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

3 News Stories

#1 Eligibility Lawsuit

Last week, a judge in Ohio granted a preliminary injection for 24 players in men’s and women’s college basketball within the state to continue their careers after the “5 for 5” ruling came down from the NCAA. Now, we’re getting a federal lawsuit from players who have played the last 4 seasons but won’t be getting an ‘extra’ 5th year to continue in college. From ESPN:

If successful, the federal lawsuit could essentially nullify the NCAA’s new eligibility rules for a massive pool of athletes across all sports who would then be allowed to enter the transfer portal and extend their careers.

With football season set to begin in a month, a ruling in favor of these athletes could alter the college landscape for the upcoming season. If it’s defeated, it could also signal a significant ruling in favor of the NCAA, which has faced numerous state lawsuits already regarding its new eligibility rules.

This puts a lot of football players in a tough spot this late in the process, and sadly I’d imagine most of them in this situation have already moved on with their life. Can you imagine Notre Dame trying to get Junior Tuihalamaka back right now?

#2 ACC Tiebreakers

Following the embarrassment of a 5-way tie that saw Duke make the ACC Championship over eventual National Championship runner-up Miami, the league has re-worked their tiebreaker rules for the 2026 season. Head-t0-head remains the first tiebreaker but now the second tiebreaker is the Team Success Ranking provided by SportSource Analytics.

What could go wrong?? Especially for a dumb conference that won’t have all teams playing the same amount of league games in 2026!

#3 Hoos Pick a QB

Coming off an impressive 11-3 season and replacing Chandler Morris, the Virginia Cavaliers have named a starting quarterback ahead of the season. The program brought in Pitt transfer Eli Holstein and Missouri transfer Beau Pribula this off-season and will be handing the keys over to the latter signal caller.

Pribula started his career at Penn State before taking over the Missouri job last year. He started out hot but struggled as the year progressed before suffering an ankle injury. Pribula is a good runner (868 yards and 4.6 per carry with 16 touchdowns on the ground over his career) although he was just 11th among qualifying quarterbacks in passer rating in the SEC last year.

Uniform of the Week

Tennessee has made the switch from Nike to Adidas this off-season, just like Penn State. The Nittany Lions really didn’t change anything to their uniforms which is smart. Adidas probably didn’t want to have a revolt on their hands in month number one of their reported 10-year deal worth $300 million. Notre Dame has 8 more years left on that re-upped Under Armour contract worth $10 million per year. Anyway, the Vols didn’t exactly change their look much, either. Especially on the football field.

Technically, three new uniforms for 2026.

The player number font is different, although most people probably wouldn’t have noticed outside of the fan base. The SEC patch on the right chest has added a white outline on the home orange jersey. The road white jersey ditches the orange collar (a sneaky good upgrade IMO) and encircles the Power T logo in orange instead. The program had been dabbling in smokey grey alternate uniforms in the recent past and now pivots back to an all-black uniform. They are very basic, pretty much the road uniform except switch white for black and add an orange outline to the SEC patch.

Media

Have you ever heard about France’s Charles IX? He became king in 1560 at the age of age of 10 and he’s best known for having an overbearing power-hungry mother Catherine de’ Medici and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in which the Catholic throne assassinated anywhere from 5,000 to as many as 30,000 French Protestants. Some pretty grim stuff from history. However, what caught my eye recently with Charles IX was the “Grand Tour” he did around France about 18 months after this massacre. In an attempt to legitimize his rule as the Catholic king, they thought, hey let’s travel the entire country!

Maybe that doesn’t seem that crazy, but this was a long time ago and the king brought…literally everyone and everything from the royal court across the country. FOR TWO YEARS. This had to be one of the most miserable experiences in the history of monarchy. Not enough adults were present in the room to overrule this decision. From the Wiki page:

His entourage was around 15,000 strong, including a military escort, his privy council, servants carrying his tapestries, coffers and other furniture, artisans, princes and ambassadors. It was a staged display of royal power in the wake of the first war of religion, to compensate for the throne’s weakness in the provinces and to forge the kingdom’s unity around himself by strengthening ties of loyalty to the monarchy. On each leg of the journey his fore-runners had a rush to find lodgings for him – in the large towns he slept in the town-house of that city’s richest citizen (who had to move out during the king’s stay), but more often he slept in inns. Finding lodgings was a real problem, for the court accompanying him and his family was made up of several thousand people, with its major lords each using their agents to find lodgings before anyone else – in short, first come, first served. Many lords thus had to sleep outside wherever the king lodged.

How bored and upset did this make everyone in the royal court and military!?? Can you imagine being one of the dudes to carry tapestries all over France for over 2 years and trying to find a place to sleep every night?

Tunes

The Strokes are coming out with their 7th album Reality Awaits on July 24th. I’d have to think about it more but this band is probably my favorite modern group in their rock/garage rock genre although they haven’t been real prolific writers recently (this is their first album in 6 years). I thought their last album The New Abnormal was really quite good and we may have profiled “Bad Decisions” on that one in a Rambler post from the past. I’m a bit worried, the two new singles from the Strokes ahead of the new album feature auto-tune quite heavily. I wouldn’t call them bad songs but I think the album is going to be a bit of a departure for the group.

“Ode to The Mets” was one of the band’s top songs from the last album. It’s such an interesting song that opens with an upbeat 1980’s style electronic beat that is quickly drowned out by a much more depressing guitar chiming away. It’s so weird, I love it. “Drums please, Fab” adds to the iconic nature of this song. I really, really hope The Strokes come through with another good album. Fingers crossed.

One More Thing

The weirdness surrounding Kawhi Leonard and his trade/no trade back to Toronto once again has me thinking about just how filthy rich so many NBA players have become over the past couple decades. Sure, there’s been tons of talk about the NBA stagnating as a product but I believe the basketball stars in the United States still have an outsized cultural significance relative to their overall numbers that the NFL has a hard time rivaling.

*laughs in a half a billion dollars*

It seems like Christian McCaffrey has been in the NFL forever (he’s only 30 and entering year 10 of his career) and he’s made just a little under $100 million in his entire pro football career. Kawhi Leonard has made more in his last 2 seasons only–and he hasn’t played 70+ games in a season since 2016-17! If Leonard’s career continues (and that is at least a little bit of an if right now!) he’s poised to pass $400 million in career earnings during the 2026-27 season.

Sure, the NFL quarterback salaries and the top of the NBA are similar. But, a rookie in the NBA this year can develop into a solid top 8 rotation guy, hope to play 10 years in the league, and make over $100 million. It’s such big, big money.