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

3 News Stories

#1 Why Doesn’t This Happen More Often?

NC State (or should I say the NCAA) suspended Teddy Hoffmann for a positive PED test recently. This got me thinking, is it kind of shocking that we don’t see more of these suspensions in college football? It virtually never happens. Can anyone remember the last Notre Dame player to be popped for something like this?

I’m curious to learn more. In the cycling world with the GPS passport it’s gotten much more difficult to use banned substances and I’m guessing there’s nothing like this at the FBS level of football. Have the schools effectively bypassed these tests and keep things under wraps when something goes wrong?

Why is a skinny wide receiver from NC State a random guy getting popped for PED’s in March out of nowhere? I have so many questions.

#2 Bird Rights

The Big Ten is at it again. According to a recent report in the Sports Business Journal, the league is floating an idea for school’s to go over the salary cap in order to sign, and keep, their own players. Here’s the relevant text from the article:

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the conversations told Sports Business Journal that Big Ten athletic directors and Commissioner Tony Petitti are promoting a carve-out to let schools who have opted into the House settlement to spend beyond the stipulated revenue sharing cap to maintain their rosters.

The exact machinations of the proposed retention caveat are still to be determined, but the idea would be to allow schools to go a certain percentage or flat rate over the $20.5 million revenue sharing cap, sources said.

The hope is the change would operate similarly to how Bird rights function in the NBA, allowing teams to exceed the cap in order to re-sign their own players.

Those supporting the initiative imply that, in practice, it would help curb the creative accounting measures and shuffling of monies schools are currently employing to ensure deals get through the College Sports Commission’s clearinghouse, along with potentially slowing the persistent player movement plaguing college sports.

Will this actually help curb the creative accounting measures or is this basically yet another way for school’s to leave the door open to spend more money on players? Maybe this makes sense, but I also think about how the current salary cap is causing chaos, we haven’t figured that out yet, and now we’re just adding more difficult things to figure out on top of it.

#3 Leinart Stands His Ground

On a recent podcast, former USC quarterback Matt Leinart commented that in the past the Trojans administration has asked him to un-retire his no. 11 jersey so that current players can wear it. To his credit, he told them succinctly:

I said, ‘absolutely f—ing not.’ I am never going to unretire for some random dude, who by the way, now could wear No. 11 and transfer after a year.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know USC retired jersey numbers before seeing this story in the news this week. They do it for their Heisman winners, in fact. If Notre Dame did that, we’d have the following numbers gone:

#5 Paul Hornung
#7 John Huarte
#14 Johnny Lattner
#32 Johnny Lujack
#48 Angelo Bertelli
#81 Tim Brown
#82 Leon Hart

What number would’ve Everett Golson had worn at Notre Dame then?

Uniform of the Week

Right after last week’s Rambler was published the new (heavily leaked) Tennessee Titans uniforms were officially unveiled. I have put my finest hater hat on and have been ready for this moment to shine. Yes, in a vacuum these uniforms are fine. Maybe even nice. I don’t have many other good things to say, though.

#1 Going full Oilers re-brand is bad. It’s not okay, and the franchise should be ashamed.

#2 The dark blue, baby blue with a splash of red and silver was a really unique color scheme! I don’t like giving that up for Oilers stolen valor. And why no alternate uniform??

#3 These new uniforms feel too simple. Normally this is the exact opposite for new NFL uniforms! But, I think once the Oilers effect wears off these uniforms are going to get dragged more and more for being too dull.

You mean to tell me you couldn’t do something different?

#4 I never liked the flaming shield logo from the past helmets, still this new logo feels so uninspired. The bevel is gone and it’s such a flat and basic logo. Maybe it’ll grow on me over time, we’ll see. It looks like something you’d see at a Texas high school which isn’t helping the connection to stealing Houston’s identity. They also created the wrong decals for the helmets that is already being corrected. The stars on the bottom are supposed to be turned inwards to mimic the Tennessee state flag.

#5 The guitar string lines are a nice touch, fair play to the organization for incorporating that in a way that looks sharp up close and won’t be super visible or intrusive from far away.

#6 They have navy blue within the stripes and there’s a clean shot of the helmet bumper script, Nike logos, and neck tag in navy blue too. So it’s still a part of the team colors. Maybe use it a little more? I also think there needs to be more red, too. Especially with the all-white uniform you can see the washed out look. Surprisingly, they didn’t go with red facemasks like the old Oilers uniforms. That would’ve helped a lot and it’s weird because they used red facemasks with the recent Oilers throwbacks in Tennessee.

#7 Powder blue has become so popular in sports, especially football, that this switch feels a few years too late for fashion. I bet within 5 years they bring some changes to this look.

Media

We’re getting closer to finding out who the next James Bond will be. With Amazon MGM now under control of the rights there is a producer and writer working on the next installment of the series. The last Bond movie No Time to Die came out back in 2021. By the time the next movie gets made it’ll be the longest stretch in between Bond films since the series hit the big screen back in 1962.

Who is going to be the next Bond then? Oddsmakers have tapped either Callum Turner or Jacobi Elordi. The latter actor, by orders of magnitude is more popular and definitely one of the more “it” celebrities in entertainment right now. But, he’s also just 28 years old and probably too young, I think? Maybe a really young Bond is what the series needs? It does seem like it’ll be Turner, though. I’m ready for a change as the dark and gritty Daniel Craig-led James Bond wasn’t my thing.

Tunes

I was thinking of the best guitar openings in music history. Not necessarily the best riff but more of the best sound. Nirvana’s “In Bloom” sprang to mind for me. There may be no more thoroughly researched album on Wikipedia than Nirvana’s Nevermind, it has 396 citations! It’s been said a million times but it’s crazy to think this album came out in late 1991 and how well it continued to sell throughout the entire decade. Opening things up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “In Bloom”, and “Come As You Are” was a real cannon shot of a start to a new grunge era.

If you’d like to feel old, Nirvana pretending to film this music video in 1964 would be like a band today filming their own video from 1999. We’re now way further away from the release of Nevermind than Nevermind was from the early 1960’s Ed Sullivan Show. Yikes. Another way I look at this often is that the rock pioneers of the 1960’s were closer to the pre-World War II granny music on gramophone than we are today from the start of the grunge music era.

One More Thing

The age-old internet argument: Do you shower at night or in the morning? For me, I do both.

I must have a 21 to 22 year streak of showering every single morning before going to work. But, 95% of the time this morning shower is not a full shower. The vast majority of nights are when I’ll do a full shower, and if I’ve worked out or sweat a lot it’s an automatic evening shower. When that happens, the morning is shower is a quick one to get the hair wet, wash my face, and wake up. My hair is thicker and when I wake up in the morning it’s a mess of a situation to try and comb my hair without a shower. I also don’t feel awake enough if I just roll out of bed and into work without a shower.

If it’s a non-work day or the weekend, I may not shower in the morning if I don’t have anything to do. If I’m chilling at home, I usually won’t shower right away in the morning. If I end up showering around lunch time or a little later, I won’t shower at night unless I’ve worked out and gotten all sweaty. Especially in the winter, I won’t shower at 9 PM if I showered at 11:30 AM and didn’t really do much besides chill at home.

Otherwise, two showers per day.