After nearly a full month of Notre Dame football withdrawal, the Champs Sports Bowl is finally just around the corner and thus, the pre-snap read has returned from its holiday slumber as well. Â It's been far too long, so let's get to it. ...well, there hasn't been much to be honest. Seriously, until yesterday's post about what we at HLS think are five of the top ten stories of this season for ND, there has been very little going on here. Blame the turkey, the presents, and in ...
Te’o Will Return in 2012
Christmas has come early for Irish fans. According to Lisa Horne of Fox Sports, Manti Te'o delivered the following statement during the Lott Award Ceremony: I feel I'm not done at Notre Dame. I'll be coming back to Notre Dame. To say I'm excited is an understatement. Our front seven will be absolutely stacked for 2012 and I cannot wait to see Te'o lead the Irish defense on the field once again. Guess we can put that whole Kelly "causing a divide" between Weis' players and his own thing ...
HLS Pre-Snap Read: Conference Championship Edition
Welcome to the Pre-Snap read, now in its new home of Friday mornings. Although ND doesn't have a game this week, I will keep the Pre-Snap read going to highlight the other games going on around the nation all the way through the bowl season. Of course, when ND starts up next season, the Pre-Snap read will once again return and stay in the Friday slot to ensure that you will get very little work done. Plan accordingly. I was close to entitling this week "all the games that don't matter" but ...
HLS Pre-Snap Read: First the Turkey, Now the Tree
The end is now upon us as the Irish prepare to take the field tonight to wrap up their regular season slate against #6 Stanford. The Irish will enter the game ranked in the BCS at #22 for the first time this season as well. On the line tonight will be Stanford's dream of a BCS berth, Andrew Luck's Heisman hopes, and Notre Dame...well, we are really looking to play spoiler more than anything as we are about 99.9% likely to be Champs Sports Bowl bound no matter what the result. However, pulling ...
HLS Pre-Snap Read: What is a Rival?
Apologies for the late release of this week's edition of the Pre-Snap Read. It's been quite the crazy week and the normal work that I usually put in to this throughout the week got pushed back. Â Forget the excuses though, be sure to hop in our gameday thread today, and let's get right into the usual news. Poot sobered up to bring you his usual recap. Biscuit loves that we are finally blowing out vastly inferior opponents. Poot hosts the IBG/starts a war with Keith Arnold of Inside ...
HLS Pre-Snap Read: Superpost Edition!
This week's edition of the Pre-Snap read is going to be a bit different today. Â It just so happens that the questions for this week's Irish Blogger Gathering covers what I would usually put in for the "Previously on HLS" and "Outside the Bubble Sections". Â So for this week, I will mix in the IBG questions with the usual topics covered in the Pre-Snap Read. There is quite a bit of content in this post and, to not make it a huge wall of text, I'm going to take advantage of some features of ...
What Is Tradition?
Notre Dame is behind the times. I'm sure there will be a good portion that will disagree with me on that statement, citing that Notre Dame's "tradition" should trump things such as new helmets, field turf, or even, *gasp* a jumbotron. Those things aren't "tradition", they are simply how "we've always done it". The two are not equivalent. Before I came to Her Loyal Sons, I wrote about a costly result of staying in the mindset of "this is how we've always done it", the death of Declan ...
HLS Pre-Snap Read: That Other Night Game
Or depending where you are in the nation, it could be that "other-other" night game.  Many thanks for moving this ESPN, I didn't want to watch LSU/Alabama as well, no not at all, that game totally isn't worth watching... I blame Craig James. Anyways, it's time for another edition of the HLS Pre-Snap Read (and of course, your weekly gameday thread) to get you ready for tonight's game as well as the rest of the college football day. ...
NDtex25: Double Dose
After a week off, the NDtex25 has returned to deliver a double dose of my rankings for the past two weeks.  As always, you can check out the formula details if you are new to this or need a refresher. I won't be doing too much analysis this week since doing the rankings alone took up so much time.  However, I will say that over these past two weeks, the rankings are becoming far more stable with very little jumping around. These rankings are starting to become much more of an alternative ...
Air Force & Navy – A Defensive Comparison
One thing that stood out to me during the ND/Navy game this past Saturday was that the defense looked monumentally better against the option than they did against Air Force. So I took a dive into some numbers to check out just how much improvement the team made. Note: For those that have Flickr images blocked, I have made a Google Doc as well for all charts. Obviously, we preformed monumentally better against Navy across the board. Going a bit deeper into the stats, we see more ...