Your weekly dose of Notre Dame news, opinion, and other stuff.
Top News
Tommy Rees is headed to the Cleveland Browns as their new tight ends coach.
Notre Dame defensive tackle Gabriel Rubio has stepped away from the team to attend to a personal matter.
Jim Harbaugh is leaving Michigan and has been hired as the Los Angeles Chargers new head coach.
The 2024 ACC football schedule is here:
Ken Niumatalolo has been hired as the new San Jose State head coach.
Pete Lembo is the new Buffalo head coach.
Bill O’Brien has been hired as the new offensive coordinator at Ohio State.
Alabama safety Caleb Downs is transferring to Ohio State. Alabama quarterback Julian Sayin has entered the transfer portal and committed to Ohio State, as well.
Alabama left tackle Kadyn Proctor has transferred to Iowa.
Washington quarterback Austin Mack is transferring to Alabama.
Quarterback Will Rogers will not re-enter the portal after transferring from Mississippi State to Washington this off-season.
Arizona has fired athletic director Dave Heeke.
The NCAA is investigating Florida’s recruitment of former verbal and current Arizona State quarterback Jaden Rashada.
Uga X the bulldog has died at 10 years old. He retired after the 2022 season and was replaced by Uga XI.
Uniform of the Week
Recently, I came across this helmet tracker for Oklahoma State during the Mike Gundy era. Did you know that Gundy is joint 2nd for the longest tenured head coach at a FBS school along with Kyle Whittingham at Utah? He’s been with the Cowboys such a long time and witnessed a complete uniform revolution since arriving on campus. Just look at this, 60 different helmet designs across 245 games with Oklahoma State. That’s an average of 3 per season!
People don’t talk enough about the Cowboys being in the same air as Oregon with uniform combination madness. Looking at these helmets it’s difficult not to like all of the Pistol Pete versions. I don’t hate the script Cowboys versions either. It’s difficult to look at all of these options and then settle on their main logo–I don’t hate it but I don’t think it’s worth keeping around. If I’m not mistaken, Oklahoma State wore the script helmet (2nd to last row, 4th from the right) with orange facemask against Notre Dame and I really wish that said 0-1.
Recruiting
Five-star quarterback George MacIntyre (0.9917) is staying in-state with Tennessee.
Defensive lineman Lance Jackson (0.9536) committed to Texas.
Clemson picked up the commitment of defensive end Ari Watford (0.9809) on Wednesday.
Back in the 2024 class, elite receiver Ryan Williams (0.9962) re-committed to Alabama and the top JUCO player in the country wide receiver Chris Marshall committed to Boise State.
YouTube Channel
Norway is crazy for inventing “dodsing” or as the rest of the world has coined it, death diving. According to this week’s research this crazy activity was invented by Norwegian guitar player Erling Bruno Hovden in the summer of 1972. Officially, there is a freestyle and classic style versions of the event. You have to have a screw loose, or perhaps many screws loose, to participate in this insanity.
I’ve never jumped into water from a really high platform. I’ve gone off one of those long diving boards in an Olympic swimming pool and that was plenty enough air for me. The chance of injury jumping crazily from these dodsing levels sounds miserable. I guess in Norway there’s probably an amount of pride that comes from getting your body mangled from jumping?
Tunes
My intention this week was to include a James Brown song. It’s funny and sad to read about his early music career and how strict he was against drugs and alcohol–even firing many band members through the years for their personal use of substances–only for his life to eventually spiral out of control for some of the wildest drug use among all music professionals. I’m not even including a song this week, just adding Brown’s insane 1987 appearance on CNN’s Sonya Live program shortly after an arrest for domestic violence.
This is a pantheon American television interview. I was so happy to find Jordan Peele created a parody video of this interview from 7 years ago. I truly think Peele is one of the best talents we have out there right now. His ability to be so accurate throughout this whacky interview is so damn impressive. The “hello, Ted!” at 2:04 of the videos always cracks me up. Yes, the parody is so well done the times are synched up.
Trivia
Which current NFL stadium has the smallest seating capacity?
The Other Football
A young United States men’s squad lost 1-0 to Slovenia in a recently friendly.
At the Africa Cup of Nations, Equatorial Guinea are through to the knockout stages along with Nigeria, Cape Verde, Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea, Angola, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Namibia, Morocco, South Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Congo. The round of 16 begins this weekend.
Liverpool star winger Mohamed Salah will be out a month after suffering a muscle injury on duty with Egypt and has returned to England for treatment.
In the Asian Cup a handful of countries are through to the knockout round including Tajikistan, UAE, Iraq, Australia, South Korea, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Japan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan with third-place games ready to fill out the rest of the round of 16 in the coming days.
Chelsea crushed Middlesborough 6-1 to reach the EFL Cup Final. Liverpool are also in the final following a 3-2 aggregate win over Fulham.
Athletic Bilbao knocked Barcelona out of the Copa del Rey with a 4-2 win.
American Gio Reyna could be headed to Nottingham Forest or Marseille as Dortmund have agreed to transfer fees with each club.
Manchester City midfielder Kalvin Phillips is headed to West Ham on loan.
TV & Movies
I finally sat down and watched Jackie Brown recently. This was one of the Tarantino movies I hadn’t seen and was curious because I remember the hype and disappointment from when it was released in 1997. I checked out some reviews and the film has mostly excellent scores at places like Rotten Tomatoes. On the site it has a 88% score, which is really high!
I thought the movie was pretty terrible. It’s way too long. The plot isn’t interesting at all and the story takes such a long time to unfold. Of course, Samuel L. Jackson was in his prime for this film and I really had a hard time overlooking all of his hysterical yelling and cursing. It’s just over the top, even for Jackson’s standards. The movie made me remember how beautiful Bridget Fonda was and how she hasn’t been in a movie since The Whole Shebang in 2001.
A Look Back
We had some controversy this past weekend as Ohio State upset Iowa in women’s basketball. The win for the Buckeyes isn’t what grabbed most of the headlines, though. Rather, it was a fan running out on the court and colliding with Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark as the player was leaving the scene that gave us a lot of post-game drama. Channel 4 NBC has a nice quick breakdown of the collision from multiple angles:
However, the best angle is right HERE to watch. Now, running with a cell phone to record yourself as you storm the court is super unsafe and by definition that young woman would be responsible for this mess. That being said…….this looks an awful lot like an intentional flop from Clark. The fan is running in a straight line, while it’s Clark running diagonally into the path of the court stormer. I think the fan takes more damage from the collision, and you can see the fan notices Clark at the last second and her body reacts. Clark should’ve seen the fan coming, doesn’t even make a ton of contact, and then she kind of bounces off dramatically in a very unnatural way–in complete opposite reaction to the fan who falls harder but pops right back up. We’re ruling on a flop here.
18S Paddock Club
Reviewing the 2023 season for each team on the F1 grid…
Williams
Place: 7th/10
Points: 28
Alex Albon: 27 points
Esteban Ocon: 1 point
After a last place finish in 2022 this was a nice bounce-back year for the storied Williams team and a big boost in confidence for the career of Alex Albon. The Thai-British driver will be turning 28 in March and has successfully put the challenging spell at Red Bull behind him for a newly revitalized career.
The rookie season for American driver Logan Sargeant, well, it didn’t go so well. He was served up a goose egg in qualifying from his teammate and managed just 1 point across the entire season. Williams felt like there was enough improvement to justify a contract extension for 2024 though. However, unless major steps are taken this year surely the team will be looking to another young driver in their second seat.
While there’s still a long way to go (Williams finished a whopping 92 points behind 6th place Alpine) to true respectability it feels like things are slowly turning around for the team. Former Mercedes engineer James Vowels came over as new team principal and seems to have Williams headed in the right direction, while the ownership under Dorilton Capital (plus the F1 budget cap) has provided plenty of financial stability.
I’m not sure how much better the team can get in 2024 unless Sargeant makes a huge leap from unquestioned worst driver on the grid to someone capable of putting in a decent result once and a while. If the car is similar to last year, it’ll be surprisingly strong at 4 or 5 tracks and it’ll be so important for the team to bag as many points as possible in those races and not come away with only 2 or 4 points maximum. This feels like a team on the rise–their social media and PR are generally amazing and they are doing a good job building their brand in America–but the next steps may only come when they move on from a failed experiment with their American driver.
Trivia Answer:
FedEx Field (Washington)
Now, this is how we do diving in the U.P. (mostly Finnish population).
https://youtu.be/_TwTZkcRBR4?si=4ZK61EeZ9-6dnmr4
That might be my height limit.
Lots of cliff jumping in old quarries near Bloomington (IN) which was done in the movie Breaking Away. The last death there was 2008. The one Butch and Sundance jumped off of was near Durango (CO). Like the movie the next access out is a ways downstream. Keep your arms close to your body or over your head to prevent rotator cuff injuries.
I remember being so hyped to see Jackie Brown when it first came out and then being disappointed after watching it. If there is one flaw to QT movies, it is that most of them are a bit too long and could use a little bit of trimming
Finally I’m not the only one to think that Jackie Brown was too long and too slow, which made it boring. Speaking of which, Tarantino might be the most overrated director still working.
I might agree with you on that. I haven’t seen Jackie Brown, so I won’t comment on that one. Pulp Fiction is a stone-cold classic, but the others are a mixed bag for me.
i haven’t seen Jackie Brown since it was in the theaters, but i do remember feeling a bit disappointed. At the time i thought i was just because it followed Pulp and some let down was to be expected. i guess i’ll need to give it another shot to know for sure.
Reservoir Dogs is fantastic so is True Romance. Kill Bill, NBK, PF, FDTD all were pretty entertaining as well
I love how Oklahoma State uses that cowboy logo different for all of their sports. I think ND should do the same with the Leprechaun. Why does he always have to be fighting? I want to see him hitting golf balls, doing hurdles, fencing. I would buy so many ND leprechaun t shirts.
Homefield comes through.
I thought that was supposed to be Pat Connaughton
Washington is close to stemming the bleeding from transfers out. A week ago they had no QBs after having eight leave. In addition to Rogers’ commitment, they built some depth with commitments from two ’24 QBs – Demarcus Davis (#17) and Demond Williams (#19) – as well as getting a ’25 QB commit, Dash Beierly (#22) this week. They had lost half of their ’24 class of sixteen commits including three Edge players and two Safeties leaving only Paul Mencke, Jr. Six players from Arizona transferred to UW following Fisch.
Eight former Huskies players transferred to deep pocket programs – three to Alabama including UW’s ’23 QB, Austin Mack, two to Ole Miss, one to A&M, one to Florida, one to Miami and one to Stanford (?). Their top cover CB, Muhammad, Jabbar, is still on the market, visiting Texas for one. What a great rule. The rich programs get richer including the top players themselves from a school that lost their Head Coach.
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke is out after a a university-wide $240 million miscalculation of projected cash on hand came to light with about $35 million this year attributed to athletics.
Mack effectively replaced Sayin who will now compete with Air Noland ’24 at Ohio State and ’23 commit, Lincoln Kleinholtz, who flipped from Washington last year. After Kleinholtz flipped to Ohio State last year, Washington got Mack to re-classify to ’23. Some of those early entrants to Washington and Arizona were with the teams for a week or two before their transfers out.
You don’t think Brian Kelly’s agent put out rumors of being a candidate for Michigan to leverage an extension for more money, do you?
Watch: Kelce brothers share epic Brian Kelly story (Fighting Irish Wire)
One note: the ’23 QB class’s commits/decommits was crazy with twelve of the top rated twenty-one decommiting from verbals at least once especially the last few months of ’22. Ohio State had two recruits decommit before getting Kleinholtz two weeks before the New Year. Alabama signed two QBs, one of whom has now transferred to Pitt who missed out on Minchey. Moore’s and Rashada’s cup of coffee’s at various institutions have been well documented. LSU was almost left standing after trying to land those two.
Georgia, Michigan, Syracuse, Baylor and others took no QBs. Florida got a late commit after Ole Miss stole one from the Gators in June and then poneyed up get Rashada who did not get the money he wanted. Nelson has now left USC. Mack just left Washington this year after the HC changes. A&M poached a commit from Ole Miss.
Sayin’s transfer from Bama to Ohio State means he joins Kleinholz ’23 and Air Noland ’24. The wild west of college free agency without contracts. Rent a QBs.
This is way off topic and kinda worthless, but… albeit not much of an NFL fanboy, after the CFB season is over and the Irish are in the weightroom and the coaches are on the road, I confess I do start following the NFL playoffs. But with an ND slant if possible. So here’s my question, does anyone else not a fan of either team feel kinda torn between Drue Tranquill and Kyle Hamilton/Ronnie Stanley?
In other football news, Deion Sander’s three sons bought him a new home described as a “mansion” near the university valued at $3-10 million. Two are still in college though they do get NIL money. On3’s calculations have Shadeur’s NIL worth at $4.8 million and have posted the list of his deals. On an annual basis, Shadeur’s NIL money is more than all but the top sixteen players drafted in 2023.
When Deion sells his home in Longmont previously listed at almost $4 million, the first $250,000 is tax free since he is single if he has lived there for two years. Sanders bought his home there in early 2023. He listed the house he lived in Canton, Mississippi for $1.5 million.
(Unless I’m missing something about a dwelling being in a parent’s name versus a child’s that ultimately aids the children in the long-run. If so, I retract any/most of what’s below.) How on earth would Deion accept that house and allow his sons to do something like that? As I’m typing this, the banner ad below me is for Restore featuring Deion Sanders. He’s already made plenty as a pro in two sports, plus he’s getting good $$ from CU, plus his other advertising $$. He’s had his opportunities to make and spend money – don’t take that from his teenage children. If true, not a great look for his character.