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

Top News

News broke on Tuesday that backup Irish quarterback Tyler Buchner is in the transfer portal. According to reports, Buchner has visits lined up to Alabama and Auburn this week.

Notre Dame rising junior linebacker Prince Kollie is leaving the program. The former high school Butkus Award winner made 33 tackles and 1.5 sacks with 1 important punt block in his Irish career.

Georgia defensive lineman Bear Alexander has transferred to USC. The Trojans also picked up Wyoming offensive tackle Emmanuel Pregnon this week. Those are the 12th and 54th best transfers respectively that were in the portal this off-season according to 247.

Michigan and Texas have signed a home-and-home series for 2024/2027 with the Horns coming to Ann Arbor next year.

The Big Ten on NBC kicks off this season with Penn State vs. West Virginia likely slotted into the primetime game on the opening Saturday of the season.

The Central Michigan vs. Michigan State season opener has been moved up to Friday, September 1st.

The SEC really doesn’t want field storming anymore and is considering harsher punishments for schools, including heavily increasing fines or taking away home field advantage during the next meeting of the teams involved.

The Tennessee Titans are getting a new $2.1 billion stadium and it is being discussed as a potential College Football Playoff destination.

Uniform of the Week

Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Iowa State won the past week in college football uniform news as they unveiled Jack Trice Legacy uniforms. These are throwbacks to 1923. In case you didn’t know the history with Trice, he was the first black football player at Iowa State and died after playing in only his second game after being stomped on by Minnesota players, among other illegal plays. He tragically died 2 days later after doctors essentially misdiagnosed his injuries.

As the flyer states, Iowa State used to be called simply “Ames” which I may suggest would be a good informal nickname to start calling the school for the rest of the country. I don’t love the white numbers on top of the gray (Trice-era ISU didn’t wear numbers back then) but everything else about this uniform is super sharp, including the pants. Iowa State also wore Trice throwbacks back in 2013 and they were very similar, except it was all red/mustard with a red helmet. This look is far superior.

Recruiting

Defensive Lineman Hevin Brown-Shuler (0.9238) committed to Clemson.

Safety Dashawn McBryde (0.9113) committed to LSU. The Tigers also added tight end Trey’Dez Green (0.9679), too.

One of the nation’s top tight ends Brady Prieskorn (0.9687) committed to Michigan. The Wolverines also added defensive lineman Jerod Smith (0.9105), as well.

Linebacker Cayden Jones (0.9350) picked Alabama last week.

Arkansas picked up defensive lineman Charleston Collins (0.9202).

Safety Jaydan Hardy (0.9316) committed to Oklahoma.

YouTube Channel

I love me a good old fashioned archeology dig that re-writes what we know about history. So it happened with the Gobekli Tepe site in modern-day southern Turkey about an hour north of the Syrian border. This place was ‘found’ in 1963 but a real excavation didn’t begin until 1994. They originally carbon-dated things from items that were later brought to the site but eventually discovered the main structures date back to as far as 9500 BCE. It pre-dates agriculture and the domestication of animals!

That is outrageously old. It’s funny how reading up on the site, they saw farmers (this does not look like a particularly fertile place to be farming anymore!) had been kicking around the area for years moving stones here and there if they were in their way. Not knowing it’s remnants of the oldest known megalith on earth.

Tunes

Today’s song “Hallucinogenics” is from an American artist named Matt Maeson. I don’t know much about him but apparently he had an alternative rock Billboard no. 1 single “Cringe” in early 2019 that I listened to and had never heard before (I found it very forgettable). Today’s featured song was on heavy radio rotation not that long ago and it even crossed over to my local pop station. For several months it was on all the damn time.

I’ve found that I don’t like when artists, who I’m not a big fan of, use the trope of switching the loudness of the song, although just about everyone does it–especially in a chorus. Check out the 1:05 mark in this video. That’s really harsh, right? The beginning of the song has this really sweet and tasteful acoustic guitar that honestly would’ve been enough to make a great song. Then it’s like, “BAM ELECTRONIC OVERSATURATED SNARE DRUM NON STOPPPPPPP.”

Trivia

Michael Mayer is a 1st round hopeful tonight in the NFL Draft, can you name the previous 10 picks to go in the 1st round from Notre Dame?

The Other Football

Matt Crocker is the new sporting director for the U.S. soccer federation and is leaving his role as director of football operations at Southampton.

Manchester City and Arsenal met on Wednesday night in a game that will maybe determine the league title. City took it comfortably 4-1 and now sit just 2 points back of Arsenal with 2 games in hand. Out of their remaining 7 games, City do not play a team higher than 8th in the current EPL table.

Chelsea suffered their 5th straight loss under Frank Lampard and technically are not safe from relegation. Just 39 points from 32 games for a club as wealthy as Chelsea is mind blowing. There are reports that Mauricio Pochettino will be signing a contract as manager next week. Poch no, don’t do it!

Tottenham lost 6-1 at Newcastle over the weekend, fired interim manager Cristian Stellini, while the players decided to pay for refunds to the visiting Spurs fans in attendance. It’s going great!

Barcelona have secured an eye-watering $1.5 billion Euros to renovate Camp Nou.

Streaming

My middle kid is banging out episodes of Henry Danger at an alarming rate. Over the past several months I’m pretty sure she’s watched the 5 seasons 3 times over already. The show is called Henry Danger, yet the boy in the show, Henry Hart, is called Kid Danger. It bugs me. There was also a spin-off series called Danger Force which further complicates matters. Anyway, Henry Danger aired from 2014 until 2020 and all things considered it’s a pretty fun watch with younger kids.

One of the funny parts to the series is how Captain Man always tries to flirt with Henry’s mom and that she’s oblivious to the approaches even though it bugs Henry. The actress, Kelly Sullivan, isn’t in the show a ton, though. But she’s a big reason for me to watch. She was also featured on The Young and the Restless but like many characters on that soap opera I think she was killed off the show.

A Look Back

It seemed like there was a lot of respect for the Manning name throughout the recruiting process of Arch Manning. But, you didn’t have to look very far to see people who were critical of him being the Composite no. 1 overall player in the 2023 class and tied for the 18th best recruit in the 247 Sports all-time rankings. I’ve read some scouting reports that thought Arch probably would’ve been outside the top 10 of the quarterbacks in the 2023 class if he had a different last name. After the Texas spring game a couple weekends ago, some doubt is starting to creep in for the 5-star quarterback’s hype.

Manning finished 5 of 13 for 30 yards in the game while looking extremely average at best. Many have noted that the arm talent just does not seem to be there for someone who was this highly rated. It’s early of course, but it’s not only that Manning is sitting behind starter Quinn Ewers, but also that redshirt freshman Maalik Murphy looked really good in the spring game (9 of 13 for 165 yards) and has quite a bit of arm and athletic talent. I think there’s a 30% chance Manning finishes his career at Texas, maybe even lower.

18S Paddock Club

Finally after a godforsaken long break Formula 1 returns to action this weekend picking things up on the western shores of the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan. Is it a European race? Is it an Asian race? No one really knows or cares, we’re just here for the 90-degree turns, street track drama, and that super long straight for the cars to bomb down.

As mentioned last week, this could be the second to last race ever in Azerbaijan if F1 doesn’t sign a contract extension. But, the government currently pays $55 million per year to host the race (tied for the highest in the sport) so perhaps there is plenty of incentive to go back in the future, even though the race doesn’t make money (it has some of the lowest attendance figures in the sport and isn’t set up well for fans) and no one in the sports really likes making this trek to a remote part of the world.

Round 4 of 23
Azerbaijan Grand Prix
Date: April 30th
Race: 7:00 AM ET
TV: ESPN/F1TV
Location: Baku, Azerbaijan
Circuit: Baku City Circuit
Laps: 51
Tire Compounds: C3, C4, C5
Track Evolution: 5 out of 5
Asphalt Abrasion: 1 out of 5

The highlight of this weekend is the debut of new *revised* Sprint weekend rules. For the previous 2 seasons, Friday’s sprint weekends started with free practice 1 followed by qualifying which set the grid for the sprint race. On Saturday, cars were under parc ferme for free practice 2 followed up by the sprint race, the results of which set the grid for the Sunday grand prix. A lot of people didn’t like it.

This weekend, F1 will be ditching the free practice 2 on Saturday morning (rather meaningless with cars in parc ferme and unable to work on setups) and adding another qualifying session.

The Baku castle section is always a highlight.

After free practice on Friday, the teams will go through a full qualifying session to set the grid for Sunday’s grand prix. On Saturday, the teams will go through another shortened qualifying session (now called a “Sprint Shootout”) to set the grid for the sprint and then commence the sprint race later that day.

Essentially, Saturday is its own contained Sprint Day™ now.

With one practice session on Friday this could be a weekend where things get really spicy in qualifying and a bunch of drivers are not comfortable on the track–in the tight street circuit of Baku, no less.

Trivia Answer:

S Kyle Hamilton
DT Jerry Tillery
OG Quenton Nelson
OT Mike McGlinchey
OT Ronnie Stanley
WR Will Fuller
OG Zack Martin
TE Tyler Eifert
WR Michael Floyd
S Harrison Smith