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

3 News Stories

#1) The way news is consumed in the Notre Dame football orbit tends to come in one of two ways. The first is a relatively quick and easy “Woj bomb” style of breaking news from a national reporter. The other is a slower process carefully managed by the local beat media. So it appears we’ve seen a combination example play out as Notre Dame looks to hire a new defensive coordinator in the aftermath of Al Golden going back to the Cincinnati Bengals. The name of Chris Ash was floated immediately by the local crew after Golden’s departure and national reporter Pete Thamel swooped in on Wednesday with the breaking news:

A decade ago Ash was looking like a highly promising name after being defensive coordinator at Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Ohio State. The last several years have been less kind with a disastrous tenure as Rutgers head coach (8-32 overall) before landing as an analyst at Texas then named DC for the Horns in Tom Herman’s final season in Austin.

Since then, Ash has been hanging around the NFL first as a safeties coach in Jacksonville, then defensive backs coach in Las Vegas, before joining the Jaguars again in 2024 as a scout. Ash isn’t exactly at a peak career wise which leads me to believe A) Freeman must like several things about him and B) a possible move in this direction has been in the works for a while. Going with Ash only 6 days after losing Golden is working at lightspeed for Notre Dame’s HR department.

#2) We can buckle up for some different and interesting decisions and tactics from Bill Belichick’s return to coaching at North Carolina of all places. A reminder that Belichick will be turning 73 in a few months and becomes the oldest head coach in FBS after replacing the previously oldest coach at the same school in Mack Brown. And yes, Belichick brought his son Stephen with him to be defensive coordinator in Chapel Hill. I’ll also remind everyone Belichick continues to date a 24 year old who was previously in a relationship with a 68 year old prior to linking up with The Hoodie. If you do the math, he took the New England Patriots job before his girlfriend was born.

This could get very weird.

What isn’t so weird is Belichick taking the opportunity to switch North Carolina’s football field back to natural grass. Which begs the question, wait, North Carolina’s field wasn’t natural grass? No, actually! They switched to turf back in 2019. Notre Dame has played inside Kenan Stadium twice since then and I cannot say with any certainty I knew they had been playing on turf. Well, no more!

#3) How good was this debut season from Leonard Moore? He would’ve been the highest rated corner coming back for 2025 in the entire country if Duke’s Chandler Rivers hadn’t decided to return for his senior season to try and play his way into a top 50 prospect.

Moore had one of the best freshman seasons in Notre Dame history. 

I went back to last year’s 2024 winter depth chart preview–no mention of Moore. Seven months later I went and looked back at the depth chart preview right before the season–no mention of Moore. His rise is still confounding to me.

Hopefully this upcoming draft will see Benjamin Morrison as the highest selected Irish corner since Bobby Taylor (50th overall, 1995). With this debut from Moore, it makes you wonder if he can be the next first round cornerback from Notre Dame since Jeff Burris in 1994. Over a 30 year wait, we’d be due!

Recruiting Dip

We’re turning our attention to the 2026 class and there’s a player in Notre Dame’s sights named Tank King that we have to 100% sign at all costs with this awesome name. He’s the no. 12 linebacker in the class, comfortably a top 200 recruit, and hails from Memorial High School in Port Arthur, Texas near the Louisiana border. He’s visited Notre Dame a couple times already, some think the Irish lead. Yes please.

In other awesome linebacker name news, Notre Dame may also lead for Xavier (Cincinnati) athlete Ja’Kobe “Kobe” Clapper.

The race to fill Chad Bowden’s GM position for Notre Dame recruiting may be over soon as reports have the Irish circling around James Blanchard from Texas Tech. His resume is pretty solid. He’s operated his own recruiting service in Texas for over a decade, was the director of recruiting at Baylor for a year, a scout for the Carolina Panthers for 1 year, then hopped back to Baylor as assistant AD for player personnel for yet one more season before serving as Texas Tech’s GM for the last 2 years.

We have our first post-Bowden commit of the year as Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania offensive tackle Tyler Merrill gave his verbal to the Irish on Thursday afternoon.

He’s a big boy, listed north of 330 pounds on the recruiting sites. Is he a tackle? Is he a guard? We’ll figure it out. As the no. 61 overall prospect in the 247 Composite, Merrill immediately becomes the highest rated recruit for Notre Dame in the 2026 class.

Uniform of the Week

I was thinking about a very specific type of college football uniform look. That is, a school who only looks like their normal self in one specific set of uniforms. Perhaps Arizona State tops the list of those teams? Over the last 10-15 years the Sun Devils have cycled through a lot of different looks. I noticed over their last 4 games this past season they did revert back to their traditional yellow “Sparky” helmets. Was it the cause of their success? I’d argue, yes.

Sparky forever, IMO. 

In the post-season, ASU wore their traditional yellow-maroon-yellow uniforms and this is quintessential Sun Devils. Nothing else that they wear (even this same look with their throwback white uniforms) really screams Arizona State to me. I bet we’ll see Kenny Dillingham opting for these maroon throwbacks a lot more in the future.

TV & Movies

I want to state that I love the movie Tombstone from 1993 without question. However, I recently watched the Netflix TV series Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, and umm this story was way, way more complicated than depicted in the 1993 film. The series is 6 episodes in total, each roughly around 45 minutes long. They could’ve edited it down to at least 5 episodes if they cut out the dramatic History Channel-esque reenactments that linger on people’s faces unnecessarily long.

I still enjoyed the film much more but looking at how they handled the story it was really kind of silly compared to the real-life events. Robbing the coaches from Wells Fargo, Wyatt Earp sleeping with the sheriff’s girlfriend, the Cowboys antics disrupting the silver trade, President Chester Arthur and financier J.P. Morgan getting involved with the trouble from European backers, and the Confederacy aftermath from the Civil War–how did they not weave some of this into the movie!??

Tunes

This is maybe the 3rd time Billie Eilish has made the Rambler and I continue to be amazed at her output and career so far. She just turned 23! This past summer, we featured a song “Lunch” that was one of the first singles from her May release of her 4th album Hit Me Hard and Soft. Eilish is performing at this Sunday’s Grammy Awards and is nominated for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Dance Pop Recording, in addition to Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with the Charli XCX song “Guess” as well.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to slight Beyonce again because…11 Grammy nominations!?? Three more than anyone from this 2024 year in music? I just don’t think her music is that good or even as relevant as someone like Eilish. It’s a conspiracy, clearly. Anyway, “Birds of a Feather” is still no. 6 on the Hot 100 right now despite being on the charts for 36 weeks. Zero songs remain for Beyonce on that list, although to be fair her latest album dropped 10 months ago.