Welcome to 18 Stripes, the independent voice for Notre Dame sports.

Some of you may know me while others may not. My name is Eric Murtaugh and I was the manager for the Notre Dame site on the SB Nation network before creating this new website. This is the official launch day for this new project and I’m excited to start fresh on this platform. In addition to myself you’ll also see the same writers many of you are familiar with from our past.

You may be asking why we moved and the simple answer is that it was time to make a change. We knew when making the decision to join our former home over 5 years ago that this would be a path we would want to walk down eventually.

A few of you may remember when our site was piloted solo by Whiskey who started the first generation of what you see today or when it was just a few of us in the first year when things really started to take off. Since then, some of us have been married, or had kids, or changed jobs, or graduated from college, or experienced any number of changes to our personal lives. We could no longer fulfill the expectations from our previous owners and we wanted to gain some of our freedom back.

How much will be different?

Not a whole lot but we will be making an effort to get back to our roots. We’ve always been attracted to longer content with more soul and opinion as our editorial foundation. That got lost a little bit as the internet has evolved through the years so we’d like to recapture more of that essence again.

In most other ways, this will be largely the same site you (hopefully) enjoyed in the past.

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We wanted something more Notre Dame-centric for the new website name but not something generic and bland. We chose 18 Stripes (alternatively Eighteen Stripes, ES, and 18S are all acceptable variations to use) because it covered everything we were looking for in a name.

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When the new field turf was installed inside Notre Dame Stadium the school decided to reduce the number of stripes in each end zone to 9, or 18 total, hence 18 Stripes. Each stripe was placed at a 42-degree angle towards the Golden Dome and Basilica, thereby using 1842 to call to mind the founding of the university.

We like the name because it’s creative and is football-based for obvious popularity reasons but it also mixes something modern with the tradition of a grand university.

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Our new site has several pages for you to peruse. Our home page will always have our latest handful of stories anchored at the top of the page. Below that we have 3 flip boxes that link to our Football, Basketball, and Recruiting pages, as well as a slider photo link to contributor ndmspaint’s archives and the latest WatchND YouTube video.

These pages are also accessible from our menu. The archive page will store all of our stories, while that tab also has a drop-down menu for other sport-specific coverage.

There is also additional info available in our left sidebar and footer including recent comments, recent tweets, and recent posts.

Check out the About Us page from our header menu for more info about our site, our mission, and where our writers call home.

The Site Rules page is also anchored on our header menu and is especially important for those of you who are not familiar with our community and moderation-style. Additionally, we have placed the info on how to use the appropriate coding for our comment section within the Site Rules page. This explains how to insert pictures and GIF’s into our comment section, as well making text bold or italicized.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER for the site and join our community or head directly to the comment sections of any article and sign-up for 18 Stripes.

While you’re at it if you haven’t already follow us on Twitter (@18stripes) and make sure to like our Facebook page.

Welcome to our new home, we hope you enjoy!