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

3 News Stories

#1 Former Notre Dame offensive lineman and 2013 Pinstripe Bowl MVP Zack Martin has announced his retirement from the NFL. The Indianapolis native spent 5 years at Notre Dame playing left tackle and being a 2-time captain before being selected in the 1st round by the Dallas Cowboys. Martin spent his entire 11 seasons at guard with the Cowboys and was coming off a 2024 campaign that saw him miss 7 games with injury and finish on Injured Reserve.

His resume as a pro is ridiculous. Seven times he was 1st-team All-Pro. Twice more, he was 2nd-team All-Pro and made 9 Pro Bowls. He was also named to the 2010’s All-Decade Team despite playing in barely half the decade. He made more Pro Bowls than accepted holding penalties and had ZERO holding penalties on 6,659 pass protection snaps!

According to Spotrac, Martin’s career earnings reached just under $112 million which puts him way up there with the likes of Jeff Samardzija as the highest paid former Notre Dame athletes in recent pro sports. Congrats to Zack on what will be a Hall of Fame career.

#2 We’ll be entering the 7th football season since Brandon Wimbush last played at Notre Dame. Does it seem that long ago!? The New Jersey native spent one brief season at UCF where he threw 24 passes before heading into the “something other than pro sports” part of his life.

Wimbush has been Doing Good Things, and let’s just say he’s the anti-Malik Zaire when it comes to his post-Notre Dame life. Recently, Wimbush made the Forbes list of the 30 under 30, being one of an impressive 6 Irish students and/or alumni to make the list, wow!

Since ending his football career, Wimbush co-founded MOGL which is a “marketplace that helps businesses connect with college athletes to form name, image, and likeness (NIL) marketing deals” according to the University press release. He’s since moved into an advisory role with MOGL and is currently working with Duael Track, a company that is televising running competitions in a tournament format. We really do need more competitive running sports that exist outside of the Olympics/World Championships/Major Marathons so I’m on board with this venture.

#3 Earlier this week, an article on ESPN+ by Adam Rittenberg caught my attention by going over the next college football head coaches to win their first National Championship. Rittenberg broke things down into these 3 categories:

The Close Ones: Steve Sarkisian, Dan Lanning, Marcus Freeman, James Franklin, Kalen DeBoer

Wild Cards: Brian Kelly, Josh Heupel, Lane Kiffin, Sherrone Moore, Kenny Dillingham, Mario Cristobal

Slipping Away: Lincoln Riley, Mike Norvell, Luke Fickell

I have a physical reaction to seeing James Franklin up there as a close one but trying to be impartial I guess you have to do that. I want to move DeBoer down to wild card after a really unimpressive first season at Alabama but his track record is still very good and I’m sure they’ll bounce back with all that talent in Tuscaloosa.

Sherron Moore is 100% getting fired within the next 2 seasons, guaranteed.

I suppose if you agree Miami’s ceiling is theoretically high then Cristobal has to be included somewhere. That might be a tough sell, though.

Dillingham feels like a name that is a little too flavor-of-the-month to include and if he’s involved you could also throw in any of the following: Matt Campbell, Kyle Whittingham, Mike Gundy, Curt Cignetti, Bill Napier, Brett Venables, and Mike Elko. These coaches either have a strong track record at some point in the past and/or they are at schools that have the talent/support to turn things around and have a Cinderella season finishing with a title.

Recruiting

Notre Dame has thrown out some new offers in recent days (and if you’ve been reading the 2025 recruiting reviews you’ll notice an awful lot of future Irish players are offered in the spring of their commit year which is now).

First up is safety Kaden Gebhardt (0.8912) from Olentangy High School north of Columbus, Ohio. He’ll be coming to Irish Invasion this summer.

Running back Brian Bonner (0.9533) was offered out of Valencia, California to the northwest of Los Angeles. He’s a top 100 guy with big speed and obviously one of the top-of-the-board-type of recruits for Notre Dame.

A new offer to wide receiver Bubba Frazier (0.8921) raised a bit of an eyebrow. He comes from Benedictine Military School in Savannah, Georgia and is a slot receiver-type. Right now Notre Dame is his biggest offer by a considerable margin.

Unrated linebacker Calvin Thomas from Cypress, Texas won’t be unrated for much longer after Texas, Notre Dame, and Michigan all offered in a span of 4 days. LSU and Texas A&M had offered late last month, too.

The Irish offered their 9th tight end of this cycle with Gavin Mueller (0.8567) late last week. He’s from Wheaton outside Chicago and will be attending Irish Invasion in June.

USC recently picked up commitments from defensive lineman Simote Katoange (0.9494) and quarterback Jonas Williams (0.9571). The former was reportedly a silent verbal to Notre Dame, whoops! The latter is from nearby Illinois, left Oregon’s class before picking the Trojans, and was not carrying a Notre Dame offer for what its worth.

As they are want to do, Louisiana native offensive tackle Brysten Martinez (0.9627) is staying in-state with Brian Kelly and LSU.

Arizona State picked up a big commitment from tight end Israel Briggs (0.9369) earlier this month and became the top-rated recruit for the Sun Devils in 2026 so far. He did not have a Notre Dame offer.

Uniform of the Week

Have you ever heard of Jerry Lorenzo? He’s the son of former White Sox and Mets manager Jerry Manuel and is an American fashion designer who created the Fear of God streetwear label that has been in collaboration with Adidas athletics. Last year, Indiana basketball wore dark gray FOG uniforms and they were uhh…not well received by the traditional Hoosier fanbase. Recently, the school released a statement that both their men’s and women’s teams would not be wearing the FOG uniforms this year, not long after showing the uniforms on social media.

This year’s uniforms were much more harmless. Cream with scarlet lettering. It’s kind of funny that the school is refusing to wear them when they wore these hideous Black History Month abominations not too long ago:

Red at home, no less. 

Reports are Indiana’s decision has to do with Lorenzo’s relationship with the problematic Kanye “Ye” West so there’s that to consider. I really only bring all of this up because I noticed Miami women’s basketball wore Fear of God uniforms when Notre Dame came to visit recently and they were awfully sharp:

Didn’t help Miami on the scoreboard, to be fair. 

TV & Movies

While the Rambler was on a break during the football season I took up the responsibility of bringing my 7 and 5-year old daughters to see Wicked knowing my little dude was way too young (he would back up that worry seeing Moana 2 a month later and unable to make it past 40 minutes in the theater). I was worried about the long run time and some of the mature content. I was expecting a disaster. Numerous bathroom breaks, inattentiveness during longer scenes, what else could possibly go wrong?

Nope, we had a great time. The movie held the kids’ attention throughout and I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed everything. I’m not really into musicals and I thought they balanced the movie and dancing really well. The only part I thought dragged was the library dancing scene with Prince Fiyero–it was the silliest, over the top, and far too long of a set piece that I’d argue didn’t even need to be in the movie. That scene was most definitely for the musical crowd.

Tunes

Are we ever going to see no-fuss, no distortion, clean American rock ‘n roll like Creedence Clearwater Revival ever again? I caught “Proud Mary” on the Classic Vinyl station recently and marveled at how simple and effective this song is and yet I’m sure something like this just couldn’t be recorded as a hit today. Production value (which is really cool in its own right) would have to do something more to this song in 2025. I guess that’s a bit sad.

I was on CCR’s Wikipedia page and there’s this insane fact: “The compilation album Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits, originally released in 1976, is still on the Billboard 200 and reached the 600-week mark in August 2022.” I’m pretty sure I have that album on CD in one of my large binders relegated to the basement storage. I checked and incredibly the album sits 70th(!!) this week on the Billboard 200 chart. It’s streak is on week 734 now.