Jaylon Smith

Yep, this pretty much sums it up. (Screen capture from @SuperManTDJesus)

Snap Judgment: Pitt

November 10, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

So where do we even start with Notre Dame's debacle in Pittsburgh last night? Perhaps we could start with Tommy Rees. Tommy, quite frankly, had one of his worse games in his career at ND. He may have had 300+ yards through the air, but he did so with a sub-50% completion rate and 2 INTs which may have been two of the worst balls that I've ever seen him throw. One of these came in the endzone and when Notre Dame was on Pitt's 2 yard line no less. Or perhaps we could point to T.J. Jones' ...

Her Loyal Podcast: Episode 3

October 28, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

The Irish Twins are delivering Her Loyal Podcast early to you this week. In this episode, the Twins have a breakdown of Notre Dame's victory against Air Force, the Jaylon Smith love-fest continues, Reesus is praised, and the discussing the mystery that is the Irish rushing attack among other topics. GET TO IT! As an aside, we will hopefully have this up on iTunes soon. Unfortunately, the RSS feed for the podcasts are still slightly broken, but I will hopefully have this fixed soon. ...

Defending the Option: Who Takes Over for Te’o?

October 24, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

Before the Irish started their 2012 season against Navy, I had a detailed post describing how Bob Diaco runs Notre Dame's defense against an option attack. In short, Diaco throws the 3-4 away for such games and switches to a more traditional 4-3 look. The catch though, was that Diaco had another wrinkle in the assignment football that you usually see in the option: Manti Te'o. To refresh, here's how ND started to assign players to defend the option after the 2010 disaster in the ...

Packaging Rhythm Throws with Base Run Plays

October 14, 2013 by Blog Davie

After rushing for nearly 190 yards per game in 2012, Notre Dame is averaging a meager 137 yards per game this season. While there are a number of reasons why the run game has struggled (graduation of key personnel, playing from behind, etc.), it is clear that the Irish miss Everett Golson's mobility. Defenses are attacking the line of scrimmage with little fear that Tommy Rees will make them pay for over-pursuing the Irish running backs. Although Rees will never be a running threat, Brian Kelly ...

The Irish – Episode Eleven – Ju Ju Man

October 6, 2013 by Bayou Irish

http://youtu.be/rhdQzq9cNvA Notre Dame head football coach Brian Kelly stopped at the Gug and went to his office, took a shower, and sat on his couch, smoking a cigar and sipping his whiskey in the dark, looking out at the breaking dawn of a South Bend Sunday morning. He had no idea how long it was before he recognized the knock. "Enter!" he huffed. "Coach." Kelly could only discern the frames of Prince Shembo and Jaylon Smith from their contrast with the light behind ...

A look ahead at Brian Kelly's starting quarterback, Tommy Rees. (Robin Alam/Icon SMI)

8 Big Questions: Where Do the Irish Stand?

September 17, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

Back in August, I outlined 8 big questions that were on my mind for the upcoming season. Now that we are three games in, I wanted to take a look at where the Irish currently stand. 1. Which Tommy Rees will show up? So far, we've seen good Tommy Rees, Touchdown Tommy, Reesus, whatever you want to call the opposite of Turnover Tommy. Thus far, Rees is 65/107 (60.7%) for 969 yards (323 yards/game), 7 TDs, and, most importantly only 2 INTs. Further, only one of those INTs was really a bad ...

8 Big Questions for the 2013 Season

August 14, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

With the season nearing ever closer, I started to think of some of the big questions on my mind for the 2013 campaign. While we don't have some of the major burning questions that we did last year (who will be the starting QB?), there are still some unanswered questions coming into season. Here are the eight questions that I came up with as I pondered the upcoming season in glorious non-slideshow form: ...

Ranking the Irish Roster: Tex’s Top 25

July 22, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

Every year, Keith Arnold over at Inside the Irish does an annual ranking of the top 25 players on the Notre Dame roster. This year marks the second year that I have been able to contribute and, this time around, I wanted to give a break down of my rankings. Thankfully, I don't have to justify ranking a kicker #1 (NEVER FORGET) or leaving our starting QB off the top 25 list (NEVER FORGET THIS AS WELL). So without further ado, let's get to the rankings. ...

National Signing Day 2013 Recap

February 7, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

After all the insanity that was January, we deserved a National Signing Day like this. All 18 unsigned verbal commits sent their national letters of intent to South Bend. There were no surprise defections; in fact, the only surprise of the day was a positive one as Eddie Vanderdoes became the 24th and final member of the recruiting class dubbed as the Irish Mob. Just how great was this recruiting class? Let's take a look: ...