A Notre Dame Football Blog
For those Loyal Readers that are familiar with my work, y'all know that I have a true love of stats when it comes to my analysis of football. This passion embedded itself in my being because (1) I have a brain that God made for engineering purposes and (2) I grew up with a love for the game of baseball--the stat nerd's dream sport. Football is a rough sport to analyze through the magic of spreadsheets. With short seasons and smaller sample sizes than a sport like baseball, you truly have to ...
I never liked the Brian VanGorder hire. VanGorder was hired in 2014, following the departure of Bob Diaco to become Connecticut's head coach. The criticism of Diaco was his "bend but don't break" approach made his defenses appear somewhat vanilla or "boring." So what? They were fundamentally sound, rarely beat themselves and were always in the top half of the nation in total defense. Much enthusiasm ensued when the Irish brought VanGorder and his NFL pedigree to South Bend. Many media ...
So what do you do as a podcast when you need to preview a game against a terrible opponent after a terrible loss? Well, Shane and I decided to bring you you the most incredible, hard-hitting, most in-depth preview for Duke possible. If you thought that last sentence was truthful, you are going to be very disappointed. ...
With the advent of the College Football Playoff in 2014, we -- the Elvii of college football -- have joined together to present our weekly playoff nominations to keep the selection committee honest. We call it the TCB Poll. ...
Here is a playlist of every Notre Dame football game available on YouTube, as of today. There's about 500 games here, dating all the way back to 1913. ...
Last week, one of our newest writers, Moons, wrote a solid and well-received piece on whether or not bowl games serve as a "springboard" for success the following season. Moons suggested that a bit of micro-analysis or team-specific inquiry could flesh out his general theory and add a little nuance. In today's piece, I decided to look specifically at the Irish. What I found was that while there was no correlation between a bowl appearance, much less a win, for that matter, and a better record ...
Happy New Year, Loyal Readers! Be sure to spend a little bit of time today watching (or listening) to Molly Moran and myself talk about Notre Dame's surprising win over LSU in the Music City Bowl to get your 2015 started off right. Yes, we both predicted a win in the previous episode, but let's be honest, we were both very, very afraid about that claim (which we made without the knowledge that Malik Zaire would be starting!). I don't think I've ever been so happy to take a super optimistic ...
If the 2012 championship game against Alabama was a yardstick applied with gusto to the backside of Coach Brian Kelly's Irish, the 2014 Music City Bowl victory over 23rd-ranked LSU was yet another sort of measure in Notre Dame's journey from relevance to validation. Trading gaudy, gash-y runs and kick returns for shattering, clock-consuming drives, the unranked and injury-riddled Irish bested a ranked-SEC squad for the first time since 1992, unless you count back-to-back wins over A&M in ...
Okay, Loyal Readers, it's time to do the prediction thing one more time. In order to get your predictions in, use this handy Google form. Now, full disclosure, I completely had the prediction post slip my mind yesterday, so in the interest of time, I do not have updated standings or HLS staff picks. I thought about pulling quotes, but I don't think I'm ready to relive the Southern Cal disaster on gameday. We will have one final, mega-post later this week to detail the final results as well as ...
The Christmas holiday is over, 2015 is rapidly approaching, and the Music City Bowl between Notre Dame and LSU will go down tomorrow. That means it's time to get back to business here at HLS and that business kicks off with another episode of HLS TV. Molly Moran and I return to preview the game, share our thoughts, and give a bit of a primer on what LSU brings to the table, especially in their rushing game. We also tossed in some graphics in this episode, so let us know how you like ...