Apologies for getting this out sooooo late today, or tomorrow, depending on what side of 12 I actually hit “publish.” I was either just stricken with food poisoning, or the gods wanted to give me a 6 hour view into how much it sucks to be a Wolverine…

I’ve really enjoyed hosting the IGB this week, and thank Subway Domer for offering us the opportunity. If you haven’t already, check out the fine answers (that I know about) in the links below, and then we’ll get around to my answers to my own questions.

• Irish Round Table
• We Never Graduate
• One Foot Down
• UHND
• Subway Domer
• Inside the Irish
• Rakes of Mallow
• Domer Law Blog

1) You’ve now seen Notre Dame Football: The Kelly Edition, Volume 1, Episode 1. Was it everything you thought it would be? Were characters missing from this episode that you were expecting to see featured? Did it strike you as a carbon-copy of Kelly’s Cincinnati teams, or is there something discernible between the 2 programs beyond the colors of the uniforms?

Well, it wasn’t “50 quick slants to Mike Floyd and a cloud of dust.” So yeah, it was a surprise to me. I also would have picked the over – whatever it was – for that game, and I’m pretty sure the score landed in the under. Nothing we’ve seen in 3 years, even including the B&G game this spring, indicated that the Irish would tackle on a level that may have even gone a full level over “competent.”

And I’ll also cop to sort of expecting that Dayne Crist would look not just “good,” but “awesome.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no real complaint about Crist’s first start aside from an occasional throw to Floyd into the drum section. That said, one of Kelly’s most recent hallmarks has been his ability to get any QB playing for his team to play at a high level. And given that, I sort of kind of maybe just a teensie bit expected that Crist, as Kelly’s new starter with a full spring and fall camp in the books, would look Heismanish. Hey, it’s the everlasting optimist in me. Sue me.

2) Pick one positive play, offense or defense, by the Irish from last Saturday that you feel serves as a bit of metaphorical foreshadowing for the 2010 Irish. Extra points if you can stretch the metaphor to fit Kelly’s entire tenure at Notre Dame.

1st and 10 ND at the ND 25. 3:50 to go in the 2nd half. Dayne Crist passes the ball for an 11 yard gain to Cierre Wood. First down. And with a little under 4 minutes to go in the first half, Crist had just managed to complete at least 1 pass to 7 different receivers in the first half of his first start.

This is going to happen often.

3) Pick another play, offense or defense, by the Irish from last Saturday again, but this time, make it a negative play. Tell us how that play serves as a bit of metaphorical foreshadowing for the 2010 Irish. And again, bonus points for stretching it over Kelly’s tenure.

Yeah, like I believe a majority of the IBG members have already said, I’ll take the safety too. It embodies every paranoia ND fans have managed to develop over the last decade short of the “our most important player just got hurt because the HC tried to kill the clock in a bonehead fashion” paranoia: Bobdavieobia. It’s been spelled out enough by all the other respondents, but let me just sum up a bit more: This sort of miscue is the exact sort you might expect to see in the first year of a new system, particularly from an OL that hasn’t performed at a high level in about 5 seasons. Unfortunately, such miscues will not always be in games against Purdue.

4) You know us, we’re stat geeks. Give us a stat that we should be watching this season that will A) Tell us something enlightening about the 2009 Irish and/or B) Tell us something enlightening about the
average Top-5 teams at the end of the 2010 season.

I’m going to be watching yards per pass attempt pretty closely all season. ND had a pretty good passing game, as noted above, with completed passes to 7 players, but currently ND’s at only about 7.88 yards per attempt passing. That’s pretty middling. Anything under 7 yards/attempt is, from what I understand, usually considered bad. In fact, after 1 week, 7 yards per attempt is the cut-off before you reach the bottom 50 teams in the stat. It’s not like ND needs a herculean effort to firmly settle into the “good” ranks in this number. Last year, ND sported one of the better yards per attempt rankings at 8.68 ypa – 9th best in the nation. Still, does ND need a Golden Tate Part Deux to reach a number like that?

Last year’s final top 5 teams had ypa rates of: Alabama 7.6, Texas 7.09, Florida 9.08, BSU 8.07, tOSU 7.14. Yes, even tOSU had a higher ypa rate than ND currently has after playing Purdue. I’m not concerned. Just curious.

5) Notre Dame is currently a 4 point favorite in the coming Michigan game. You get 3 points for being at home. The AP poll actually ranks Michigan higher than ND. ND is 1-4-1 in the last 6 games with Michigan in which the Irish were favored and 9 and 6 in the last 15 games in which Michigan was favored. Does any of this worry you? Why or why not?

No. This question was, in the words of Admiral Ackbar, a trap.

6) Last week, Frank at UHND put the Gathering on the spot with our predictions for the season. After week 1, are there any of those predictions that you’d like to alter? Any upon which you’d double down?

I picked Pitt to be the highest ranked team on our schedule after the season. Feel free to stop reading HLS now.

7) Describe in no fewer than 30 words why you hate Michigan.

I didn’t always hate Michigan. I wasn’t aware enough of Michigan to hate them. Even through college, I fully recognized that a game with Michigan was a big game, but I didn’t hate them. No. It took a year of living in Michigan to come to really hate Michigan. And now I hate not just the University of Michigan, but the entire state. All because of Ed.

Ed was a contractor. An IT contractor. Back within the heady days of the year 2000, if you could spell the word “Java,” you could get paid a gold-brick to hash out some html as a contractor. Each week. And in between bowling league nights and dates with his 400 pound wife at the local Tim Hortons, that’s what Ed did. And he did it poorly. And he made my first job out of college complete hell.

But beyond creating more work for everyone else on my team thanks to his craptastic work, Ed also served as the first person ever, upon learning that I was a graduate of Notre Dame, to get this squirrelly look in his eye and this grin on his face as he told me that he was a graduate of Michigan.

As if that was supposed to mean something to me.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. It’s not the fact that he was a Michigan grad that caused me to hate him or Michigan. It was his attitude about that fact. And it wasn’t even that he was overly proud of graduating from the University of Michigan. It was that he was so hell bent of practically making me shout to the heavens that, “YES, ED, GRADUATING FROM MICHIGAN IS CERTAINLY AT LEAST AS IMPRESSIVE, IF NOT MORESO, AS GRADUATING FROM NOTRE DAME.”

You know that joke, “how do you know a guy graduated from Notre Dame? He’ll tell you.” Well, there’s a corollary: “How do you know a guy graduated from Michigan? He’ll tell you. And then remind you. And then point it out again and again and again because you didn’t even realize that graduating from Michigan is like winning a Rhodes Scholarship and he’s going to continue to remind you that he’s a Michigan Grad until you throw a ticker-tape parade for him.”

That was Ed, the Michigan grad with the vague understanding of basic computer concepts working in IT contracting.

Hey, there are exceptions to every rule. I’ve met some good Michigan grad folks, but I’ve met a lot of Eds since I first met the Ed.

Ed, and a vast body of Michigan grads like him, embody everything that’s wrong with America: Expectations of massive wages without ever assembling a set of irreplaceable skills that justify those wages. The Pontiac Aztek. The ushering of football players into “football majors” and still failing to graduate African American players at a rate comparable to white players. The “Rush Hour” films. The ubiquity of Applebees. That chick that looks like a horse and is obviously the town bicycle at ESPN. Brian Cook (who, by the way, is annoyed by my IBG questions – mission accomplished). Everything ever made my Oldsmobile. Attempts at sustenance via a diet of krullers. The entire American Pie series of films after the first one, and every subsequent teen comedy of the same mold. Tuesdays with Morrie. John Saunders. Yoohoo. Sarah Moulton. The socio-economic cancer that is Coinstar. Lucy Liu’s entire “acting” career. Government bloat. The Detroit Free Press. And a plethora of other things that I can’t think about right now because I’m too infuriated by the way Michigan is destroying our great nation. That’s all “Pure Michigan.”

Mostly, I hate Michigan because, being human, I need something to hate, and after a year in that God-foresaken state, just outside of Detroit, where I never went a day without someone lamenting that their “rightful” high-wage jobs and incredible pensions were being “robbed” by “foreigners,” and watched the unassailably untalented Ed continute to get paid doing “IT work,” by one of those major, crappy auto companies, Michigan just became easy to hate. Michigan’s just become this massive, easily targeted bucket into which all my bile may be spat. Hate isn’t healthy. It’s human, but it’s not healthy, so I give it to Michigan. And Ed.