Should this season in fact be something special, the kind that ends in confetti underfoot, we may talk about Notre Dame's win over Wake Forest as the game in which the team discovered its identity. A change at quarterback, from Brandon Wimbush to Ian Book, after three consecutive but flawed wins transformed Notre Dame's offense. The defense punished Wake Forest throughout the contest, displaying a nastiness not seen from the boys in gold in a long time. Should this season be something special, ...
Winning is Everything: Fighting Irish Sink Commodores
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish beat the Vanderbilt Commodores 22-17, to move to 3-0 on the season. Somehow, for many to most of the fan base, this is not enough. The narrative is quickly building that there is something wrong with the team, whether with Brian Kelly or Brandon Wimbush or with some combination of the two. Maybe with the Board of Trustees. Given the data, though, it looks like the 2018 Fighting Irish are more a team "on the verge" than a team "on the brink." Most pundits picked ...
You Like To Watch: Ratings Through Week Two
NBC Sports announced yesterday that the first two games, against Michigan and Ball State, of the 2018 Notre Dame football season have been the most-watched in eight years. Notre Dame Football on NBC is up sixty-five percent (65%) over last season. Clearly, you like to watch. NBC tracks its viewing metrics a bit differently than a simple trawl through Nielsen's data. NBC uses an acronym that is straight out of the Sean Spicer School of Photoshop: Total Audience Delivery (TAD). TAD is an ...
What’s Wrong With Wimbush?
"We're happy to win the game..." are the words with which Brian Kelly chose to start his post game press conference in the uncertain wake of a 24-16 win over in-state rival (?), Ball State. Coach Kelly took most of the blame, but to be fair, not a single coach took a single snap. With The Irish unchanged at 8 and 2-0 on the season, is there something rotten in the state of Notre Dame? I don't think so. For one, Notre Dame is 2-0 and unchanged at 8 in the AP poll. Reality for Notre Dame is ...
MACtastic MACtion: Notre Dame takes on Ball State
For the Ball State Cardinals, leaving the friendly confines of Scheumann Stadium to travel from Muncie to Notre Dame, involves more than just 69. The left exit and the run up Highway 31 shifts the field. Behind them is the relative quiet of MAC West football -- MACtion. In front, the echoes of ESPN's College Gameday and the "cathedral of college football." The Fighting Irish head into Saturday's first-ever meeting with their in-state opponent ranked 8th in the country and with ...
Irish Opening: First Game Ratings, Moments, and More
Each football season takes on a personality of its own. The moment that personality percolates to the surface cannot be determined in advance. But, like April, come she will, recognizable in the moment, truly discernable only when the season itself is done and dusted. In 2012, the moment came in the eight game, when Everett Golson threw a fifty-yard completion to Chris Brown. In 2011, it came in the opener, against South Florida, when it started to rain and The Irish melted like spun sugar ...
Her Loyal Review: ND Insider’s 2018 Notre Dame Football Preview
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 ...
Alma Matters: Graduation
Do you know what it means to miss Notre Dame? This graduation weekend, this weekend where the latest class of overachievers leave a campus I hardly recognize anymore, I cannot help but pervert the Louis Armstrong classic to bring my thoughts back to the Bend. It's a Bend I don't get back to enough, or, really, at all. I was back for Stanford in 2004. Before Stanford, there was law school and finding my way, a wedding, a deployment. Then Katrina, and a kid, intervened. I went back for Michigan in ...
Notre Dame, Our Mother
"Hi mom, it's me. Steve." My roommate would start every call home this way. I wonder what today's student would make of the idea of sharing a phone? Of having a phone that was physically attached to the wall by a cord of some lunatic length and a receiver that was itself connected to the base by another coil, equally long? What would today's student make of the ritual of producing your room's answering machine message? I howled internally whenever my roommate would reintroduce himself to his ...
What Can You Make Out of This? Blue-Gold Game 2018
With a scoring system roughly as complicated as the one used in dressage and an excitement level usually reserved for the Purdue game, the Notre Dame Football Blue-Gold Game is of interest mainly to see what progress, if any, was made over the Spring practices and how The Shirt looks in the stands. It's also a reasonable facsimile of college football, so if you're not careful and you suspend reality just enough, it can be a fair amount of fun to watch. This year's April Classic was no different ...