Hi Irish Elvis and thanks for reading and for commenting. I gather you yourself did not graduate from Our Lady’s University, since you did not mention your class year. Regardless, I agree with your point, except that I find your references to playing cards offensive. Cards, as you may well know, can be used in either gambling or time-wasting, neither of which we really need to be promoting.

Perhaps if the head Joker (you know who I mean) would exhort these linemen to have more Heart and to Club their opponents on a regular basis, we’d see wins come in Spades.

You remind me of ever crusty chief or warrant I had the occasion to work with in the Coast Guard. Thank you for commenting and for the compliment. I appreciate it.

In our defense, I still misspell things regularly.

Hi tiki and thanks for reading and commenting. Sure. I could have used the mechanical and process failures that inundated New Orleans during and after Katrina, but I think the shuttle was a much more simple, and more easily YouTube-able, subject. Lives were lost in that shuttle disaster and ever will lives be lost in space and at sea and in the air. At times, those moments become fodder for writers or coaches — remember Bill Parcells? Sometimes, the use is in poor taste — certainly and clearly not my intent.

Thanks for reading and for commenting. I think if you’ve been following my posts over time you will know that, at most, I compare athletes to soldiers, I never equate them. Read my piece on Eddie Vanderdoes nnd his decommitment, for a start. Football, to be fair, is at certain times, a matter of life and death. One need only think of the Rutgers and Tulane players who, of late, were paralyzed by the game and who, in years before, would certainly have died on the field or in hospital from infectious process. The metaphor of the trench is one that is used all the time to describe the O- versus D-line battle, no offense, and I make no apologies for using it, especially in this centenary year. Regarding the shuttle, I only compared the season’s de-lamination (sp?) to the shuttle’s reentry. That was a mechanical process — you will note I even hyperlinked to mission control. We use the Titanic as a literary device in so many instances — Pearl Harbor, too — such that I’m okay with what I did, from my perspective. Yours is different, and if I offended you, I am, for that, sorry.

There is a lot of nice, fancy words in there Bayou, but, I am an old school lineman that happened to coach the game for ten years and officiated it for the last 13. I agree, Kelly’s system seems to employ a lot of finesse, much like Charlie’s zone blocking scheme, but you have to have the ability to man handle your opponent and until we do that, we will see the same thing year in and year out. ND has not been dominant up front for a long time. EG was blamed for a lot of the TO’s especially against ASU and in my eyes, the OL forced a lot of that to happen. EG isn’t without blame though, he needs to improve. Yes, a good QB will make the line look better, but, a bad OL will make a decent QB look bad too. Love the articles. Keep up the good work.

Hi William. Thanks for reading and for commenting. Like Golson, they, the line, sort of seemed to be in a fog most of the year. The O-line is the only position group that functions as a unit, meaning a poor performer at the LG position negates the worth of your stud RT five plays out of seven, whereas a five star MLB will make the entire D better. Nastiness is a funny word with linemen, for I think there’s a lot of finesse, technique, and skill to it. There’s synchronicity required, again, something I think that is more diminished, but not absent, on the defensive side of the ball. So, to wrestle this reply back towards relevance, I think we saw a lot of individual poor performances, none perhaps as noteworthy as Lombard’s against USC, that just happened to couple with some awful decision-making by Number Five. A great QB will make his line better more than a great line will make their QB better — a mediocre QB won’t use the pocket right or will hold onto the ball too long. We saw all those things this year. My hope is that time will cure whatever ails them.