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

3 News Stories

#1 SoFighting Irish

As detailed HERE by Andy, Notre Dame has joined the jersey patch market and signed a deal with online banking giant SoFi for some real estate on the left chest of Fighting Irish athletic uniforms. The response has been not great! But that’s to be expected, I suppose. I have a few thoughts though…

*Does it look good? Not really, but it could be far, far worse. I don’t love the white box outline and wish that would look different though.

*I find it very curious that Notre Dame didn’t roll out PR photos of the jersey patch on other athletic team jerseys, I thought for sure they would do that. How will it look for basketball? Soccer? Fencing? Heck, I want to see if they do a blue outline on the white jerseys. Also, does this mean they need to make a glittery SoFi patch for the Shamrock Series uniforms so it matches that uniform? The new green jersey came out on Thursday and has a white patch with green SoFi font, at least.

There it is.

*I’m surprised that SoFi allowed navy blue to be used instead of their corporate sky blue colors. That’s a big win for Notre Dame. As a fan of blue-clad Tottenham Hotspur–who has been dealing with a bright red main jersey sponsor for years–this is an important part of jersey advertising!

*Did I think this was coming at Notre Dame? Honestly, I thought it would eventually but not in this first season. But when we’re talking about the money being involved ($20 million per year) it’s stupid not to go down this road. I don’t love it, but I understand it. Notre Dame gets $10 million per year from Under Armour, and like 1/3 of that is in apparel anyway, so twice as much for a jersey patch is crazy work.

#2 Chase is on the Case

For roughly 19 minutes on Tuesday, the Ohio State University held the title as the school with the largest school jersey sponsorship. The Buckeyes announced they will have Chase on their chests across all sports. The deal was worth a reported $17 million per year.

Integration.

Ohio State was able to get the patch integrated on their uniform a lot more cleanly, to be fair. Instead of the rectangular patch look, the Chase logo is in white and sits on a blended red patch. You would think this type of patch would be standard for all schools, but alas.

#3 More Controversy in Chapel Hill

The off-season was quiet at North Carolina compared to last year, maybe a little too quiet. That all ended this week as Tar Heels general manager Mike Lombardi was put on administrative leave due to a “human resources complaint filed by a former UNC front office employee” per reports. Perhaps this is not surprising for one of football’s most reviled and disliked figures. However, that’s not where the fun ends!

Who could’ve seen this coming?

North Carolina is ALSO being investigated by the College Sports Commission but without any concrete details all we can assume is this is NIL and/or NCAA rule issues that are being dealt with. It would be funny if, in this time of seemingly lawlessness and more money than ever in the sport, it’s North Carolina doing something stupider than stupid to get investigated. Perhaps they’ll wind up with a bowl ban to which UNC can say, “Too bad, we weren’t planning on going to a bowl game anyway.”

Uniform of the Week

Notre Dame unveiling a jersey patch normally would’ve taken up most of my oxygen this week, but the Buffalo Bills went ahead and released one of the worst uniforms in the history of the NFL. Against our will, the Bills give us the “Nickel City” alternate uniform in gray jersey and pants. Per the egregious PR release, these are nickel gray uniforms using “inspiration from the steel mills, grain elevators, and rail yards which are foundational to the region’s place in history.”

JFC.

I honestly don’t hate the gray and don’t think this is ugly as much as it is poorly, poorly executed. I read a comment that sports teams need to stop finding inspiration from their region and begin finding inspiration for making cool uniforms. Per the release, the Bills collars are blue because…it’s a tribute to blue-collar workers. At a time when they are opening a billion-dollar stadium and pushing out working class workers!

The helmet is indeed so bad. The charging streak doesn’t look right so enlarged, in this framing it doesn’t look like a horn or eye, plus many of the helmet straps obscure this area. Connecting the streaks in the back looks outrageously dumb as does a weirdly plain blue helmet with blue facemask. I’ll give them credit for wearing blue socks, but the helmet seems so out of place.

Media

Should I make an effort to watch Obsession? Let me know in the comment section if it’s worth it for someone who doesn’t really love horror/thriller films all that much. The movie came out back in May and since I’m always on Peacock (the Tour just ended!) I’ve seen a million ads for the movie. It also piqued my interest when my podcast feed had the movie on the Ringer’s Rewatchables channel. It’s not often they’d do a movie that’s only been out for a couple months.

I haven’t read any spoilers but it seems like the movie is more weird and freaky scary in a way that may not really be apparent in the trailer, right? I’ve read a couple things that made me not want to watch it. Or, at least be less interested. However, it seems like Inde Navarrette puts in an epic performance and the snippet I saw from the Rewatchables was that she’d be the favorite for Best Actress at the next Oscars ceremony.

Tunes

I’ve included a Jimi Hendrix song in the Rambler in the past, but it was after the Jimi Hendrix Experience broke up. Drummer Mitch Mitchell is so underrated that he’s kind of overrated nowadays. Whenever you see a list of the most underrated rock drummers–he’s near the top of the pile. It seems crazy to say, but Mitchell kind of carried the Jimi Hendrix Experience in a lot of ways. And if there’s someone who could outshine Jimi freaking Hendrix in a band, he did it sometimes.

“Fire” is one of those such songs. There is a live version on YouTube that is so bad with Hendrix seemingly exhausted and disinterested. Without Mitchell, this song is nothing. Even the guitar solo is subpar for Hendrix’ standards. Keith Moon from The Who is probably the first drummer who was a lead rock drummer within a band, but Mitchell was right there in 1967. When those first two guitar notes hit in this song, he takes over.

One More Thing

Geography plus sports trivia? Hell yes, sign me up. I found out about GeoSports and it’s really great. Check it out HERE.

I scored 982 points on this Thursday’s trivia. I like this because the cities are not printed on the globe so you really have to lock in on your geography and knowing exactly where places are situated. For example, I don’t have a great sense of where Seattle is along the Pugent Sound. Is that Seattle or is it Tacoma?