Your weekly dose of Notre Dame news, opinion, and other stuff.
3 News Stories
#1 The Broyles Award was created for the 1996 season to honor the best assistant coach in the country as selected by a small committee of retired college football coaches, media, and broadcasters. That inaugural season long-time Florida State defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews won the award. I can’t find exactly when during the season they announced that but this was the season in which the Noles went 12-0, beat Florida in the regular season finale 24-21, then got Danny Wuerffel’d in the 2nd half of a re-match against the Gators in the Bowl Alliance National Championship Game losing 52-20 to choke away a championship.
I’m guessing Andrews won the award some time in December that year before the Sugar Bowl.
Nowadays, the wait a little longer to announce the decision. This past weekend, now former defensive coordinator Al Golden won the Broyles Award becoming another assistant to lose in the National Championship, although Golden’s defense put in a better performance than Florida State back in early 1997.
Al Golden’s speech at the Broyles Award definitely an impactful sign off at Notre Dame and sheds some light on the program under Marcus Freeman. Worth a listen.pic.twitter.com/fvh4xFkLJV
— Pete Sampson (@PeteSampson_) February 14, 2025
Golden is the 2nd Notre Dame assistant to win the award after Bob Diaco (I still deeply miss his zaniness) following the 2012 season. Golden’s tremendous speech after receiving the Broyles is linked above and I’m sure everyone has watched it by now. He will forever be the last coach I’ll ever judge too harshly after being hired by the Irish. I truly thought he’d last one year, be a poor fit, and move on to something else in his life. Instead, we got 3 memorable seasons and he’s back to Bengals as their defensive coordinator.
#2 The SEC and Big Ten met on Wednesday to discuss plans for the future with a College Football Playoff committee meeting coming next week in Dallas. It’s time to get those ducks in order. The current contract ends after this upcoming 2025 season and no one is under the illusion of who is driving the force for change for the future. Changes for 2025 have to be unanimous while changes for 2026 do not, so expect little movement for this year while 2026 is the big target.
The only change looking to be implemented is removing the four highest ranked conference champions with the first round byes. This shouldn’t be popular outside the SEC/Big Ten but people are really selling the “all the teams with byes lost this year it’s not good for you” line to get everyone to swallow this. To be clear, this is good news for Notre Dame who could then earn a top 4 seed and first round bye with this rule change. Although, that home game was pretty cool! I’m once again stating the playoffs should all be on the campus of the higher seed until the National Championship.
Moving to 14 teams in the playoff looks to be locked up though:
- 4 auto qualifiers for the Big Ten/SEC
- 2 auto qualifiers for the Big 12/ACC
- 1 Group of 5 auto-qualifier
- 1 at-large qualifier
Eight teams coming from the Big Ten/SEC is insane. If this were the case for 2024 we would’ve seen Alabama in the playoffs plus BYU getting in as the 2nd team from the Big 12, too. I’ve always been at peace with what the playoffs brings us but man they are really moving at warp speed to devalue the college football regular season.
#3 I was thinking about Power program coaching situations that aren’t doing too well and came up with this list for situations to be monitored for anyone who has been at their school for at least 2 seasons:
Justin Wilcox, California
Mike Norvell, FSU
Troy Taylor, Stanford
Tony Elliott, Virginia
Scott Satterfield, Cincinnati
Mike Gundy, Oklahoma State
Lincoln Riley, USC
Hugh Freeze, Auburn
Brent Venables, Oklahoma
I bring this up because I wanted to add Luke Fickell to the list but Wisconsin just…gave him a 1-year extension to take his contract all the way through the 2031-32 season. Fickell is one game under .500 in his 2 full seasons with the Badgers and he makes nearly $8 million per year. So much about this sport is silly these days and defies logic.
Recruiting
This past year, Notre Dame lost corner Jaden Mickey during the middle of the season as he looked to transfer out with 2 years of eligibility remaining. He originally committed to the Notre Dame transfer portal destination of the west California (joining Tobias Merriweather, Aiden Keanaaina and Tyson Ford) but has now reversed course and is headed to Boise State instead.
Former #NotreDame DB Jaden Mickey, who signed with #Cal back in December but recently asked for and was granted his release, signed with #BoiseState earlier today, redshirt junior with two years of eligibility left https://t.co/Le86ImnkNo pic.twitter.com/zxjqFIzszF
— Greg Biggins (@GregBiggins) February 20, 2025
This means we’ll be seeing Mickey returning to Notre Dame Stadium on October 4th later this year when the Broncos face the Irish for the first time in program history.
We’re approaching a month without a commit for Notre Dame. Who will be the next to verbal to the Irish?
Uniform of the Week
The NBA has been the biggest sport that people love talking about but no one watches during the regular season. Guilty as charged over here! I do watch an hour or two per week though. It’s been a tough 2024-25 for the league as they’ve dealt with low ratings and now they gave the world another weird All-Star weekend stinker. They went with a 4-team format made up of 3 teams drafted by Shaq, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith, plus the winning team of the Young Stars tournament. So, there were essentially 4 different uniforms showcased during the All-Star game with these 3 from the actual real stars:
These uniforms are pretty blah, too. In baseball, I prefer the All-Star format where the players wear their normal team uniforms. In the NBA, I do like these one-off all-star designs. The league has only worn the team branded uniforms for 1997-2002 and then 2018-19 in their entire history. They have to keep this going, but maybe go back to the old East vs. West format because that is better than last weekend’s abomination of an event.
TV & Movies
Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut came in 2017 with the movie Molly’s Game starring Jessica Chastain in the leading role. The film started out with a lot of promise as I was working out on the trainer recently. It kept getting better but then it ran out of steam. It’s a long movie (141 minutes) and I think making so much of that time in flash backs started to ruin the flow of things. You ended up getting either those scenes from her past or she was arguing with her lawyer.
I didn’t realize until I researched the movie that this was based on a true story. It looks like they stayed pretty faithful to Molly Bloom’s life, as well. If anything, they probably could’ve made it even more sensational from true events. Other than maybe exaggerating her skiing injuries they kept it real. The poker scenes were pretty cool, I wish the movie focused more on what happened at the tables (especially for such a long movie) and would recommend that if the movie were to be re-made.
Tunes
Where are my Phish heads at? I went to college in the North Country within the orbit of Vermont-based Phish and I had a couple freshmen-year buddies who were definitely big fans of the band. That said, I really don’t know enough about Phish. What I do know is “Bouncing Around the Room” played a million times in our 2001-02 dorm room.
They’ve been releasing studio work for over 35 years and I was surprised to see they “only” have 16 albums. I was expecting way over 20 albums. Of course, they have been a prolific touring group and they did disband for about 5 years in the early 2000’s. Do we have any Phish heads among our readers?
Apparently it’s SOP at Wisconsin to extend the coach 1 year after every season. No idea why, and it sure looks insane right now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy with Fickel’s performance
That is crazy.
I at least applaud FIckell for bouncing outside the room/box by trying Longo at OC instead of just a pound and ground game at Wisconsin. I’m curious to see if he does better with a new OC
Not a phish-head and have never been to a show, but I have heard them plenty as they are often recommended songs/youtube links when listening to other bands like DMB or John Butler
Haven’t seen the boys play in way too long, but yeah saw a few dozen Phish shows, including the summer festivals in 96,97,98, and 99. Only NYE show i made was the 99 in the Everglades…largest traffic jam in the country lol. Somehow we kept a 15 or 20 car caravan together through that mess.
I saw them once. I believe it was 96 in Deer Creek. Were you at that show too?
Yup, that summer was a short tour because they were in Europe all of July. i didn’t jump on til Alpine Valley and was expecting to meet up with a friend who didn’t show. Being from the Bend some of us stopped at home on the way to Deer Creek and somebody had a message from him on their answering machine his jeep had broken down and was delayed because of it…so at least we knew he wasn’t in jail in South Dakota or something (he had gone to all four night at Red Rocks).
So dude was expected first night at Deer Creek. Didn’t show up…2nd night i bump into him in the middle of the crowd just as Glide starts so magical coincidence there. Unfortunately he was my ride to Hershey Park and Clifford Ball…and his jeep started overheating around Columbus so we missed the Hershey show. But Clifford Ball made it all worth it…and not least of those reasons was the orchestral set afternoon of day 2. If you ever get an opportunity to hear an orchestra outdoors out of a rock or jam band’s PA do it. The kettle drums hit so hard i literally fell on my ass (i was sober for that set). Granted i was also literally 10 feet in front of the stacks so i felt the full power of the low end, but still.
Molly Bloom is Jeremy Bloom’s brother. I don’t know if the movie goes into this, but he was an Olympic skier who went back to school and played football at CU. So it has CFB ties!
I remember reading he had to return all his skiing winnings and maybe endorsement money to be allowed to play football. That was when I realized something was seriously wrong with the NCAA’s amateur model.
I bought A Picture of Nectar when it came out and really liked it…then the whole Phish phenomenon started happening, and it turned me off the group. I know musical taste should be about the quality of the songs and what speaks to the listener, but I may have thrown away my cassette hoping to avoid being placed in that clique. And I’ve purposely avoided Phish since then. I didn’t want to listen to it because I didn’t want to like it.
It’s a shame because I just pulled up the album on iTunes to remember what was on it, and it’s still a good album 33 years later.
But I’m not downloading it.