Following an opening weekend five days of incredible college football action, your Fighting Irish are up two spots to number nine in the most recent AP poll, the first in-season poll of the season.
Ohio State is a consensus number one. ‘Bama is in at two, Michigan State is at five, and USC is at eight. Clemson is slotted at twelve, Georgia Tech is at fifteen, and Stanford is at twenty-OH THAT’S RIGHT, they lost to Northwestern. Bad for ND’s Strength Of Schedule but good for our Schadenfreude O’Schedule.
Since being a conference is super important, let’s take a quick look there: SEC has three teams in the first ten and ten in the top twenty-five. That makes them awesome. The Big Ten has two teams. The Big ACC and the Big 12 have three, each, and the Pac-12 has five. Boise State at twenty showers glory upon the Mountain West.
Bayou Irish
Hating Hurricanes Since 1990.
Bayou Irish is a Jersey boy and Double Domer who fell under New Orleans' spell in 1995. He's been through Katrina and fourteen years in the Coast Guard, so we cut him some slack, mostly in the form of HLS-subsidized sazeracs. But, when he's not face down on the bar and communing with the ghosts of Faulkner and Capote at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, he's our man in SEC-land, doing his best to convince everyone around him that Graduation Success Rate is a better indicator of success than the number of MNC's won in the last five years.
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I have a feeling the discussion at the end of the season will be that ND’s schedule was too soft. Stanford already disappointing and I just have a feeling Clemson, with its decimated defense, will also. Since Carroll left, USC is always ready to implode at any moment and lose to Wazzou or BC. That leaves Paul Johnson’s triple option to do the heavy lifting. The ND opponent with the best win is Temple.
Of course if we play like we did Saturday I don’t see a loss and that makes it easier.
It will indeed be interesting, and hopefully we needn’t worry. Check back each Thursday; we’ll post weekly strength-of-schedules (strengths-of-schedule?) for all of ND opponents. The Irish usually end the year with a schedule strength of 40-60, and the small sample size at the beginning of the year makes for quite a bit of volatility early on.
If we make it unscathed through our schedule, it’ll be hard to justify leaving us out and Ohio State in with their cupcake walk this entire fall.