Welcome back to the 18 Stripes Big Board for Fighting Irish football, everybody. Now that this football season is over for Notre Dame, the staff will be hitting the recruiting trail hard trying to close this class out strong. Hopefully, we'll have a lot of good news to share with you guys over the next [...]
Mike Brey likes to divide up his Fighting Irish basketball season into “segments.” If you listen to his comments to his team after their November 26th win over Chicago State, he asks them to finish this segment strong with a win over Iowa on Tuesday the 29th. Looking at the Irish schedule, he appears to [...]
WatchND highlights: Up early against [OPPONENT] after a fast start, Notre Dame couldn't keep it up and played a poor second half against the [OPPONENT NICKNAME], resulting in a disheartening loss that sent their record to [INSERT RECORD HERE]... Oh, never mind. That was my draft that I have lined up from pretty much every [...]
DeShone Kizer has been a bit of an enigma this year. At times, he has looked like a sure fire first round NFL draft pick, big, strong, athletic, confident, decisive, accurate. Other times he has been inconsistent, indecisive and struggled with accuracy. The ups and downs in his play are due to a variety of [...]
Game one of the service academy doubleheader is in the books and it wasn’t pretty. The Irish will look for redemption on Saturday in the Shamrock Series game against Army. Last week we went through the basics of Navy’s triple option offense. At a high level, both Navy and Army run very similar offenses. Navy [...]
Press conference updates for Brian Kelly and other coaches are great grist for team reporters. When you're winning, everything is good. Your coach who storms out of a press conference or singles out a couple of players on a fateful play or tears apart a coordinator at the end of a blowout win is a [...]
Welcome to exhibition basketball, where the scores are made up and points don’t matter. Mike Brey and his Notre Dame Fighting Irish squad opened the season with an exhibition versus D2 Mercy College Tuesday evening. The Mavericks were run out of the gym by Notre Dame, who piled up the 119-58 victory. Mercy sports a [...]
How to lose a football game in which your opponent repeatedly gives you chances to win it: - Pass the ball more than you run it, even when the conditions dictate you shouldn't. (ND had 26 official pass attempts and 38 rush attempts, but at least 5 of those 'rushes' were sacks and a few [...]
If you follow Notre Dame football closely, or even too closely, just like we do, you're probably aware that the Irish have always struggled with defensive line recruiting, especially with landing elite talent on the line. Since 2000, only two 247 Composite five-star defensive linemen have donned an Irish jersey*: Victor Abiamiri (#29 overall/0.9861 rating) and [...]
After the first four games of the 2016 football season, the Notre Dame defense could rightfully be described as a raging tire fire. As a result of the horrific performance of the defense, Brian Kelly decided to make a change and fired defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder. After watching the defense play against Syracuse, I’m comfortable upgrading their [...]
Praying that the defense will have better luck against this Art Briles disciple than the last one, and anticipating a shootout with two defenses that have been shredded by every good offense they've encountered. If looking for additional information on the statistics and terms used here, great starting points are Football Studyhall’s Advanced Stats Glossary, Bill [...]
Note: This recap was 95% finished prior to the news of Brian VanGorder's firing. I've chosen to leave the writing as is although a few things could change in some parts as the Irish move on with an interim defensive coordinator. What a great time start a new website! The beginning of the 2016 football [...]
After calming down on Sunday and taking in the embarrassing loss to Duke it appears Brian Kelly's mind has been changed. Following a tumultuous 30 games on campus, defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder has been fired by Notre Dame. The Irish had entered territory where a move had to be made and frustration was building that [...]
The Michigan State game featured all the same maddening themes that have driven Irish fans to (more) drink over the last couple of years - defensive breakdowns, missed tackles, mindless penalties, inconsistent urgency... You get the idea. A fan base that was restless after the season-opening overtime loss to Texas and mollified only marginally by [...]
Every year, one or two home games become marquee recruiting events; this year, there will be a very impressive list of recruiting visitors for Michigan State weekend, making it arguably the premier recruiting event of the 2016 season for the Irish. The visitor list has steadily grown over the last few weeks with elite names from [...]
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