So there I was, about 15 hours removed from an all-you-can-eat-meat-fest in celebration of my birthday (no jokes about Alumni Hall parties, please), about 5 minutes after the rains cleared, and about 5 months after a 3-9 season when it began to dawn on me: I’m not going to be able to park anywhere near the stadium today. Why? Well, I’m pretty sure that not all of the usual “stadium parking” was open, but mostly I couldn’t park anywhere near the stadium because way more people than I expected, given the previous record, the crummy weather forecast (you were so wrong, Frommy), and the lack of any real “must-see” facets to the game, showed up to watch the game.

And so began a full afternoon of mostly pleasant surprises for my little trip back to South Bend for the 2008 Notre Dame Blue and Gold Game Festival, or whatever they call it. I know they call it a festival, and I’m not clear on why. A festival of what? Construction cranes? Because that’s the only feature on campus I really noted as being remarkable. Crikey, there is a lot of construction on that campus these days. Nice to know my donation dollars are going to good use. This year I donated enough to pay for 2 construction workers to take a lunch break on non-holiday pay. Wont you help feed the construction workers? Donate today!

In keeping with my “manic stream of consciousness” theme I’ve established thus far, I think I’ll just start listing things I noticed about the day, the game, my school, and life on this, the 19th of April. If you have a hard time keeping up, just imagine I write for cnnsi.com except with lower pay and way more qualification. If you still have a hard time keeping up, please don’t have children.

• Good: ND managed to have I’d guess 30,000 people show up to the spring game of a team that just went 3-9. Bad: Half of the stadium was closed due to construction, so it looked like a pretty poor showing in person. Probably looked worse from any media cameras that were there. I was concerned this would hurt our recruiting efforts for the weekend. As you know if you’re reading this, it didn’t. And you know that because you read ND football blogs, and have thus read the news that we at HLS have not yet covered unless The Biscuit posts something about it before I get done with this piece.
• Apparently 90% of the fanbase hasn’t gotten the message that Charlie is no longer calling the plays on offense, based on the comments I was overhearing. And I moved around in the stadium a fair amount. The ignorance was homogeneously distributed.
• Our linebackers have a hard time “staying clean.” I say that despite what seems to be the common (mis?)conception around the internets that the linebacker play was pretty good today. I figure that’s due to Harrison Smith looking like Zibby 2.0. Yeah, he looked great when he was making plays. When he wasn’t making plays? He was lost. He was. That’s to be expected. He’s moving down to LB after training as a Safety for so long. It’s a quick read, and normally he has more space between himself and the guard within which he can recover. Good news is, he sure is quick to recover. Crum still has trouble shedding blocks, but he took on the contact with a lot of gusto. Maybe he’s hoping to scare 320 pound guards from blocking him.
• That said, even with our linebackers getting caught up too often, they did make some plays, and they are very, I repeat, very active. From the moment the huddle breaks, they’re moving around. It was a pain trying to find the MLB from the stands, and I know who he is from the minute he walks on the field. Good luck, opposing centers/QBs. Say farewell to 4-5 seconds of play-clock. Better get the calls in quickly, opposing OCs. Also, if this was the “vanilla” version of the defense, my god are we going to blitz a lot. And with Kerry Neal and Brian Smith continuing their best impersonations of angry-giants-with-heads-aflame, I’m predicting 2-3 opposing QBs knocked out of play in 2008. Seriously. I’m trying to temper my enthusiasm, but it really seems Corwin Brown has embraced Tenuta’s public “never let the QB get comfortable” mantra and Tenuta’s lesser-known, private mantra of “Kill! Murder! Death!”
• Trying to make any guesses about the performance (in terms of quality) of the 2008 squad based on this game would be about as successful as forcibly creating a democracy in the middle east. And, really, going to the game as a die-hard fan is just a giant mind-screw. Every single positive is a negative in this game. Hughes looked great, is that because our defensive front looked terrible? Our OL gave up a few sacks, are Neal and Smith just that awesome? Our wide receivers drop a lot of on-the-money passes. Is that because… wait. No. They just drop a lot of freaking passes. Let’s talk about that in our next item.
• Our wide receivers drop a lot of passes. Look. I know we were sort of spoiled there for a bit with our mini-renaissance of the Stovall/Shark era, where anytime a ball went up, it seemed like a Notre Dame pair of hands came down with it, but jeezy-creezy, it’s not as if the dropped balls today were due to “stone hands” or nerves. They were due to sloppy freaking technique. Every time a ball got dropped, it was due to the receiver trying to catch with his pads or “basket catch” something that should have been caught with the basic “triangle technique.” What’s the “triangle technique,” you ask? Hold one hand out in front of you, palm facing away, thumb perpendicular to index finger, index finger pointing upward in a diagonal fashion. Now do the same thing with your other hand. Now turn yourself around. Ha! Kidding! No, seriously do the first things, the parts with the hands, and then bring them together until your thumbs and index fingers make a triangle. That’s the “triangle technique.” Now you know how to properly catch a football when running an out, a slant, a hitch, a square in, or a post. And believe me, it’s way easier to catch such passes with that technique than the “let it bounce off your pads, then catch it on the rebound” technique. Why didn’t your dad teach you this? You dad does suck. And our coaches had better correct this laziness, something I’ve seen them correct in certain players named Maurice Stovall, right this freaking minute (or whenever the team gets to practice again).
• God help you if you are a defensive anything and Chris Stewart gets his hands on the inside of your pads.
• Clausen throws a pretty freaking ball. And he’s faster than Quinn. And Quinn’s a pretty good athlete. I’m not saying Clausen would win a straight sprint against Quinn, but when he ditches the pocket, or he steps into the pocket, it’s a shade quicker than Quinn ever was, and he’s a full step quicker than Clausen himself was in 2007. That little bit will help a ton this season in making the OL look a lot better.
• Amazing that the Big Televen officials still found ways to screw up this game.
• Girls most definitely did not dress like that when I was at Notre Dame. No wonder our recruiting rocks.
• I own every shirt worth owning in the ND bookstore, and I haven’t bought a new one in 2 years.
• BP still has their “dorm of the year” banner up on the front wall. They won it in 2004-2005. I’m going to go find my “best hustle” trophies from little league.
• Clausen now looks like a QB rather than just a guy that throws balls and hands off the running backs. He has the “presence” that Quinn actually had in his freshman year. He’s looking guys off. He did, actually, try to throw a few away. He did throw the prettiest deep ball I’ve seen in ND stadium in 10 years. He threw, I think, everything right where it had to be with the exception of the first series. I figure the first series was just designed to remind anyone who’d forgotten what 2007 looked like. At any rate, I don’t think Clausen will be a problem in any way. And he clearly has the material to become the guy who can take a team to the top of the national stage. Also great to see: Much more “involved” with the other players. They were all coming up to him to give him “bumps” after positive plays. His OL all seem to have his back. And after the “game” ended, Jimmy was the first guy from the offense giving the defensive guys high-fives. These sorts of things do more to bode well for 2008 than anything you can see “in play.”
• Weird reaction I had when the team came out of the tunnel: We look really small. Not sure why I thought that. I saw a lot of the players after the game around campus. They aren’t small. Even our DBs look quite big, actually. Just a weird gut reaction. It might be that our OL, as massive as they indeed are, actually don’t look like they’re maxed out on weight. Except Stewart. Stewart’s built like a pimped out Land Rover.
• The “fight” was a great thing to see, from a fan’s point of view, because it reinforced that these guys are taking a lot of pride in their work. Second best thing to see: During the “fight,” the first person in my section to give the “fight” a standing-O was the mother of one particular player. I’ll keep her name out of it, but now I know from where that dude gets his ‘tude.
• Throwing the ball on ND probably isn’t going to be the best tactic for beating ND. Better to try gashing ND with a grinding, gashing style of play on the ground. The ND DBs are very good. Even when catches are made, the DBs are very quick to the ball. I would expect to see far more INTs for this unit this year. And Bruton and McCarthy are fun to watch pre-snap. They know exactly where they and everyone else is going to go, and they do a nice job of communicating.
• Before the offense’s “game winning” score, the students were actually “making some noise” in support of the defense. Ha!
• The RBs all seem a full beat faster in identifying their man when they stay in the pocket for pass protection. And that’s no small task as the guys coming at the QB are wasting no time in doing it.
• Speaking of those guys coming at the QB, that constant chanting of “downhill” by Tenuta is paying off, and not just for the LBs. The DBs are noticeably quicker as well when they come on the blitz. Angles still need some work for some of the guys, but nobody on the field has taken a full step sooner than the ND blitzers after the ball is snapped.
• Terrail Lambert laid one on Armando Allen to “save” a TD. It was the loudest pop in 40 minutes full of some pretty good hitting. Good for him. I hope it foreshadows a season where I’m not wondering why younger guys haven’t beaten him out.
• I had one thing that my rational mind allowed me to look forward to today: Young guys, guys we all got jazzed about signing a year or two ago, making plays and having “shining moments” today as an indicator of good things to come. And I got it. You can’t glean much about this program other than the fact that guys like Hughes, The Smiths, Clausen, Allen, Walls, and Kamara all made plays at different points in the game. That’s critical. The classes in front of them are too small to carry the load this season, so these guys can’t just “wait their turn.” And it seems they understand the opportunity they have in front of them and are trying to take advantage of it. With some success, the sophomore class could cause opponents to really hate them for the next few years.

That’s enough for now. I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but I’m exhausted. Do me a favor, if there’s something you really want to know about, just ask in the comments, and I’ll reply. If you want an answer to “will we be better than last year,” I really have to think we will be, if for no other reason than this spring was clearly much more intense than last year.

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