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

Top News

Notre Dame’s upcoming Shamrock Series game in New York City against Army on November 23rd will be played in primetime.

Former 5-star quarterback Sam Huard is transferring from Cal-Poly to Utah after previously spending time at Washington.

Former Louisville defensive lineman Jermayne Lole has flipped his commitment from Oklahoma to Texas.

Snoop Dogg is sponsoring the Arizona Bowl, of course.

Former Oregon State head coach Mike Riley is now on the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.

Two Congressmen have proposed a bill called the Protect the Ball Act to try and legally protect the NCAA from being able to “govern college sports.”

ESPN content will be added to Disney+ coming later in 2024.

Uniform of the Week

After more than a quarter century, the Denver Broncos recently unveiled new football uniforms to the public. In some ways, not much has changed. In other ways, they’ve come through with some radical new looks for the future. The horse logo remains on the blue helmet and now a thick arrow stripe sits on the back of the helmet, being cut off towards the crown at the top. They kept the alternate white helmet from last year but removed the helmet stripe and throwback logo for the current logo. The dated 90’s striping is gone and the jersey sleeves have a jagged look to emulate the Rocky Mountains. The pants have two stripes but the rearward line ends just below the hip.

The Orange Crush throwbacks are included, a top 5 NFL uniform. Overall, the new uniforms are okay but some of the color combinations look downright amateur. Their normal color combinations will look good but something like the white/blue/blue above makes the Broncos look way too much like UTSA in the college ranks. I have a feeling that white helmet won’t last very long, either.

Recruiting

Cornerback Trystan Haynes (0.9378) committed to Oklahoma.

Auburn picked up a verbal from linebacker Tyler Lockhart (0.9384).

Offensive tackle Avery Gach (0.9138) committed to Michigan.

Edge rusher Nasir Wyatt (0.9628) committed to Oregon.

YouTube Channel

Sports trivia nerds who remembers the game show Stump the Schwab from 20 years ago? We lost Stuart Scott over 9 years ago and Howie Schwab recently passed away on April 20th at just 63 years old from a heart attack. I don’t know when ESPN2 peaked, but surely Stump the Schwab had to be somewhere in that range when ratings on the secondary channel were still on fire. I loved watching this show whenever it came on TV.

I wonder what this show would like today with a couple decades worth of internet research available to everyone? I mean, the contestants on the show do a really poor job trying to name all of the NBA MVP winners up to that date. If that is done today I feel like people are getting way more names included before dropping out with an incorrect answer. Although, the questions would likely be much more difficult in today’s version because we are a sports nerdier society in general.

Tunes

In terms of a long hard life lived in the music scene few can top what happened with jazz pioneer Miles Davis. He lived 14 years longer than Elvis and yet was a heroin addict in the late 1940’s, to put that career length into a different perspective. If you haven’t listened to Davis’ work it’s probably smart to start with his famous Kind of Blue album from 1959 and see if it resonates. There’s a lot of work to choose from too as his Wikipedia discography features 63 separate album of his ‘major’ work. Sixty three!

In the mid-to-late 1960’s Davis started taking extremely large swings in experimental music and eventually found his way to becoming one of the pioneers in electronic music. For example, today’s featured song “Rated X” from 1974 is truly something else. It contains electric piano, electric sitar, guitar, bass, drums, tabla, and Davis on the organ.

Trivia

Which color below is the real and official Notre Dame blue?

The Other Football

Dortmund withstood a barrage of shots and a Mats Hummel header led the German squad beating PSG 2-0 on aggregate to advance to the Champions League Final. In the other semi-final, Real Madrid scored a late and controversial goal to beat Bayern Munich 4-3 on aggregate. It’ll be BVB vs. Los Blancos on June 1st inside Wembley Stadium in London for the the UCL crown.

Despite the loss, PSG will retain manager Luis Enrique.

They did it again. After going down 2-0, Bayer Leverkusen scored 2 late goals to draw Roma in the 2nd leg of the Europa League semifinals and will move on to the final with a 4-2 aggregate win. Bayer have now broken the European record with 49 games unbeaten in 2023-24.

United States 17-year old winger Keyrol Figuero has signed a professional contract with Liverpool after coming up through the club’s academy.

Chelsea defender Thiago Silva’s contract is ending and he’s headed back to Brazil to play for Fluminense.

TV & Movies

Can an autistic person be so calculating and deadly in real life? Such was the story line in The Accountant back in 2016 featuring Ben Affleck in the lead role. The movie is having a resurgence on Netflix and I’ve been sucked backed into this financial crimes thriller. Affleck dropped this gem right in the middle of his Batman era. He’s great in this performance.

The first half of this movie is really interesting and received a lot of praise. I’ll agree with a lot of the critics that the back half got way too messy and generic. It felt like this story deserved better. Like, somehow they should’ve gone deeper with Affleck’s character and background but instead it turned into him saving a girl and killing a bunch of people. I enjoyed it but hopefully a planned second movie is better overall.

A Look Back

In this case it’s a look forward, or I guess you could say a look back at the plans for new stadiums to be constructed and/or renovated in college football. At Notre Dame, we know well the process of renovating a stadium and there’s now more excitement with the news of the new Shields Hall being built over the next couple years south of the Gug. The schools included in the video below are:

Hawaii – This should be a fun stadium when it’s done, you can’t mess this up.

Lafayette – A very meh upgrade plan.

Charlotte – A needed upgrade but it looks like Wake Forest.

USF – This looks like it’ll be pretty wacky and very Florida.

Northwestern – This legit looks like an awesome stadium far too nice for Northwestern’s talent.

Army – Notre Dame needs to play a game here, damn it.

Boise State – Of course, the blue turf stays.

Fresno State – This looks like a really solid new modern remodeling by the Bulldogs.

UCF – This renovation isn’t very exciting.

Memphis – Some simple but necessary upgrades in their mockups.

Florida State – The trend in decreased capacity in favor of comfort continues.

Miami – This could be a top 5 stadium or a massive boondoggle. Also, 65k capacity is way too large.

Kansas – This project is already underway and the light towers make it look like construction cranes will forever be parked around the stadium.

18S Paddock Club

Prior to Sunday’s race in Miami the Sky Sports pre-show sat down with McLaren driver Lando Norris and gave him a lie detector test–a spot they’ve done with several other drivers in recent times. In that segment, Norris was asked if he’d win a race with his current team and of course he said yes.

Just a couple hours later, we witnessed Norris’ first career F1 victory.

*This was a sprint weekend and Norris had full upgrades on his McLaren. However, the softs didn’t work well in sprint qualifying and he was hit in the first corner of the sprint race for a deflating DNF. For the Grand Prix he would start in P5 and after going a long time on mediums he benefited from a Safety Car while retaining first place. However, he would impressively drive away from Verstappen behind him in P2 at the re-start for a 7.6 second win.

*Verstappen led most of the race prior to Norris taking over and apparently damaged his floor after jumping the curb and knocking a bollard off the track. It takes a bit of shine off Norris’ maiden victory but he won’t care.

The whole sport was happy for Norris.

*The overall pace for Red Bull, McLaren, and Ferrari was fairly equal during the race. Fans are hoping this continues in the future, especially as Ferrari is bringing upgrades next weekend at Imola.

*What an up and down weekend for RB Visa! Danny Ricciardo qualified P4 and finished in that spot for the sprint portion of the weekend only to qualify P18 (plus a penalty from China) with a P15 finish in the grand prix. Yuki Tsunoda had a more consistent weekend with a P8 and P7 finish in both races. The team is now comfortably in 6th place with 19 points.

*Kevin Magnussen with Haas had an insane weekend with 5 penalty points and 35-seconds worth of additional penalty time. He’s now just 2 penalty points away from a race ban and will need to nurse that for 11 more months. It seems impossible to avoid a ban at this rate.

Trivia Answer:

B