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

3 News Stories

#1 Bison Country Spreading

The encroachment of conference realignment isn’t slowing down any time soon. While lower tier FBS teams may be putting out feelers for new homes it’s also the FCS who is getting plundered, too. This week, news broke that North Dakota State–a school with 18 National Championships and a 82% winning clip in the playoffs–is leaving the FCS and Missouri Valley Conference for a football-only home in the Mountain West.

That’ll give the Mountain West 10 teams in football after several teams defected for the newly formed Pac-12 Voltron being assembled:

Air Force Falcons
Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors
Nevada Wolf Pack
New Mexico Lobos
Northern Illinois Huskies (joining from the MAC)
North Dakota State Bison (joining from FCS Missouri Valley)
San José State Spartans
UNLV Rebels
UTEP Miners (joining from Conference USA)
Wyoming Cowboys

With their pedigree, it’s not hard to imagine the Bison becoming extremely competitive and in the top third of the league right away. One thing is for certain is that North Dakota State’s travel costs are going way up. Only NIU, Wyoming, and Air Force are within 1,000 miles of Fargo. Good luck!

#2 Big Sky to Fighting Illini 

More FCS news recently as Montana head coach Bobby Hauck stepped down and into “retirement” following 8 seasons (and also a previous 7-year stint) with the Grizzlies that included a brutal 4 National Championship runners-up seasons. He cited the changing sport as less appealing to be a head coach.

Okay, fair enough. But wait!

Notre Dame hired Illinois defensive coordinator Aaron Henry to coach defensive backs with the Irish and after less than a week of “retirement” Hauck is headed to Champaign to coordinate the defense for Bret Bielema.

While he got his wish to longer be a head coach, Hauck is set to make approximately $1.2 million per season with Illinois while he was making less than $300,000 leading Montana to numerous conference titles. Not a bad move on his part.

#3 Combine Invites

The NFL Combine invites were released for 319 players across the nation. For Notre Dame, six players were invited including Jeremiyah Love, Jadarian Price, Eli Raridon, Malachi Fields, Billy Schrauth, and Aamil Wagner. Still running on the fumes of the Saban era, Alabama leads the way with 12 invites.

Here’s a list of the quarterbacks that were invited:

Drew Allar, Penn State
Luke Altmyer, Illinois
Carson Beck, Miami
Jalon Daniels, Kansas
Joe Fagnano, UConn
Taylen Green, Arkansas
Haynes King, Georgia Tech
Cade Klubnik, Clemson
Fernando Mendoza, Indiana
Behren Morton, Texas Tech
Garrett Nussmeier, LSU
Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt
Cole Payton, North Dakota State
Sawyer Robertson, Baylor
Ty Simpson, Alabama

The industry expects Mendoza off the board early, if not no. 1 overall and Simpson remains the second quarterback on many lists as a likely first round pick. Who would you predict is third off the board??

Uniform of the Week

Without doing any research, can you name the team pictured below? It’s the mighty Jaguars of South Alabama! They are led by Major Applewhite who is in his 2nd head coaching job since being let go by Houston back in 2018 after a brief 2 years with the program. That season saw the team win 8 games while averaging almost 44 points per game (5th best nationally) while allowing 37.2 points (119th nationally). They famously lost 70-14 in their bowl game against Army and Applewhite was swiftly shown the door. The Jaguars went 4-8 last year and are 11-14 overall under Applewhite.

We can do better.

I feel like we need to form a committee to re-do this South Alabama logo. They updated it back in 2008 and the result was something a 7-year old might draw in their spare time. Before that, they had a pretty unusual logo of a slightly side-profiled full bodied jaguar next to a square box “USA” next to it. Hardly better! My opinion is that cat logos are super hard to pull off, especially outside of lions or tigers. Honestly, can you think of any really good cat logos from other animals?

Media

Steven Spielberg will turn 80 at the end of this year and hasn’t been terribly busy lately. That is until now! This summer he’ll release a new movie Disclosure Day that he directed and co-wrote. Details are scarce but it’s supposed to be a UFO/sci-fi film featuring Emily Blunt in the starring role. Meanwhile, over on Netflix, Spielberg is executive producing an upcoming mini-series The Dinosaurs that will be narrated by none other than Morgan Freeman.

There will be 4 episodes each one hour long. It’ll be released in just under a month on March 6th. My little 4 year old is totally into dinosaurs right now and I’m curious if this will hold his attention. Some of the CGI animations will amaze him, I’m sure. He’s currently interested in watching the Jurassic Park River Adventure ride-along video on YouTube and other videos that recreate the sounds and body movement of different species. Watching 4 complete hours of anything, even in small chunks, is probably out for me and him. We’ll try our best.

Tunes

I’ve never listened to a Justin Bieber album. Today won’t be about me going through that experience, either. I know several of his songs and think once he became an adult from 2015’s Purpose album there have been some good tunes that he’s put out. But, he’s also taken 2 separate long breaks from releasing music. Last summer, he released Swag and then 56 days later he released Swag II so there’s suddenly a bunch of new songs from Biebs out there.

Not too long ago, I was driving and one of the newer singles “Yukon” came on the radio. But, it didn’t sounds like Biebs. I mumbled something to my wife later about hearing this new song but I think it was all sung by a girl? At the Grammy’s last week, Biebs came out in socks, boxers, taped a loop with his guitar, and sung “Yukon” on stage. Now, I realize the studio song is his voice just pitched way, way up. What a bizarre decision. The Grammy’s performance sounds great. Now that we saw him sing the song in his normal voice in this stripped down (quite literally) way it feels like the producers failed everyone.

One More Thing

The winter Olympics have been going on in Milan and Cortina and will last through February 22nd. I’ve been trying to tune in during live coverage a little bit and also settling into some late night coverage on Peacock. I love the weirdness of the winter games, they’ve always felt like more of the Olympics worth paying attention to for the goofy nature of some of the competitions. You see that a lot less in the summer games. With each new winter games, curling continues to get more popular.

I’ve realized I’m officially out on curling, though. It’s not about it being too easy or anything like that, although it’s probably workable to get very good at the sport with a couple years worth of training. I think it’s too slow for me, and the constant chatter between the players hits this annoying nerve with me that finally made me check out on any further matches. Is it a lot like golf if there was a greater increase in broadcast chatter between the golfer and his caddie? That’s the closest comparison I can come up with but I also like golf. So, it’s like golf except you’re listening to more chit-chat and there’s far fewer actual shots/rolls being played.