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

3 News Stories

#1 Commits are Coming

Notre Dame added a flurry of commits recently, including edge rusher Aidan O’Neil (0.9405), tight end Titus Hawk (0.8933), quarterback Champ Monds (0.9132), and wide receiver Jackson Coleman (0.8700). That brings the class up to 14 players with plenty more to come.

Hawk and Coleman are easily the most interesting and discussed new additions. The former is a lanky tight end from Oklahoma, not a place Notre Dame usually recruits, so his progress will be interesting to watch. Coleman hails from Valor Christian High School in the southern suburbs of Denver, the same school where the McCaffrey’s played their prep careers. Our former friend Mike Sanford, Jr. is also the head coach at the school.

#2 Private Equity

It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. The Big 12 is desperate and has officially signed a 5-year “partnership” with RedBird Capital to become the first league to get in bed with private capital. The pertinent passages from the news according to ESPN:

The strategic partnership, which was first reported by Front Office Sports and Yahoo Sports with RedBird Capital posting both stories on its website, includes Weatherford Capital and was ratified by Big 12 presidents and chancellors last week, the people said.

The three-prong partnership is designed to grow revenue for the league at a time when some schools are strapped for cash and vying to better position themselves for the next iteration of the ever-changing landscape of college sports.

RedBird will provide the Big 12 with a $12.5 million capital infusion and help create more commercial revenue for the conference. The league’s 16 schools also will have access to up to $30 million each, a line of credit that would have to be paid back with a double-digit interest rate over time…

…Also noteworthy, RedBird is the second-biggest shareholder of Paramount, which owns CBS and is working to acquire TNT. And that could help create additional television partners for the Big 12 during its next negotiating window. The league’s current broadcast deal expires in 2031. Media rights deals for major conferences account for a majority of the revenue distributed to its members.

If Notre Dame was doing this, people would be losing their minds and rightfully so! The short-term gain from this is questionable at best (it certainly won’t help Texas Tech to bring its quarterback back from gambling rehab!) and it makes you wonder if some day a school like Houston or West Virginia are left behind in a competitive football world and drowning in massive financial debt chasing gridiron glory.

#3 The AFCA Speaks

College football coaches convened recently and announced 4 changes that they’d like to see implemented in the future. Among those being:

  • Reducing bye weeks from two to one per season.
  • Ending conference championship games.
  • Allowing playoff games to be played around the Army-Navy game window.
  • Reducing the minimum number of days in between games to no fewer than six.

Obviously, the removal of conference championship games is the biggest wish and it appears the sport is quickly headed in that direction with many around the sport ready to move on. It only makes sense, especially when the sport is expected to move to a 24-team playoff. Everyone will be worried about playoff spots and seeding, it’s an easy out to kill off the league title games.

Uniform of the Week

For a while, it looked like G.J. Kinne was showing tons of promise and going to have Texas State be a big problem in the Sun Belt. You may remember Kinne for playing quarterback at Tulsa and winning *that game* in South Bend back in 2010. Since becoming head coach with the Bobcats he’s won a bowl game in each of his first 3 seasons and has a respectable 23-16 record overall. But, Kinne is only 12-12 in league play, including slumping to 3-5 last year. I pulled up the Texas State standard uniforms (they wear a lot of alternates like most teams) and here’s another program that needs to do some work on their branding.

Officially maroon and gold colors, per Texas State.

Now, this could be an okay-to-good uniform if this were a traditional blue blood program. Basic, traditional, if a bit boring. Their colors are basically the same as Boston College in name but that maroon looks much darker and closer to plum. It also doesn’t help that their uniform basically uses no white as a trim color, usually one of my least favorite ways to go about designing. Their Thundercats logo is okay and I’m also struck that nowhere does it show that this is Texas State. This isn’t the type of school that has the branding power to just roll with their nickname!

Media

I recently finished up Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (not the actor) and would recommend it to anyone, especially if you have minimal knowledge of this time period in history. The book lines up really well with the first couple of months of my favorite college course where a Santa Clause-like jolly professor lectured for an entire semester about several hundred years of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. Riveting stuff, and this gentle fellow did it all without any technology aids.

Reading about the Romans you’re constantly struck by their amazing balance of a modern civilization with utterly horrific violence and treatment of people. Or how in one breath the rule of law and tradition is sacred and the next breath norms are tossed away with ease. I found myself thinking a lot about Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, aka Pompey the Great. A cool name, a huge character, and someone who should be about 64% more famous (especially relative to the likes of Julius Caesar) than he is today. He had a massively important life, only to be tricked and stabbed to death entering Egypt. This guy needs his own modern movie!

Tunes

I lived the transition of Michael Jackson from pop genius to morally questionable (at best) freak. I was there soaking in the incredible hype of his 1991 album Dangerous where he still had a hold of the world pop culture and news. Then things just got weirder and weirder with reports coming over the years and months that Jackson wasn’t right. When he released HIStory: Past, Present, and Future: Book 1 I was only 13 but felt like MJ was clearly out of touch musically already. He was only 37 years old! That’s how old Taylor Swift will be this year.

As such, I completely blacked out the single “Scream” from my mind until it popped up recently on a drive to work. A few frames from the video look familiar but his sister Janet Jackson being a part of this, I have no recollection. What sticks out the most, besides the subject of trying to fight back towards the paparazzi, is how many of the classic Michael Jackson “hee hee” and other little vocal screams he makes in this song. There must be over 100 in this song. It’s insanity.

One More Thing

I have a very Seinfeld type of observation this week. Now, I am shopping in stores less and less these days and I’m not the person who goes and gets the daily groceries in our house. When I am out though, whether it’s a supermarket, Target, or what have you, I am seeing more and more people standing next to their shopping cart and pulling their things along. Instead of pushing the cart from the very obvious bar in the back as God intended. What is going on with this trend?

It does seem to be heavily done by men, but not exclusively. It feels like it could be a masculinity issue, maybe? Is pushing a shopping cart considered soft and too feminine? The only benefits I see are entering corners with your body first, but that is minimized by many people pulling the cart from the middle (and thus having the cart sticking out in front anyway) and taking up twice as much space in the aisles. If there’s anyone reading this who is a cart puller, let us know if there are positives that we’re missing out on navigating a store like this.