NCAA infractions!  Here they come!

It’s worse than when Reggie Bush took $300 Grand from shady ‘marketing professionals’.

It’s more insipid than when Urban Meyer got a player’s girlfriend a gymnastics scholarship.

It’s much more damaging than Michigan’s systematically pushing players into ‘classes’ where they do nothing, learn nothing, and most of the time don’t even have to show up.

That’s right, ND’s players break the rules too! 

They play basketball with girls.

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Charlie Weis has hired Kinnon Tatum as an intern on the coaching staff this year! Here’s a link to the press Charlie’s Spring Kickoff Presser.

Welcome back, Kinnon!

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I think we may have one very good clue about what the ND Spring Practice experience will be like based on what’s missing from the Georgia Tech Spring Practice experience this year…

You don’t have to watch Georgia Tech’s football team practice to know things have changed. All you have to do is listen.

In the past, one growl could be heard from one end of the practice field to another. It belonged to Jon Tenuta, and it could either make you cringe or blush or laugh, or sometimes do all three at once.

Tenuta, the defensive coordinator and secondary coach, could be heard riding defensive backs and linebackers who lined up in the wrong spot or blew an assignment. Sometimes he’d even throw a compliment toward an offensive player.

Other coaches worked much more quietly. Tenuta was like a de facto voice of the staff. One exception: receivers coach Buddy Geis was noisy, too, but almost always in an encouraging way.

Monday was different. Tenuta has moved on to Notre Dame. Now, if you listen, you can hear a lot of voices, all as fired up as Tenuta was, but generally cleaner.

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And babies are crying because I forgot that the good ole’ NCAA has limited spring contact quite a bit in recent years. So so much for one of the things I’m looking for this Spring.

Still, Happy First Spring Practice, all.

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Why else would people keep leaving the Micigan (sucks!) program?

I’m enjoying the tears with an Allagash White. Join us, wont you?

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There better not be any of this happening this Spring. We’d never understand what Michigan was doing at ND practices anyway.

I think of Spring Football as a tiny island in the middle of an ocean of off-season. It wont sustain us for long, but there’s fruit to be had, and maybe, just maybe after it all, we can have some idea of where we’re headed from here until the season starts.

So here are the rumors and bits of news that I’ll be particularly keen to hear about in the next few weeks:

• Injuries: We all fear them, and many of us tend to sit around in the office, hitting refresh on our web browsers on the various ND Football news sites and forums, hoping to get word of any truly devastating injuries as soon as possible. I don’t know why. Maybe we’ll think it will hurt less if we just get it over with, like a rabies shot, or a break up, or an episode of The View. But as ND fans we shouldn’t fear all injuries this spring. It was evident in 2007 that the off-season wasn’t nearly physical enough. And looking back, the relative lack of practice-related injuries should have clued us into that fact. Hopefully there’ll be a fairly regular stream of nicks, bumps, bruises, and maybe even a few strains or sprains this spring. Nothing that ends a season or even a spring for any player, but at least some solid indication that the guys are really hammering eachother out there.
• A Focus on Special Teams: Nothing in football helps a lousy team become a respectable team faster than great special teams play. In 2007, ND was a lousy football team with lousy special teams play. Coach Weis promised to do all he could to clean that problem up, including visiting Frank Beamer at Virginia Tech. Here’s hoping Coach Beamer has a bit more affinity for Notre Dame than Rich Rodriguez apparently did.
• Weight Gain: We’ve already heard plenty about Sam Young bulking up to 330 pounds. And we applaud that. He and other offensive linemen seemed to be getting nicked up pretty regularly by October. They need some extra armor to protect them against the rigors of a full season. And a guy with Young’s frame, in particular, was probably a bit too easy to get leverage against and push around at or just below 300 lbs. But what I really hope to start hearing about is the bulking up of some of the defensive linemen. Given our serious depth problems there, the guys who are on the roster will need to be able to take punishment and keep on coming. A little added weight will help. A little added weight on Mr. Clausen wouldn’t hurt either, but we’ve heard lots of reports that indicate he’ll be looking to roll up the ole’ jersey sleeves with a little more pride this fall.
• Very Unhappy Happy Linebackers: They got themselves a new coach in Tenuta. I hope to read pieces about how thrilled the linebackers are to be practicing all sorts of exotic blitz schemes while I hear about how a certain linebacker was too sore to move a day after having to run the shed and tackled drill 50 times in a row so that Coach Tenuta could, “ensure that he understood the technique.”
• Little Change(s): Hopefully we’ll hear and read quotes from the QBs, receivers, and other members of the offense that “little has changed” in terms of actual scheme with the transition of play-calling duties from Weis to Haywood. I’ve never thought the scheme, the “Weis Scheme” if you will, was bad. I just felt like there were too many pages in the playbook for this young squad, and I felt Weis made a few (!) head-scratching calls this year trying to “out-call” the opposition rather than letting the team out-play them. If Haywood sticks with the original play-book, and then abbreviates it, his own limitations as a novice play-caller may serve to benefit the team. He’ll be more apt to call things he knows his team can run because, frankly, he doesn’t “know” he can out-call anybody. Neither do we.

That’ll suffice for now. Though as the Spring moves along, and we get wind of various tidbits, our interests are likely to change with the lake-effect winds.

What are you looking for this Spring?

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With just a few more days to go until the start of Spring Practice…

Wait. Give me a second…

Sorry about that. Ok. So with just a few more days to go until the start of Spring Practice, we find that there really isn’t much news about Notre Dame football to fill out the roundup, so here’s a roundup full of various and sundry items.

The Roundup:

• We all watch when Tiger is playing, especially if he’s winning. He’s like Jordan, but more so.
• We haven’t even started playing games, and already, Richie Rich can’t beat Sweatervest McCheatypants
• This is why I attended ND’s business school.
• Penn State students can now take “Comm 497G: Joe Paterno, Communications & the Media & How To Mumbler Your Way Out Of Any Situation“
• TREVOR LAWS MUST PROTECT THIS HOOOOUUSSSE!
• The NFL draft may well make a lot of ND fans look back on the 2007 season and think, “WTF?”
• I knew ND would have no problems against George Mason. Then again, I also “knew” that Duke would make a run to the finals. Gah!
• If Urban Meyer lies to a low-life, is it just as bad as all of his other lies?
• A writer finds depth in Bobby Bowden’s words. All the depth of a kiddie pool.

It’s 1pm Eastern, or nearly so, on Good Friday, during the second day of the NCAA’s, so… this seems like a good stopping point.

Happy Easter, Everyone!

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Does something feel a little funny today? Do you feel out of sorts? It’s probably your Bracketitis!

It’s not too late to sign up for this year’s bout of HLS Bracketitis. Just click the link below and use the ever-clever password we’ve supplied to join!

http://herloyalsons.mayhem.sportsline.com/e

Password: louholtz

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I think Brian is broken. Normally he makes some effort. Sure, it’s the sort of effort you see from a three-legged horse trying to pull a sleigh over ice or a Michigan (sucks!) football player taking an English Lit course, but it’s still effort. This time, there was no effort. And it’s sort of ruined our afternoon plans.

I failed to notice that, before his reposting of his “Destroy Harbaugh” post on mgoblog, Brian posted this. I link because I don’t care if he gets some traffic from HLS. There are lots of people already reading mgoblog because, well, there are a lot of stupid people in the world.

This is the equation we’ve set up in all varsity sports to some degree or another:

Large Group of Academically Underqualified Persons +
40-hour-per-week year-round commitment +
Grad rates at or above the University average =
X

Solve for X, and you get the kind of stuff detailed recently by the Ann Arbor News.

I mean, duh. The only group of people dumb enough to believe you can take star athletes whose uninspiring high school GPAs are almost entirely fraudulent already, give them a full time job, and then get those star athletes to graduate without hijinks are dickwad Notre Dame fans driven mad by their program’s 15 years of total irrelevancy. And, apparently, some but not all Penn State fans.

The Ann Arbor News knows this, of course, and knows that a similar examination of any program in the country would turn an equal or greater level of academic offense. So the editor puts on his I Are Serious Cat face and rumbles about “perception” and “reality” and how Michigan believes that it is better than everyone and isn’t this troubling, isn’t it? And we get sidebars about how poor Brent Petway couldn’t get into the music school when he discovered its existence… two years into his time on campus. Thanks a million, AANews.

This was going to be a big long article about the place of the athlete in the modern university; in it I would link the piece I wrote last summer when Jim Harbaugh was shooting his mouth off about the general studies program and the like, but when I re-read it I realized I didn’t have to or want to change it, so I’m going to bump it to the front page here in a few minutes.

Try and guess with which part I’ve taken issue.

But wait, maybe there’s a reason ND fans know that ND athletes can, in fact, be viable, nay flourishing STUDENT-athletes.

Here’s what the members of our 1987 STARTING LINEUP are doing today.

Chief of Staff to CEO of multi-national corporation
Senior Vice President – Investments, at major international bank
Senior Vice President – Sales, at international biotech corp.
Real estate developer
Offensive Line Coach – Jacksonville Jaguars
Senior Vice President – Brokerage Services, at major U.S. Bank
Director of Diversity, major U.S. corporation
Chaplain, Jacksonville Jaguars
Heisman Trophy Winner/Analyst/Entrepreneur
Commercial Airline Pilot
Attorney/Partner
Special Agent, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms
Vice President, major U.S. mortgage broker
Senior Vice President, Equities Sales at Wall Street firm
Executive Officer of (non-profit)/Adjunct Professor of Law
NFL retiree
CEO of capital acquisition firm
CEO of major food chain supplier
Special Agent, United States Secret Service-Presidential Protection Unit/currently Investigator for Congressional committees
Financial consultant
Director, Product Management and Marketing Communications at major U.S. corporation
Commodity trader

Places like Auburn, Alabama, Miami, and Michigan (sucks!) have given up on the student athlete. But they don’t want to give up on the big-money that comes with big-sports success. So they create kinesiology majors, give these kids an “A” for “trying,” and then dump them back into the real world as soon as they are no longer able to help develop revenue without any actual preparation for success beyond football/whatever-other-sport-they-played. It would be pretty funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

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Brian Cook continues to, I assume, lay “groundwork” for his arguments against the mlive.com piece. This time, he’s republished a piece called “Destroy Harbaugh” in which he takes a bunch of numbers and manipulates them or outright fabricates them to essentially argue “everybody’s doing it.” He does so while slandering Notre Dame. But in the re-posting of this piece, he drops this quick note as a preface:

Editor’s note: The Notre Dame numbers were disputed by some ND readers; ND’s site lists two majors for everyone or a major-minor pair or something; it was confusing and I just ticked down a bunch of majors; I wouldn’t take the assertions of grouping below seriously. Suffice it to say that guys with 6th to 8th grade reading levels apparently average a 3.5 at ND; they’re probably not taking astrophysics.

Amazing how difficult it can be to read and copy down the majors of a college football team for someone with such a self-proclaimed aptitude for “data” analysis. To help Brian out, I’ll just re-link to our response to his original stem of fecal matter.

Also incredible: Brian’s misunderstanding of the phrase, “Suffice it to say.”

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That’s shocking!

“If I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet, I wouldn’t be more surprised than I am now.”

What’s the opposite of this quote? Because that’s what I’m feeling today, “learning” from mlive.com that, GASP!, The University of Michigan (sucks!) is herding athletes into easy majors/coruses.

I know! I had to sit down and take a moment as well!

Anyway, I’m just waiting for the attempts at spin. Thus far, Brian Cook of mgoblog has begun to “lay some groundwork” for whatever argument he’s about to attempt. Love the use of the term, “Data” to make what he spews out in that post seem like, “Data.” He’s becoming the Jack Van Impe of sports bloggers.

We already know what Brian’s response will be if he’s at all consistent because we’ve been through this all before.

At any rate, we promise to rip apart whatever response The Iraqi Information Minister Brian cooks up (pun alert!). It’s the off-season, and we’re looking for a fight.

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Knows a things or two about things that end in “itis.”

The HLS March Madness Bracketitis is back! And this time it’s raging!

That’s right friends, it’s the best time of the off-season: A time when something nearly suffices to fully distract our hearts and minds from College Football. The brackets have been announced, and it’s time for you to fill out your picks here for a chance to win… absolutely nothing! But hey, if you win, you can shout out in bars, “I’ve got a raging case of Bracketitis, and HLS done gave it to me!” We just hope that if you win, you’re a girl!

To join the game, click on the link below and use the super-secret, nobody-woulda-ever-guessed password!

Group Link: http://herloyalsons.mayhem.sportsline.com/e

Password: louholtz

Good luck and remember, you may still have a raging case of Bracketitis even without the obvious symptoms!

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There’s not much going on in the College Football World, so I thought I’d just make this roundup all about Bob Costas because it seems like Bob’s feeling a little threatened by sports bloggers. He doesn’t understand them. He thinks they’re idiots. He believes that they blog from their mother’s basement. That’s preposterous. I can’t get a WiFi connection from the basement.

That said, let me address Bob for a moment: Bob, the only thing that separates you from nearly any sports blogger on the internet is that you have a monthly budget for hair-care products. That, and some of these blogs are interesting and fun. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for you to understand blogging, Bob.

In honor of Bob, here’s a roundup of a few of his pieces that I thought showed real insight and some wit:

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Okay, maybe it’s been two weeks.  But this is important!

Luke Harangody was named Big East Playa of the Year.

Simply fantastic for a guy who wavered on accepting his ND scholarship because he wasn’t sure if he could be a big man in the Big East.   Guess Brey is smarter than Luke knew.

Congrats big man. 

 And…Mike Brey was named Big East Coach of the Year.  Given what he did with Luke and the team, this is well deserved too.  Congrats Coach.

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Yeah, so, Michigan had to be sued to agree to improve access to the Widdle House for disabled and handicapped patrons, but they did so.

It’s pretty sad that the paralyzed veterans group and the US Department of Justice had to bring a lawsuit to bear to get the skunkbear administration to actually care about people.  But, you know, that’s not all that unexpected.

In the past, the stadium staff used to say to people “Make it through this, and you can see the game.  Good luck wheelchair folks, you gotta want it!  See you in the stadium!”

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