Courtesy of Wikipedia

Her Loyal Sons has exclusively learned that Notre Dame senior safety Max Redfield intends to leave the university and transfer to Eastern Washington, a Football Championship Subdivision school, for his final year of eligibility.

Redfield’s transfer comes as somewhat of a shock, even though true freshman Devin Studstill had been seen taking first-team reps at the free safety position.

In a statement posted to his Twittergram account, the former Mission Viejo, Calif. resident said:

I feel a calling deep within my loins. It’s my ancestors calling me home. They have spoken to me loud and they have spoken to me clear. I must honor my family by playing at Roos Field next year. I will always love Notre Dame, my teammates, fellow students, administration, coaches, staff, our fans. But I simply cannot resist the opportunity for Redfield on red field. #ballout #GoEagles #LuvMyIrish

Eastern Washington Coach Beau Baldwin said he was “beyond thrilled and terribly excited” for Redfield to join the Eagles.

We believe Max will be a big part of our quest for another Big Sky Conference championship and a FCS title. His transfer speaks volumes about the national reputation that Eastern Washington has received in the past few years and the caliber of student-athlete we are producing here in Cheney. When I told my brothers Alec, Daniel and Billy at Easter dinner that Max’s transfer was a real possibility, they simply could not believe it. We look forward to getting Max here on campus as soon as possible.

Redfield never lived up to the five-star billing he received coming out of high school, although he had moments that Notre Dame fans will certainly never forget.

Best of luck in your new endeavor, Max. Fly, Eagles. Fly.

The post Redfield To Transfer, Play on Red Field appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

Play Like a Champion Today

Notre Dame has agreed to cede all rights to the “Play Like A Champion” motto – including barring its display on campus – in exchange for Oklahoma head football coach, Bob Stoops.

The deal was announced this morning in a short, joint statement by Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, Oklahoma President David L. Boren and Laurie Wenger, who owns the copyright to the “Champion” sign.

Stoops will succeed Coach Brian Kelly as the 32nd coach of the Fighting Irish. He amassed a 179-46 (.795) record in 16 seasons with the Sooners, including a 2000 National Championship and a second appearance in the final in 2010.

The Irish have long coveted Stoops, reaching out to him at least twice after the firings of Bob Davie, Ty Willingham and Charlie Weis. Sources close to Swarbrick said the athletic director had reached out to Boren after expressing displeasure with “average” nine-win seasons under Kelly.

On the Oklahoma side, sources familiar with the negotiations said Boren initially dismissed the overture, but rejoined negotiations when Swarbrick offered to remove “Play Like A Champion Today” signs from Notre Dame’s campus and disassociate themselves with the motto.

The iconic sign has hung outside the Notre Dame football team’s home locker room since 1986, when then-head coach Lou Holtz commissioned Wenger, a campus sign painter, to make the unmistakeable gold placard with blue writing. Since then, it’s become tradition for football players to touch the sign before taking the field. Similar signs have been temporarily erected in visiting locker rooms and for other athletic teams associated with the university.

Oklahoma fans and alumni have expressed bitterness over Notre Dame “stealing” its aphorism, which they believe was coined by their legendary coach, Bud Wilkinson, sometime between 1947 and 1951. The original sign is showcased in the Switzer Center Museum, with the five words reprinted on a mural in a tunnel that leads to the Sooners’ home field.

As part of the agreement, Wenger will no longer contract with two South Bend-area printing companies, AP Image Team and Dec-O-Art, to make the iconic blue and gold version and will instead begin partnering with two Norman firms, King Kopy & Printing and Action Printing, to produce the sign in crimson and cream. The university will buy the first 10,000 units for its bookstore, located in the Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

Although not disclosed, Notre Dame will also pay a portion of Stoops’ remaining contract to Oklahoma, up to $5 million, according to a source who requested anonymity because he was not authorized by the university to speak about the negotiations.

The source said Kelly learned late Thursday night of his termination. Attempts to reach him this morning were unsuccessful.

The post Stoops Traded To ND for “Play Like A Champion” Rights appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

It turns out that Rockne’s has as much to do with football as Darrell Hazell has to do with fine dining. Or as Darrell Hazell has to do with high-quality football. Either way. Owned by Kurt and Gurli Dagmarfisk, formerly of Trondheim, Norway, Rockne’s, though named after the region’s most famous son of Norway, leaves any pretense to sport at the beautifully finished antique door that the pair salvaged from an abandoned ostrich ranch in Michigan. Once inside, any thoughts of football, even the last lingering wafts of ethanol, are quickly subsumed by the tantalizing aromas of baking lefsa and kniep breads.

The dining space is quaint and well turned-out, with a fireplace that both warms the room and provides a pleasant, onomotopoeia-ic accompaniment to amuses bouches of house-made local cheese topped with paddlefish caviar. To the Dagmarfisks, sustainable ingredients are far more important than gaudily-named (and -priced!) alternatives, such as Caspian Sea osetra, which we all know is just months from extinction.

“We, Gurli and I, came to America after serving together in Hans Majestets Kongens Garde and we settled in Chicago, because we thought it most like Norway, what with the cold and all the immigrants,” Chef Kurt told me while I sampled a flirtatious sauvignon blanc that he paired with a fine crudite plate. “Still, we grew more and more homesick. One day we visited South Bend. It has a river with tall banks, like a fjord, and it’s somehow colder and snowier than Chicago and it has lake-effect weather, so it’s gray almost the whole year ’round. It’s very, very much like Norway.”

Starters and salads are terrific. I especially appreciated the plate of mixed greens served cold and starkly on an enormous granite plate. “At night, Gurli and I go onto the Notre Dame campus and we pick the vines from the trellises between the Law School, Fitzpatrick Hall and  DeBartolo. When I hear people complain that nothing has grown on them since 1994, I laugh!”

Main courses range from the humdrum, the walleye in parsley sauce, to the extraordinary, local venison with currants and baby carrots. Chef Kurt explained, “my wife drives very, very fast and has excellent night vision so she forgets to turn on the headlights many times. There are many, many deer in this area and they can’t see her coming, so they jump out in front of her truck and she hits them and that’s how we get our meat for the restaurant.” Personally, I wish more restaurants would concentrate as much on overpopulation as they do on locally-sourced ingredients. Could you imagine the options for pigeon and squirrel? I for one could go for a few more intriguing appetizers in exchange for a few less red-furred menaces begging for potato chip crumbs at the Knights of Columbus steak sandwich line!

The wine list is perfectly acceptable and, helpfully,  a sommelier may be in the cards for next season. “After the Michigan game last year,” Chef Kurt told me, “we were absolutely packed and we thought about hiring one to handle the task. But, after the Northwestern game, I think the bitter taste in many mouths was too much to distinguish between a barolo and a chardonnay, even!”

If there are disappointments on the menu, they are found among the deserts. The flour-less chocolate cake was neither flour-less nor cake. The crême brûlée was poorly-formed and dour. Turnovers are frequent and soul-destroying. I liked the gelato best, a deft homage to Froyo that was at once fresh, minty, and insouciant.

Rockne’s. Corner of Colfax and North Niles Streets, South Bend. Reservations recommended. Phone (574) 867-5309. Follow them on Twitter (@RocknesSouthBend) or on Instagram.

The post Rockne’s: A Restaurant Review appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

Nope. Not this year. Good job, everyone.

Citing an overwhelming negative response from message boards, social media, and the occasional hand-written letter threatening to withhold donations, Notre Dame has decided to cancel the annual Blue/Gold Game after previously announcing it would be an invite-only event. Jack Swarbrick released the following statement this morning to explain the decision:

Fans of Our Lady’s University, we hear you loud and clear. Ever since we announced that the final spring practice, commonly known as the Blue & Gold Game, would be an invite only event, we have received constant complaints both directly and indirectly from alumni and fans.

We worked hard to convince our partners at NBC to once again allow Notre Dame to be one of the few schools to actually televise their glorified spring scrimmage and we figured that would satisfy everyone. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

After the Fighting Irish Digital Media team released TV broadcast information on Facebook, I did something that I had never done before: read the comments. I was shocked to see that people were still angry about the situation. There were comments of the broadcast not making up for our initial decision, anger that families now couldn’t afford to go to a game, and one gentlemen that said he’d be cleaning his toilet instead.

Quite frankly, I am ashamed that I have not listened to the fans sooner. Therefore, we are doing the only thing that we think that is fair and plugging the plug on everyone. Instead of the Blue & Gold Game, the football team will have a secluded practice in which no fan or media will be allowed to attend. It’s a shame too because Coach Kelly was excited to debut his run-heavy offense that features some odd position called a “fullback” in front of everyone.

We want to thank the world’s greatest fans for opening our eyes on this matter. Please be assured that we are now examining absolutely everything that we are doing here at Notre Dame based on your comments. Please continue to make your voice heard!

Obviously, with such a shocking statement, we immediately tried to reach out to Swarbrick to find out why the internet changed his mind and what else could be changing. We were very surprised to receive a near immediate response:

[All the terrible Facebook comments] just really got to me, you know. I was so surprised to see unhappy people on this announcement and dug back into previous announcements that we have done.

And I’m talking everything here–Campus Crossroads, switching to Under Armour, the Shamrock Series Uniforms, and putting down field turf. I couldn’t believe that quite literally everything that we’ve done made some people upset. And there are just so many negative responses. It’s incredibly overwhelming.

So I’m going back to the drawing board on everything, placing priority on items with the biggest amount of outrage, especially if such outrage contains comments along the lines of “Notre Dame has lost their way as a Catholic university” because those cut the deepest.

Our new policy here is to make everyone happy. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with a mindset of trying to please everybody?!

I sent a reply back to Jack pleading that he should never, ever read the comments but have received no reply. I’m not sure what kind of brave new world we are about to enter here, but I’m absolutely terrified of the possibilities.

And I will certainly be at the ready on Facebook for when it goes down.

The post Blue/Gold Game Cancelled Due to Fan Complaints appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

Please tell me this isn’t happening again.

Edit [7-7-14]: This post was an April Fools’ joke. To be more accurate, it ended up being a part of a much larger prank in which I got “fired” based on the knee-jerk reaction some people had to this. I suggest reading this post for all the details of the prank and my reasoning behind this post.

With that being said, I am putting this post back up into the wild now that April is well in the rear-view. We’ve had requests to put this post back up, but the last thing I wanted to do was fuel any more fire that we only had this post up as a pageview ploy.

With all that being said, enjoy.

There is no off day from Notre Dame football blogging, even when in Las Vegas for work or making major blog acquisitions in what little downtime I have.

I just received a phone call from our long lost friend, Grantland-X. The rumor mill burning around campus today is that one of our QBs has been expelled, but he isn’t sure who. There was some kind of cackling about Tommy Rees getting an emergency fifth year, but I hung up the phone.

Before I did though, Grantland-X heard from some unnamed players that Malik Zaire’s recent confidence about being the starting QB wasn’t just bravado, but that Brian Kelly was on the verge of announcing he would walk into the Blue/Gold game as the starter.

Grantland wasn’t sure if this meant Everett Golson slipped up again or if Notre Dame has lost it’s starting quarterback for the second season in a row. None of the players confirming who it is and no one has apparently seen either Golson or Zaire around campus today.

While I’m sure outlets with better sources than I will get more specifics on this story, I feel like I need to start asking the hard questions about this program. What is it with our quarterbacks and offseason trouble? Why does this seem to keep happening to us?

Loyal Readers, I think my eyes are finally open as to what the issue is here. Brian Kelly is clearly leading the Irish down a path that we need not follow. Oh sure, he has the best record since Lou Holtz and got the Irish to a title game, but is that what really matters at Notre Dame? Aren’t we above selling our souls for wins? Do we really want to look back at the Kelly era and say all the academic suspensions, transfers, and the certainty of field turf were worth the wins?

I think not.

It is time for the Kelly era to end before he transforms Our Lady’s University into something we no longer recognize. I highly encourage everyone reading this to write letters to Jack Swarbrick and, even better, if you have friends on the Board of Trustees, push them to see the light and vote this disgrace off of our campus.

This is last straw and I’m calling for change.

The post BREAKING: Quarterback Expelled from Notre Dame appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

“We had to do something,” said HLS co-founder Biscuit in an exclusive, invitation only Google Hangout held Monday evening. “I didn’t start this thing (referring to HLS) just to watch it whither away. When Tex and I looked at what they were doing, we quickly realized that we had no answer for their unique, original concepts. I mean, they have a show called Roughing the Passer, for example. I defy you to scour the ND blogs out there and uncover a title that original, that creative. Tex and I knew we couldn’t really compete, so we took a page from Notre Dame’s own playbook and threw money at the problem.”

“They were a HECK of a problem, too,” said Tex by phone and en route  to Las Vegas for a work conference. “First of all, what they were doing with WordPress was amazing. I mean, the idea of having all your content there on like, what? two pages? That’s incredible. But they obviously struck a cord with the readers out there. Bleacher Report hit upon the idea of click-baiting you with slide shows, but DTT discovered that you could make the reader SCROLL. Endlessly. Who knew?”

“Ultimately, it came down to answering the question: do we want to grow or stay small?”

Ripples from the deal are already being felt throughout cyberspace. The Subway Domer wrote this morning that, “I’m going to retire again. There’s no point in going on. When I saw DTT‘s logo, I knew I was done for. Look at the color selection — the shape, even. It’s original. That’s the only word for it.” HouseRockBuilt was more sanguine, deleting all previous posts in favor of a 45 minute clip of Jack Swarbrick’s hands pouring scotch. BlueGraySky could not be reached for comment.

Terms of the deal cannot be released at this time, but we can report that the former staffers at Down the Tunnel will be enjoying free, eco-friendly, fresh flowers farmed on the side of an active volcano for many, many years to come.

The post Down The Tunnel Goes Down The Hatch appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.