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

3 News Stories

#1 Drew Pyne has made his decision on a 4th school in his career. The former Notre Dame quarterback entered the transfer portal last week and is now headed to Bowling Green for the 2025 season. Will he stay with the Falcons for 2026 or will it be a 5th school to finish his eligibility? Place your bets!

It’s an interesting choice for Pyne who moves down to the G5 level for the first time. As we covered earlier in the off-season, BGSU lost head coach Scot Loeffler to the NFL and have since hired Eddie George from Tennessee State. Perhaps more importantly, the Falcons are losing former Indiana and Missouri transfer Connor Blazelak who started for the program since 2023 so there should be a competition for the new job under center.

#2 Ross Dellenger over at Yahoo! continues to lead the coverage on the NCAA news and its impacts with college football specifically. We’re waiting for the House settlement to become final but as Dellenger reports, the delay is being caused by the roster limits situation:

In fact, of the parade of objectors who appeared in court Monday before the judge, many focused their critiques on the implementation of roster limits, which are imposed on schools that opt into the House settlement’s revenue-sharing concept. While the NCAA and power conferences agreed to expand upon scholarships as part of the settlement — schools are now permitted, not required, to scholarship every player on a roster — they also imposed sport roster limits that did not previously exist.

The new roster limits are expected to lead to the elimination of thousands of Division I roster spots, most notably impacting walk-ons and partial scholarship earners in swimming, football, track and cross country, as detailed in stories in October and January at Yahoo Sports. High school athletes, recruited for months by schools and even offered scholarships, are having their offers revoked as coaches trim rosters to meet the new limits. Current athletes are seeing their spots eliminated.

[California federal judge Claudia] Wilken was clear: Change the roster limit situation or risk not having me approve the settlement. “My idea is to grandfather in” those currently on rosters, she told lawyers. “It would save a lot of angst.”

I just checked and using the old system, Notre Dame is still sitting on 95 scholarship football players. We’ll surely see an exodus to some degree following this academic school year but I’m curious to see how things will be constructed for this 2025 season. As we know, Notre Dame is a wealthy school with the ability to fund a large roster.

#3 Speaking of rosters, NIL, salary caps and such, On3 recently reported that Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava is in contract negotiations with…Tennessee. How much of this type of negotiating goes on across the country and how will rule changes affect things like this moving forward? How long until we see someone like Iamaleava hold out during fall camp for a better deal? If there were rules around this maybe we would accept it, but there’s not.

When Iamaleave signed with Tennessee back in 2022 he reportedly led the way with an industry-leading $2 million annual NIL deal from the Volunteers. Now coming into his 3rd season on campus, and the second as the full-time starter, he’s now looking for a much larger package since the market has shifted considerably over the past couple of years. Fair play?

Recruiting

Notre Dame picked up a new recruit for the 2026 class as edge rusher Ebenezer Ewetade (0.9372) gave a verbal to the Irish. He comes from Garner, North Carolina just outside Raleigh and was coming off an unofficial visit to South Bend recently. Ewetade did have official visits scheduled to Florida State, Alabama, and Georgia lined up in addition to Notre Dame and let’s hope he sticks with the Irish because he has incredible athleticism as a pass-rusher.

We’re going to start seeing a lot more commits for Notre Dame in the coming weeks and things got better yesterday evening as Charlotte, North Carolina edge rusher Rodney Dunham (0.9816) committed to the Irish.

Dunham is super close to 5-star status in the 247 Composite falling in the no. 33 overall prospect in the nation spot a few places away from that elusive final star. Although, in the On3 Consensus he is a 5-star recruit so we’ll take it.

Notre Dame reached into North Carolina again to offer wide receiver Gordon Sellars (0.9236).

One of the nation’s top tight ends Brock Harris (0.9719) is the top player in Utah and has committed to BYU. He’s the top commit for the Cougars in several years.

Cornerback prospect Jontavius Wyman (0.9335) committed to Miami.

Oaks Christian running back Deshonne Redeaux (0.9343) is headed to USC.

Uniform of the Week

Well, the vibes and results went directly into the tank for the Notre Dame women’s basketball team at the end of this season. After reaching no. 1 in the polls late in the campaign, the team face planted to a 4-4 finish and lost to TCU in the Sweet Sixteen. Olivia Miles (pictured below) has decided she’d like to transfer to the Horned Frogs now. In the chaos of the end, the team quietly debuted a 6th uniform on the season in the Sweet Sixteen.

The women have similar 2 navy blue uniforms–one with the gold trim Notre Dame script across the chest and one with the gold trim Irish script across the chest–and they seemed to wear the latter uniform almost exclusively in 2024-25 on the road. This new blue uniform featured white numbers (that looks nice) with the gold foil shiny trim accents. It’s a nice, uniform it is now remembered for the clunker end of their season.

TV & Movies

Sometimes the culture is just too strong. Let’s take a look at the new A Minecraft Movie for example. I saw the trailer in the theater and was disgusted at how outrageously bad the movie looked. I thought this would come and go without much fanfare. We have an aging Jack Black and greasy-haired Jason Momoa in a pink jacket with a whole lot of CGI. I was expecting this to make it on the flops of 2025 lists and to be fair some of the reviews were lukewarm at best. Nope!

On a budget of $150 million (which seems crazy even for modern times) this insane movie has been breaking box office records. It’s the largest opening weekend of the year so far, besting Captain America: Brave New World and was Warner Bros. largest Saturday AND Sunday at the box office. Theaters are going wild with the youths cheering and screaming–plus dumping popcorn and trashing theaters when popular memes come up in the movie. Worldwide, the film is already over $300 million so I guess people really like Minecraft?

Tunes

Is there anyone out there among our readers who doesn’t use their phone as an alarm and are still using a traditional alarm clock? Whatever device you’re using are you choosing some sort of alarm sound, a more delicate sound, or perhaps music? I’m about 14 years into life with an iPhone and for 95% of that time I’ve used music to wake me up. I also married someone who wakes up nearly every day before her alarm so it’s either my alarm or kids taking me away from sleep.

For the past several months, I’ve been using Khruangbin’s “White Gloves” a song that is already 10 years old. I’ve used a few different Khruangbin songs in the past because their vibe fits so well in the morning for positive feelings and most tracks don’t have lyrics. However, “White Gloves” does have lyrics but the intro is just so perfect for an alarm. The band came out with their 4th album last year and it was pretty solid. It got really good reviews but I think it was probably the weakest of their catalog so far.