T.J. Jones

Credit: Irish Illustrated

Will Another Star Receiver Emerge In ’16?

May 16, 2016 by BJ Konkle

Welcome to a series of posts we're calling "Five Question Marks." In this inaugural entry, BJ Konkle answers a question on the minds of many Notre Dame fans: Is there another star wide receiver waiting to emerge? Notre Dame football has recruited, developed and ultimately produced extraordinary college football wide receivers. Some of these athletes - Jeff Samardzija, Michael Floyd, Golden Tate, T.J. Jones, and most recently Will Fuller - have gone on to successful (and lucrative) ...

Credit: Matt Cashore

The Case For Corey Holmes

March 10, 2016 by andrewwinn

Corey Holmes is the forgotten receiver on the Notre Dame depth chart. In this post, I'm going to make the case for why the redshirt sophomore should play - and hypothesize about what may be keeping him from the field. Holmes was a four-star prospect from St. Thomas Aquinas (Fla.), who was considered both "highly overlooked" and "underrated" by professional talent evaluators coming out of high school. Holmes' best attributes were his length, his speed and his route running ability. The ...

Combine Nation: Trying Out The Irish

February 24, 2014 by Bayou Irish

This weekend, nine Irish took to the podia, weight benches, and drill spaces to "[. . .] jump, and run across the floor, and perform many other feats, exhibiting [their] activity and condition." Each of them, and close to three hundred other ex-college players, are participating in this century's equivalent of the slave auction. Sure, they're there voluntarily, and they're chasing payouts in the millions-of-dollars. But they're still there to perform, or in the case of Teddy Bridgewater, not, ...

Notre Dame to Pinstripe Bowl, Louis Nix to NFL

December 9, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

On Saturday, Brian Kelly confirmed what most Notre Dame fans have been bracing themselves for ever since the loss to Pitt: a Pinstripe Bowl berth. The game will be played on Saturday, December 28 at 12:15 PM (ET) and will air on ESPN. Even though Kelly had mentioned that the team would prefer to play in a warmer climate, he said in his presser on Sunday that the Pinstripe offer was simply one the team couldn't refuse: When you're dealing with our guys, it's bowl packages, right? It's just ...

IBG in the Trees

November 27, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

The Notre Dame Football season is finally winding down to its conclusion, meaning that Irish Blogger Gatherings are also coming to an end quite soon this year. Let's finish this sucker strong. As a reminder, all members of the IBG will send a single question and we will all answer of them on our sites, with the exception of our own query. So be sure to visit all the other IBG members to see their answers throughout the day. My Question: BYU and Stanford are somewhat similar ...

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' ...

Bringing Back Multiple Tight Ends

November 1, 2013 by Blog Davie

With two touchdowns in the last three games, Ben Koyack is quietly emerging as a legitimate offensive threat for Notre Dame. While his season stats will not turn many heads, Koyack's emergence does something more important for the Irish than filling up the stat sheet—it allows the offense to use more multiple tight end formations. As I have previously written, multiple tight end formations create mismatches that defenses cannot easily counter with changes in personnel or formation. ...

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 ...

Four Pleasant Surprises and Four Areas of Concern

September 2, 2013 by Ryan Ritter

Week one is in the books. While all of us here at HLS will start diving in to some deeper analysis of the game, for now, I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts and takeaways from the tilt against Temple. So without further ado, here are four pleasant surprises and four areas of concern from last Saturday's game. Four Pleasant Surprises 1) Tommy Rees Has Improved And not just his stat line either. Oh sure, he had a career day going 16-23 for 346 yards, 3 TDs, and, most importantly ...

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: ...