guaranteed seven or eight victories each season.
Are you serious Biz Marky? Seriously? I’ll take the bottom 7 out of ANY conference over the same bottom 7 that ND schedules regularly. We don’t schedule garbage teams from nowhere – we pick up USC, Penn State, Michigan and a host of Big Ten schools. Are these easy games? No! And even if you take the ‘light’ portion of our schedule, go ahead and compare it to what some of these ‘good’ teams (tOSU, Michigan in the Big Ten) face in their conferences. It’s a joke, not even a comparison! ND’s schedule was ranked 20th in the nation this year. And that’s the LOWEST it’s been in recent memory. Give me a break, man, and think up something original, something with some thought and research behind it.
Otherwise, it’s going to be on you…cuz I’m getting mad, and I strapped on my boots…so any dogs….NO, puppies and kittens better be on lock, cuz I’m about pissed enough to kick one. Hard. And all because of you Marky Mark. So go get smart somehow and come back and give us something better. Else Fido and Fluffy might get hurt.
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= Marky’s Fault