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 [...]
The game was almost beside the point Saturday as Notre Dame dominated Stanford 45-14 to move into the clubhouse at 11-1 in a season that against all odds will end as very much part of the College Football Playoff story. Coach Brian Kelly abandoned any pretense of being gentlemanly at the end of the game, [...]
What more could you ask than a 55-0 beating of an overmatched foe on Senior Day to clinch Notre Dame's 5th straight 10-win season? The Irish completely took over the game on Jack Kiser's pick-six to make it 10-0, and from there the only drama was how much action the senior reserves would get. Georgia [...]
Notre Dame did what you're supposed to do to a team missing its best player Saturday, pounding Virginia 28-3 on the road. Much of the game was perfunctory due to how hopeless the Cavaliers looked offensively, which was certainly because of the absence of Brennan Armstrong, out with a rib injury. However, it's worth crediting [...]
Late in Notre Dame's 44-34 win over North Carolina, the NBC broadcast team discussed that the Irish aren't winning pretty or in dominating fashion - they're just winning. It's something of an 18 Stripes motto that, well, winning is hard. Week after week, doing enough to fight off your opponents, especially on nights you don't [...]
Notre Dame played easily its most complete game of the season Saturday, and picked a fine time to do it, dispatching rival USC 31-16 to get this 'bridge season' back on track. There was plenty to like from the Irish's performance, and even more so because the one thing that went seriously wrong - an [...]
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