The 2018 Notre Dame Football Preview from ND Insider has been on the stands for a few weeks now. Its appearance is another sign that football is close at hand. At ninety-six pages, heavy with gloss and laden with information, it takes the reader deeper and deeper into a very Irish world. With such depth, the reader only finds the bottom with the back cover. When digested, the reader should know everything about the team, from the specialists to the coaches.
The 2018 Notre Dame Football Preview is a must-have, even for the casual fan. As ever, the 2018 Notre Dame Football Preview is a bargain at twice the price. You can purchase it here for $12.95, which includes shipping in the United States, or just $9.95 off the newsstand.
*this article contains mild spoilers*
ND Insider is the unofficial official source for all things Notre Dame football, basketball, and other sports. ND Insider is a creature of The South Bend Tribune. The Tribune’s sports writers write The Preview. The 2018 preview is Mike Vorel’s last, as he’s taken his talents to Seattle. Fair winds, Mike.
To anyone who watched A Season with Notre Dame Football, Jerry Tillery, and his alter ego Terry Jillery, were scene stealers. The Preview gives him ample coverage, from the cover to a fantastic deep-dive by Eric Hansen, The South Bend Tribune’s head ND Football reporter. On a personal note, I fell in love with Tillery simply because he hails from the Sportsman’s Paradise and snubbed LSU, along with many others, when he committed to Notre Dame. The article provides a lot of detail on how Tillery’s initial decision to play for The Irish, and his decision to play for The Irish in 2018, transformed him. If Hansen’s right, Jillery is truly in the past. If Hansen’s right, Tillery is going from Showtime to show time in a very big way.
The Preview goes heavy on features. It gives long reads of Phil Jurkovec, Miles Boykin, Jeff Quinn, and Clark Lea. Need your fix of Brian Kelly? The Preview gives you twenty questions — from his last “honey-do” project to what he misses most about Ara — with perhaps twenty unexpected answers. Brandon Wimbush and Ian Book, indeed the whole QB position going into 2018, get analyzed alongside Irish quarterbacks from Brady Quinn forward. It’s another perfect read from Eric Hansen. Shorter pieces, covering Myron Tagovailoa-Amosa to Justin Yoon, accompany every positional analysis.
Tyler James, The South Bend Tribune’s ND Football Recruiting pro, says The Preview’s detail is what makes it unique. “[W]hat makes our our product really special is our focus on telling compelling stories around the program. We work hard to get the access to players, coaches, and recruits to share their stories. If it matters to Notre Dame’s 2018 season, it’s in our magazine.” Tyler’s piece on Ja’mion Franklin, his father, and football is beautiful.
There’s prognostication served on the side of the positional analyses, roster details, and stats. Each of the four writers weigh in with their season predictions, from the record to the position standouts to the trap game. Without giving too much away, one thing they each predict for the season is that Wimbush has way more to offer than we’ve seen to date. According to Tyler James, “[l]ast season was nowhere near his ceiling.”
If you’re eager to know all about the newest Irish, there’s gobs of information for you, too. Want to learn their celeb crush? Favorite song? How many times they’ve seen Rudy? How many pets? Favorite emoji? That’s all there for you. If you think they’ve all seen Rudy a hundred thousand times or you don’t know what an emoji is, you’re a magazine living in a digital world, brother. Hopefully, like The Preview, you’re the kind of magazine everyone wants to get their hands on.
If you want to learn a lot more about Tyler James, The Preview, and ND football, tune in to the Her Loyal Sons Podcast through either the podcast feed or on our Twitch channel, with the episode premiering tonight at 8pm ET.
As always, Her Loyal Sons is grateful to Tyler for the review copy, the quotes and for sitting in on the old podcast.
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.
- Finding Flaws in a Diamond: Clemson’s Rushing Offense - December 17, 2018
- Why Nobody Will Cotton to Notre Dame - December 3, 2018
- Irish Finish Regular Season Perfect 12-0 - November 26, 2018
