Your weekly dose of Notre Dame news, opinion, and other stuff.
Top News
Just a couple days after the Andy Ludwig deal from Utah fell through, Notre Dame has moved on to hiring tight ends coach Gerad Parker as the next offensive coordinator. You can read athletic director Jack Swarbrick’s statement about the Ludwig fiasco HERE.
Notre Dame has reportedly hired Gino Guidugli to be the next quarterbacks coach. Guidugli recently joined Luke Fickell at Wisconsin as the tight ends/passing game coordinator and had been at Cincinnati as a running backs coach, quarterbacks coach, and then offensive coordinator in 2022.
After 1 season back in South Bend, offensive line coach Harry Hiestand has retired.
Notre Dame has hired former Michigan State linebacker Max Bullough to replace James Laurinaitis as a defensive graduate assistant.
Akron has given head coach Joe Moorhead an extension after several college teams showed interest in him this off-season as an offensive coordinator.
Georgia offensive coordinator Todd Monken is headed to the Baltimore Ravens and the Dawgs are bringing in Mike Bobo from Auburn.
Houston offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Shannon Dawson has been hired in those same roles at Miami.
Kevin Sumlin has been hired as the new co-offensive coordinator at Maryland.
Tulane has hired Troy’s Shiel Wood to be their defensive coordinator.
Former Boston College offensive coordinator and Notre Dame tight ends coach John McNulty is headed to Alabama as an analyst.
Utah officially announced quarterback Cameron Rising tore his ACL during their bowl game this past season.
The Big 12 and its TV partners have announced an official early exit deal for Texas and Oklahoma following the upcoming 2023-24 athletic season.
Kansas announced a $200 million stadium renovation project.
Ohio State has cancelled a 2024-25 home-and-home series with Washington.
The NCAA was embarrassed in court on Wednesday. In the U.S. Court 3rd Circuit of Appeals the NCAA representation were struggling to understand scholarship rules while the 3-panel of judges were signaling they believed athletes should be employees.
Uniform of the Week
I guess I’m fully devoted to a Wonderfully Ugly™ uniform off-season for the Rambler. Up next, San Jose State going absolutely turn-of-the-century wild in 2001 with these uniforms. Today’s picture shows them in black, which maybe you were thinking was a one-off type of situation as this was the era when Black for Black’s Sake started dominating sports. You would be wrong. They had this template in white and blue, as well. Fully committed.
This was the first season under head coach Fitz Hill who as a black man decided to partner with a new apparel company 4 Players Only out of Grapevine, Texas who were minority and women owned. What started out as great cause soon turned dark after these uniforms were unveiled. San Jose State signed a 2-year deal with an option for a 3rd season but ended up dropping 4 Players Only after just this lone season in 2001 and signed a new deal with Adidas.
Recruiting
Things are really quiet on the recruiting front right now and we are in a dead period until March 1st. Our 18 Stripes recruiting grades and comments from the 2023 class are coming soon, though!
Washington quarterback commit Austin Mack (0.9204) is reclassifying to 2023 and enrolling on campus this summer.
YouTube Channel
Three out of the 5 large shopping malls in my metro area are hurting bad. However, the biggest one is still going strong with over 23 million visitors per year. In the early 1990’s after it opened there was this little off-shoot entrance/exit situated in a random corner of the mall with an escalator right in the entryway going up to the stores in the main shopping level. But, to the left almost hiding behind the escalator was this large indoor mini-golf (we call it putt-putt where I’m from) course that had this early version of a golf simulator built into it. For years, I wanted to play on that simulator but never got the chance.
I’ve hit a few balls in a stripped down simulator while getting looked at for fitting new irons but I’ve never experienced a full simulator in a home. Putting a high-tech one in the house is a life goal. We’ve come a long way with the technology and I bet over the next 10-15 years things are going to start getting even more impressive, particularly with A.I. getting involved. Maybe we should raise the 18S premium price to get ya boy a simulator?
Tunes
Aerosmith is a fascinating band. They came out on fire in 1973 and had this amazing 4-album run before I was born before falling into the abyss with 4 of the worst albums ever released by a major and famous rock band. For a long time they were quite the punch line, especially after their “comeback” album flopped in 1985. Then they did the “Walk This Way” collaboration with Run-DMC in 1986 and completely re-invented themselves with the 1987 release Permanent Vacation which (as we’ve discussed before with other acts) absolutely blew up on MTV.
The “Rag Doll” video was particularly memorable for me. It never does get easy to understand how weird and unique Steven Tyler has looked his entire life, does it? Aerosmith’s next 2 albums made them even bigger stars but by the time their 1993 offering Pump was at its zenith it would be impossible to ever top that level of new fame. And truthfully, I love a lot of this music but this entire second era for Aerosmith was propelled by hiring songwriters which is how things like their 1998 no. 1 song “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” from the Armageddon soundtrack happens.
Trivia
Can you name the last 5 quarterbacks taken no. 1 overall in the NFL Draft?
The Other Football
Mid-week football saw Manchester City defeat Arsenal 3-1 and move top of the table. The teams are tied on points but City are +10 better in goal differential.
The Champions League returned this week after what felt like the longest layoff in history due to the World Cup:
Benfica 2-0 Club Brugge
AC Milan 1-0 Tottenham
Dortmund 1-0 Chelsea
Bayern Munich 1-0 PSG
Jesse Marsch was set to manage Southampton after being fired recently by Leeds but a deal fell through this week.
Phoenix Suns co-owner Jahm Najafi is reportedly interested in buying Spurs for 3 billion pounds, but as is often the case for Tottenham’s ENIC ownership group, they believe the club is worth over 4 billion.
Streaming
During the Super Bowl the official trailer for The Flash was released and was one of the few commercials that stuck with me. The other was the Tubi advertisement. I just came back from putting my oldest to sleep, no one else was in the living room at the time, and I got angry and confused that someone had sat on the remote. Turns out this happened to tons of people across the country. Well done, Tubi.
I don’t know anything about comic book people, except very basic things around some of the bigger characters. The Flash is set to come out on June 16th this year after 20+ years of people trying to get it made. Somehow, there are 2 different Batman’s (Batmen?) which is confusing but clearly the plot in this trailer has some sort of time travel device. Either way, I am excited to welcome back Michael Keaton as Batman, the OG Batman to me.
A Look Back
I came across this 1999 game against Arizona State recently. To date, it’s the only time the Sun Devils have played inside Notre Dame Stadium. From the other 3 meetings, 2 were in Sun Devil Stadium while the other was the Shamrock Series game in Arlington, Texas back in 2013. You watch this TV intro with Dick Enberg heading up the broadcast and it brings back so many warm feelings. Even though this era of Irish football was decidedly crappy without many warm feelings.
I’m sure no one is going to watch this entire 2.5-hour broadcast. Notre Dame did end up crushing the visiting Sun Devils by 31 points coming directly off that win over young Bob Stoops at Oklahoma. Watch the Irish offense early in this game, though. You wonder how they could ever score points, it looks so archaic. And well, the team did end up losing 7 games so not great Bob!
18S Paddock Club
We are inching closer to the start of the 2023 Formula 1 season. Next Thursday, the teams will travel to Bahrain for the start of a 3-day testing period with the first grand prix of the season coming the very next weekend. On Thursday, the last livery launch for the entire grid was made so now we know what each car will look like this season.
Ranking the 2023 Liveries
#10 Alpine
This car is passable from the front but the side view is among the worst in recent F1 history. Alpine stripped off so much paint and have too much black dominating the car which makes the BWT pink look even more out of place.
#9 Haas
The side view is nice and a nice change from their previous couple of cars. The front is dominated by white and red and looks almost the same as their other cars in recent memory. A small upgrade for the team but not enough to move up the rankings.
#8 Alfa Romeo
Some people love this car. I think the vertical split from red to black makes the car look clunky and slow. The sponsor logos are all too small and look amateurish, too. With so many dark cars, I don’t think the Alfa is going to stand out that much.
#7 Williams
The Duracell battery covering the air intake is one of the most genius ideas. Williams used it last year for a few races and are set to keep it full-time in 2023. The car is all these mixtures of blue with dark red and I just wish they provided a brighter secondary color somewhere. Like last year, this car will look black most of the time on television.
#6 AlphaTauri
I originally had this livery ranked much lower as the addition of red in their color scheme from the Polish gas sponsor Orlen was a bit jarring. But, after seeing the shakedown run I thought the car looked much better and the red really pops and adds a nice flavor to the overall feel. Also, their wheel rim design may be one of the best on the grid.
#5 McLaren
Yes, it’s busy and there are way too many sponsors. Last year, I hated this livery. This year, they reduced the amount of blue (you basically see no blue from a front shot of the car) and I think McLaren deserve some credit for bringing something unique to the grid in an era of stripped down carbon.
#4 Red Bull
Out of all the team’s Red Bull changed the least with their livery, really only swapping in a new sponsorship deal with eCommerce company Rokt for a small set of logos on the car. Yes, people are sick of this livery to some degree but it’s still cool.
#3 Aston Martin
This livery only has very small tweaks from 2022, including what looks like a return of the more pale aqua-colored green seen in 2021 instead of the slightly darker green from last year. Like other cars, the Aston Martin struggles to look distinctive on track unless it’s bright sunlight, and the addition of more bare carbon won’t help. It’s still a lovely design, though.
#2 Ferrari
Ferrari changed their front and rear end plates to red while also adding a black strip to the side of the monocoque, a black notch for their Ceva sponsor, and a black section where the number is placed. Although it’s difficult to tell, they may have returned to a slightly brighter red, too. From the front, this car looks like a million bucks, especially with the new addition of their famous Ferrari script in white on the rear wing.
#1 Mercedes
This might be the best looking Mercedes in history. After a return to the silver last year and a mixed reaction they have stripped the car down to bare carbon (boo!) but it looks amazing (yay!). The subtle addition of the silver and Petronas green secondary colors, plus the bright driver numbers and accents, add just enough flavor to the mean black look.
Trivia Answer:
Trevor Lawrence (2021), Joe Burrow (2020), Kyler Murray (2019), Baker Mayfield (2018), and Jared Goff (2016).
Irish baseball starts today! excited to see how they look under Stiffler
Baseball can’t start in February that’s illegal.
The 1999 team was weirdly streaky. Beat Kansas in an August kickoff classic (which Michigan threw a fit about), then lost 4 straight, then won 4 straight, then lost 4 straight.
IIRC, that was also the year we probably should have lost to Navy — we escaped with a 28-24 win that I think involved a very favorable spot.
My junior year. Was it also the year we beat Army by a last second field goal? It was over fall break and I like many students wasn’t there.
Despite replacing it, the grass surface in Glendale was bad for whatever reason and was when the Chiefs played the Cardinals in the first game of the season. Butker slipped and suffered a high ankle sprain. Both KC and Philadelphia play on grass. George Toma, whose been groundskeeper for all fifty-seven SBs, has now officially retired. Toma’s first job was with the KC Athletics, then has continued with the Royals and Chiefs. His first and last SBs both included the Chiefs. KU has had FieldTurf and may be staying with it in their renovation.
Thinking of ND, bowls and the Sun Devil stadium, the Irish are 1-3 in bowls there, including a 9-41 loss to Oregon State who had Jonathan Smith, currently coach there, at QB, Chad Johnson ,T.J. Houshmandzadeh as WRs, and Ken Simonton, RB. Smith’s coaching career has been on the West Coast – OC at Boise and Washington and back to his alma mater as HC. No place like home, which for Andy Heck (and Tim Grunhard) is KC. One can dream.
For 2023, ND should be favored in their first four games. Winning those four, MF’s record in the last eleven games including the bowl win, will be 10-1 or 13-2 in the last fifteen.
Triple it!
The new premium subscription price:
Glad I paid for 10 years upfront
It might just be me however this is ambiguous:
The number 1 taken qb vs the qb taken at the no 1 pick.
The only on I came up with was Kenny Pickett taken at no 20 last year. However we was the no 1 overall qb in the draft. See what I mean, ambiguous.
My memory for QB draft’s doesn’t go much farther back than that. If I put a lot of thought into it, I probably could of guessed at four of them. Goff would have never been a guess though.
No. 1 overall is the first overall pick, though.
It’s just you.
haha. yep. made sense to me. I made it all the way back to baker then said screw it and scrolled down to the answer. not sure how much I would have had to think to come up with goff (or who was no 1 in 17)
So i’m a member on 247, used to be on the athletic but members posting wore me out(ironically why I will also cancel 247). Anyways the last few weeks I have seen lots of vitriol and comments specifically towards sampson. I personally have always liked him, I enjoy his contributions on II podcast (and I don’t blame him for fortuna sucking) and have enjoyed his perspective, but apparently there is a vocal segment that doesn’t like him. What am I missing?
I think Sampson’s brand of holier-than-thou pessimism and frequent assertions that he knew things after the fact that he didn’t report in advance rub people the wrong way, but overall he gets some good info, writes pretty well, and has the occasional interesting insight. I’m fine with Sampson.
Fortuna, however, is like the drunk guy by himself at a bar trying to tell your group about his awesome parleys. He’s awful on pretty much any topic he touches nowadays.
That seems pretty fair on sampson, I think especially the revisionist history on things.
oh fortuna, so I was pretty nervous about michigan winning 1 or gulp maybe 2 playoff games this year. Then fortuna said he had them as the favorite heading into the playoffs. Knew I was good
It is super weird to me that reporters on premium sites sit on information they have. Like, aren’t you reporters? Report! We’re giving you money for information, after all.
Beat reporter is a really weird power dynamic. They develop relationships with the department they’re covering, and have to cultivate sources who can get them that inside info. But at the same time too much digging, asking challenging questions, can be seen as biting the hand that feed them. So I think that’s why you’re more likely to get things like “this was consistent with what my sources had been telling me,” even though they never wrote on it. Also why no one is going to hold Jack’s feet to the fire publicly now or at any time in the future.
That is clearly true, but also: people are not afraid to report about, e.g., the Defense Department and risk losing their sources. Not sure why fan site reporters are given a pass for something that is not nearly as important.
That said, my subscription payments still cash, so I suppose I’m part of the problem.
Not nearly as important also means much less covered, so that’s probably why government reporters can get away with it.
I have to think “Notre Dame beat reporter” is one of the most insular, bubble-iest jobs that exists. Outside perspective is probably nonexistent.
Sampson is a complete weathervane. Ok, we’ll not as much as Fortuna, but still. He completely lost me when Kelly left, as he has been writing these puff pieces about how Kelly and Swarbrick were in total alignment, then as soon as the LSU move happened, he conveniently started talking about how there was a lot of tension in the athletic department all season and this isn’t that surprising, etc. Or more recently, how Tommy Rees was committed to ND and got along with Freeman great, quickly turning into how that was kind of a forced marriage all along and Rees was looking to get out. I don’t know if he just repeats admin spin or he conceals the real stuff to keep access, but he’s not on the up and up.
Yeah, he’s fine when he’s reporting cold hard facts — X player has Y injury, stuff like that. He clearly has the connections that make reports like that reliable.
Beyond that, I don’t really trust him. Waaaaay too much contradictory revisionist history. To hear Sampson tell it, everything within the program is perfect and unimpeachable, until something changes, and then well actually that was a known problem and the change had been in the works for a long time.
Also:
No.
My thoughts…
I think it largely depends on what you expect from the beat guys. As nd09hls12 mentioned below, I think there are fans very much interested in the media holding the entire program accountable or report on a lot more stuff they may withhold.
That….is not realistic.
IMO, they shouldn’t be doing that precisely because it’s mostly just sports and not that serious.
For example, why would someone like Sampson try to burn the program down with some in depth examination on Chip Long being hated in the Gug and publish that story during late September? Stuff like that tends to work itself out and the truth comes out eventually. Was anyone like, “they all lied!!” when we found out?
The Ludwig drama was interesting just because it had a lot of inter-section between reporting and sources needed that provided a window into dysfunction or real issues at Notre Dame w/r/t the football program and university leadership.
I just don’t think the beat guys are equipped to handle some of the higher/more serious stuff and quite often they get pipped by the national guys with stuff anyway.
I really only want quality reporting on the team and players, which is why it drives me crazy that practice access is so limited. It’s not the beat media’s fault but part of me hates how comfortable they got (especially during the Covid era) of covering the team via Zoom interviews. I remember one podcast where they chuckled happily about not having to go to campus the following day to cover things.
In general, I like Sampson and O’Malley. I think Prister is fine but a bit of a dinosaur who struggles to keep up and I view Mike Frank as pretty much worthless–either he’s regurgitating the same 3 talking points or offering thoughts on the team written like a 7th grader.
This week, Todd Monken, Georgia’s offensive coordinator who was the architect of a Georgia offense that average 40 points per game the last two years and which won the NC both years, has been hired by the Baltimore Ravens at their offensive coordinator. Monken was the highest paid OC in college football last year at $2.1 million. Georgia was ready to pay him up to $3 mill per year on the renewal of a multi-year contract. The Ravens reportedly will pay him $3-5 million a year in a mulit-year contract. Monken has over thirty years of coaching experience in both college and the NFL. DawgNation reports that Georgia wanted to keep him due to developing one of the top offenses in college football and their ability to attract and develop five stars recruits. As OC for Tampa Bay for four years, Monken oversaw an offense that was third most efficient offense in the NFL.
With the buyout from Utah and not considering the OL coach he wanted to bring along, ND reportedly would have paid a total of $4.9 million for Ludwig. While it might have come down to a bidding war with Georgia and their revenue from athletics from the SEC and the Ravens, at that total price, ND would be competing with Georgia and Baltimore for a much more experienced and accomplished OC. Ludwig’s reported salary offer alone from ND would have rivaled Monken’s salary at Georgia last year. Of course, Monken may have been ready to move back to the NFL.