Your weekly dose of Notre Dame news, opinion, and other stuff.

Top News

Western Michigan grad transfer defensive tackle Braden Fiske has chosen Florida State over Notre Dame and USC.

Wake Forest quarterback Sam Hartman has entered the transfer portal. Now, we await his decision 🙂

Former Texas quarterback Hudson Card has transferred to Purdue.

BYU quarterback Jaren Hall has declared for the NFL Draft. Quarterback Kedon Slovis is transferring to BYU after playing at Pittsburgh this past season.

Former Clemson quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei is transferring to Oregon State.

Former Purdue and California quarterback Jack Plummer is headed to Louisville to be back with Jeff Brohm.

Wideout Kayshon Boutte is headed to the NFL after previously stating he’d return to LSU.

Running back Chase Brown from Illinois is leaving for the NFL Draft.

Maryland tight end CJ Dippre is transferring to Alabama.

After one season, Texas Tech has given head coach Joey McGuire a new contract extension through the 2028 season.

Ed Reed is set to become the new head coach at Bethune-Cookman.

Uniform of the Week

UTSA narrowly lost the Duluth Trading Cure Bowl back on December 16th to finish 11-3 on the season. Some people don’t like the blue and orange color combination. I’m not one of those people. But, it’s a tough one to not look like any of the schools like Virginia, Syracuse, or Auburn. Plus, there’s added confusion with in-state UTEP, too. I feel like UTSA can do a lot better overall in the uniform department. Check out the creepy large road runner face on their sleeves!

My idea is very simple. The Looney Tunes Road Runner has a light blue body. Up until 2008, UTSA had a road runner logo where the bird had a light blue body. Why not just add a lot of light blue to the current navy blue and orange? Then, you have all of the 3 primary colors of the Looney Tunes bird. I’d also use the logo with the bird running, because that’s important to their identity. Ditch the large head logo.

Recruiting

Safety Conrad Hussey (0.9146) committed to Florida State.

Top 100 wideout DeAndre Moore, Jr. (0.9555) committed to Texas.

Colorado added wide receiver Omarion Miller (0.9127).

In the 2024 class, wide receiver Jordan Anderson (0.9560) committed to Oregon.

Pittsburgh picked up a commitment from wideout Ric’Darious Farmer (0.9333).

Coach Prime is getting started in 2024 by adding defensive lineman Omar White (0.9477) out of Georgia.

YouTube Channel

This past summer American artist Paul Pfeiffer created a 10-foot tall model of a stadium that could seat 1 million people. Check out the header photo of this article for his design. That looks pretty cool. Can you imagine what kind of transportation set up could support this? Can you imagine the concessions needed and the amount of bathrooms and plumbing to have this place up to code? It would cost billions and you’re basically building a bathroom city at that point.

I thought this video was funny as mentioned they wouldn’t discuss obscure sports then brought up cheese rolling, spent a long time on it, then uttered this sentence, “[cheese rolling] is now the second fastest growing sport in the world behind cow tipping.” I personally love the aesthetics of how Australian football and rugby stadiums look with the playing surface running right up to the stands without a bunch of crap blocking the view. A lot of college football stadiums looked like that back in the day.

Tunes

There are a handful of albums I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I listened to them for the first time. One of the unexpected albums was Santana’s 1970 Abraxas when I was a junior in college. One night I found myself in the dorm room of a friend of a friend who were both art majors. This kid, whose name I’ve long forgotten, had his room decked out in all these black light posters and put on Santana’s 2nd album. It was like he planned his whole life (I’m pretty sure he was Mexican) to deliver Santana into my brain the best way possible.

Early Santana is elite. This album opens with a groovy instrumental before going into two of the band’s biggest songs in their history. I’ve always been partial to another instrumental track from this album “Samba Pa Ti” which goes so hard. Santana got a bit weird and out of the mainstream after these early albums. I still think this song is my favorite from their catalog.

Trivia

Which school has been dead last in FBS in YPP during the last 2 seasons?

The Other Football

With the World Cup over and rumors swirling about his future in club soccer, it appears Leo Messi will be set to sign an extension with PSG in the coming weeks. He originally signed a 2-year deal that is set to expire this summer and was reported to be listening to offers from around the world, including in MLS with Inter Miami.

The Premier League came back on Boxing Day and there was an awful lot of chalk around the league as favorites mostly took care of business. With 23 games remaining, Arsenal retains a 5-point lead atop the table. There’s going to be so much soccer crammed into the next 5 months to make up for the loss of time from the World Cup.

Seemingly destined for Manchester United, instead Liverpool swooped in and signed 23-year old Dutch winger Cody Gakpo on Tuesday for a fee that could rise to $50 million with incentives. Gakpo made the team of the World Cup and has spent the last 4,5 seasons with PSV.

Streaming

The CBS Show Survivor may outlast everyone alive on earth. The show has been on air since May 31, 2000 and that’s so long ago I feel like a completely different person from back then. Jeff Probst hasn’t done a ton since the show started on CBS and now he’s worth like $50 million. I remember the buzz and hype around the show when it premiered and checked it out a few times in those early seasons. A quick check of the ratings shows me Survivor getting nearly 30 million viewers and beating Friends head-to-head in those early days. Those are some monster numbers before cable and streaming began to dominate.

When I started dating my wife this was a show she watched ritually. So, this was around seasons 23 and onward. I’ll admit I kind of enjoyed it and got into a few of the seasons. It’s funny though, Mrs. Murt won’t so much as sleep in a tent in our backyard or rough it in the slightest without modern comforts. Even glamping is too harsh. I’d never make it on Survivor either, I’d get way too hungry and leave after 2 days.

A Look Back

If you trust Pete Thamel, it seems very very likely that Sam Hartman is going to grad transfer to Notre Dame. It’ll be his 6th season in college football! If he does come play for the Irish we’ll have a deeper look at Hartman’s game in more detail coming soon. Back in 2018, the Irish traveled to Winston-Salem in late September while going through a quarterback change from Brandon Wimbush to Ian Book. This was already Hartman’s 4th career start and he had a tough day.

Hartman only played through the first 2 series’ of the second half before leaving the game. He was sacked 3 times and was hit what felt like 20 times in such a short amount of time. Ian Book could be in his third year of having a cup of coffee in the NFL next year while Hartman could be lacing them up at Notre Dame. College football with the Covid year of free eligibility has become so weird.

18S Paddock Club

Previewing each team on the grid for the 2023 season…

Team: Aston Martin
Founded: 2021
2022 Result: 7th
Base: Silverstone, England
Owners: Lawrence Stroll
Power Unit: Mercedes
Team Principal: Mike Krack
Drivers: Fernando Alonso (20th season, 1st with Aston Martin) & Lance Stroll (7th season)

The Good: The AMR22 had really solid race pace pretty much from the beginning of the year and the crew from Silverstone built a quality car for Sunday. They effectively integrated a new team principal right before new regulations. Plus, Daddy Stroll continues to pump money into the team and acting like he’ll be around long-term, despite the Aston Martin car brand still gushing losses. It was a decent send-off for Sebastian Vettel who picked up plenty of points in the 2nd half of 2022, plus Lance Stroll hung around and finished 15th.

The Bad: No car on the grid had a worse qualifying gap to their race pace. That was a huge reason why the team scored 21 fewer points than 2021 as they were constantly fighting their way through traffic on Sunday after qualifying so poorly. The team has poached a lot of talent in recent years but didn’t develop the car very well, resorting to the copied “Green Bull” upgrade that mimicked Red Bull’s cars without much success. For way too many races, Aston was nowhere to be seen during the television coverage and continues to feel like a team that hasn’t found its spot on the grid with the cool kids.

2023 Hope: If Formula 1 is about money, even in the budget cap era, eventually Aston Martin should have things start to pay off. The car development phase 1 of their $200 million factory is supposed be online in May 2023 (their state of the art wind tunnel won’t be up and running until Q3 in 2024 though) and as mentioned they’ve poached loads of talented engineers from across the grid. Despite being 6 years older than the departed Vettel, most feel that the hyper-competitive Alonso will be an upgrade for the team as they try to push up through the midfield in 2023.

Trivia Answer:

New Mexico.