We knew a 12-team playoff was coming to college football, but we found out in early December, officially, that it will begin in the 2024 season. College football will have one more year with potential high-stakes regular season games between great teams before those stakes move down the board to more middling squads post-2023. (It's [...]
Some thoughts after Notre Dame ensured a USC Heisman Trophy for the 4th time in the last 20 years: One thing matters the next 8 months All that matters from here to August is getting a QB. Any QB. It has to be done. ND can't win like this, not at the level it needs [...]
At one point during Saturday's 44-0 obliteration of Boston College, the NBC broadcast crew mentioned that Marcus Freeman grew almost angry when discussing ND's tendency to play down to its worst opponents. It seemed pretty clear with this performance, combined with the first half of Navy before everything went to hell, that the Irish are [...]
I guess that was a win. Notre Dame won 35-32. I think. My head exploded at some point during the fourth quarter and I spent the final few minutes of the game picking it up and gluing it back together. The Irish more or less dominated the first half, although it wasn't until the final [...]
My first reaction to tonight's win? "We've got ourselves a (blankity blank) head football coach." Notre Dame didn't just beat #4 Clemson Saturday, 35-14. They pushed the Tigers around. They did the only things they could do to win when Clemson knew exactly what those things were, and they did them spectacularly well. That's special. [...]
It might be overstating things, it might not, but it sure felt like Howard Cross saved what was left of Notre Dame's season when he tipped a pass that Marist Liufau intercepted, sparking Notre Dame to finish a 41-24 victory over Syracuse. The win put a 7-5 season, which would've felt like a disaster 3 [...]
Anyone stupid enough to get sucked in to anything after the Marshall game (I include myself among this group) probably deserved to see what they saw today. Any prayer of this being a remotely successful season went up in smoke Saturday as Notre Dame lost a pathetic 16-14 game to a Stanford team that hadn't [...]
If the Marshall loss was a bellwether of potential imminent disaster for the Marcus Freeman era, there were a lot of signs in Saturday's 28-20 win over BYU that things are, as the great Lou Brown said, "startin' to come together". It wasn't perfect, but especially in the 22-0 scoring run that briefly gave ND [...]
If the 2022 season starts taking off in a good direction following next week's open date, we might look back at the second quarter of Saturday's 45-32 win over North Carolina as a turning point. The Irish were plodding along through the first quarter, again largely unable to move the ball even against North Carolina's [...]
You could see it on Marcus Freeman's face when JD Bertrand was called for the world's most obvious targeting foul on the final drive, and you could see it again when Cal came within a whisker of catching the Hail Mary on the final play. "This couldn't just be easy, could it?" It could not. [...]
You have to give it to Marcus Freeman. I can't remember the last time a college football coach flushed so much goodwill down the toilet so quickly. Notre Dame lost to Marshall 26-21. In his first game against an unranked team as coach, Freeman ended an Irish winning streak of 42 games against such teams, [...]
These things are a lot easier to write after wins, but here goes. Notre Dame lost to Ohio State 21-10 tonight, sending Marcus Freeman to 0-2 and creating the easiest wisecrack in the history of Twitter about the much-discussed and hyped new Notre Dame coach. It's funny how pregame narratives can be so wrong. What [...]
Diving full-bore into football and basketball season is certainly fun, but one of college sports' simplest pleasures is diving headlong onto the bandwagon of a team you don't generally follow. We Notre Dame fans certainly did that over the weekend as the Irish stunned Tennessee, unanimous #1 team and newly minted villains of college baseball, [...]
We haven't done a ton of basketball coverage here at 18 Stripes this season. For most of the year, the Irish just weren't really worth writing about; they were a decent-to-good team in what appeared to be a terrible conference, and as those teams do they ended up on the bubble for this year's NCAA [...]
If Notre Dame couldn't get this one, against this team, with the momentum they had coming in, then it's easy to self-flagellate and think the Irish are just never going to win one of these things. Notre Dame lost the Fiesta Bowl to Oklahoma State 37-35, not scoring the entire second half until it was [...]
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