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

Top News

Notre Dame lost Sedrick Irvin and then quickly added a new running back for the 2023 class as Washington state speedster Jayden Limar (0.9062) committed late last week.

After just turning 29 years old, former Notre Dame star defensive lineman Stephon Tuitt announced his retirement from the NFL. In 8 seasons, all with Pittsburgh, he totaled 246 tackles with 34.5 sacks.

In order to avoid a conflict with a Monday Night Football game, the upcoming Sugar Bowl has moved to New Year’s Eve and will be played at Noon.

Boston College has named Blake James as its next athletic director. He had been the AD at Miami for 9 seasons prior to being let go recently. Another ACC program Louisville is expected to remove the interim tag from Josh Heird for their athletic director position.

Coming of a National Championship, reports are that Georgia is preparing a contract extension for head coach Kirby Smart that’ll make him in the running as the top paid coach in the game.

The SEC may be moving the intraconference transfer notification deadline from February 1st to May 1st.

Former Minnesota and NFL running back Marion Barber was found dead in his Frisco, Texas apartment on Wednesday.

There are business rumors that EA Sports is seeking a sale or merger of their company with NBC and Disney involved in a possible deal. This is something to keep in mind with the return of the NCAA Football video game scheduled for next year.

Uniform of the Week

I was looking at some FCS schools for this week’s Rambler and came across Georgetown. I should probably pay more attention to FCS schools but if you told me Georgetown didn’t play football I likely would’ve agreed that made sense. A quick bit of research shows that the Hoyas moved up to FCS from D-III back in 1993 and currently reside in the Patriot League. They aren’t very good traditionally, again which makes sense to me.

I fully expected to see a full gray uniform in their arsenal mimicking their awesome basketball look and came away deeply disappointed. It looks like they do use gray pants on the road but it’s with a white jersey and helmet. I do love the Jack the Bulldog logo on the helmets and while pant script is usually frowned upon here, you can do worse than their “Hoya Saxa” cheer. I still feel disappointed and feel like Georgetown has far more promise than this and should avoid looking like the FCS version of Rice.

Recruiting

Louisville scored a huge commitment as California wide receiver DeAndre Moore, Jr. (0.9759) committed to the Cardinals.

Watch out for Stanford who picked up their 5th verbal commitment of 2023 and their highest-rated yet as corner Jshawn Frausto-Ramos (0.9071) is headed to the Farm.

Bishop Gorman safety Kido Decambra (0.9062) committed to Oregon.

Mater Dei linebacker Tre Edwards (0.9215) is staying local and will attend UCLA.

Wake Forest quarterback Billy Edwards has transferred to Maryland.

YouTube Channel

Can we please stand up for the goodness that is Boston Market? It’s up there with Long John Silver’s as favorite places of mine that you don’t see around very much any more (this YouTube channel also did a video on LJS, too). My first experience with Boston Market came in North Andover, Massachusetts just down the road from Merrimack College where we stopped several times across 2 consecutive summers to the area. According to this video, I literally first visited right when Boston Market peaked and then they’d file for bankruptcy shortly thereafter in October 1998. A few popped up in my neighborhood and we were eating the heck out of the chicken, mashed potatoes, and the amazing corn bread.

I used to connect from two highways through a busy part of town that conveniently had a Boston Market right before I got back on to get home and it was right on the route we’d pass to go to most our shopping areas, too. It was awesome. About 3 years ago, this BM location suddenly disappeared. Tears were shed. Now, there’s only 1 remaining location in all of metro Buffalo, and folks, we are holding on for dear life. The story of how and why they closed so many stores makes sense from a business perspective. My preferred location was in a prime spot in a coveted piece of real estate that is now a Tim Horton’s café. I’m guessing the lease was just too much money to keep surviving.

Tunes

The first song I can consciously remember liking when I was 4 years old was “Take the Long Way Home” by Supertramp off their album Breakfast in America which came out a little under 3 years after I was born. It must have been that loud and hard-to-forget harmonica intro or something. I’d say “Give a Little Bit” is one of my most hated songs in history so all of the band’s best stuff in my opinion is mostly confined to Breakfast and Crime of the Century from 1974. These are 2 titanic albums with a combined 8 mega-hits that define their career.

“School” opens up that Crime of the Century album. In my teen’s I caught on to this song which was played sparingly by the local classic rock station. Again, a mega harmonica intro. This was during the era of using cassettes to tape songs to listen to later and I remember having my radio on in my bedroom when this came on, stumbling across the room to hit record, and for the next few years having this tape with the first 15 seconds of “School” missing, but I loved it. What a great jam.

Trivia

Which Notre Dame quarterback had the single-game highest passer rating of the Brian Kelly era and against which team and year?

The Other Football

Despite a +1.27 xG advantage on Saturday, we saw Liverpool come up short 1-0 to Real Madrid in the Champions League Final. This was Madrid’s 14th Champions League title, it must be nice. Once in the running for a historic quadruple, Liverpool has to settle for only winning the FA Cup and EFL Cup. Tough life out there for the Reds.

Nottingham Forest is coming back to the Premier League following a 1-0 win over Huddersfield Town in the EFL Championship Playoff Final. Forest will be joined by Fulham and Bournemouth being promoted while Burnley, Watford, and Norwich City are going down.

In a feel good sports story, Ukraine defeated Scotland 3-1 on Wednesday night to advance to the playoff final against Wales this Sunday to determine who will fill the last Group B spot in the World Cup with the United States, England, and Iran.

The CONMEBOL-UEFA Cup of Champions was re-launched this year and dubbed the “Finalissima” or “Grand Finale” in Italian as Argentina got passed Italy 3-0 in a packed Wembley Stadium.

After a 2 month break, the U.S. Men’s team defeated Morocco 3-0 in a friendly in Cincinnati. The team faces Uruguay on Sunday in another friendly before opening up the Nation’s League against Grenada next Friday.

The UEFA Nation’s League kicked off on June 1st as Poland beat Wales 2-1 and Spain vs. Czech Republic keeps things going with a match today.

Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger has joined Real Madrid on a free transfer.

Long-time Juventus defender Giorgio Chiellini will be turning 38 this summer and is set to sign a new deal with LAFC over here in the MLS. That club currently leads the league with 29 points in 14 games so far.

Streaming

Who among us plays chess? Not me! I briefly recall attempting to learn the game on a late 1990’s Hewlett-Packard when chess came installed to play against the computer. I think the game may have provided suggestions for best moves but in the early days of the internet and without any helpful guide to learn the game I switched to much more fun games like Ski Free. Who remembers Ski Free?

The 2020 miniseries The Queen’s Gambit was a really excellent show and after doing some research chess.com saw a 700% increase in the amount of people joining their site in the 4 months after the show debuted on Netflix. I’m sure that’s receded greatly since but it’s quite a boom. There was talk about bringing a second season of the show but it doesn’t look like it’ll be coming at all. Primarily because main actress Anya Taylor-Joy’s stock is skyrocketing and she has too many projects, including the upcoming Mad Max prequel Furiosa where she’ll play the title character.

A Look Back

I think about this game a lot. In the aftermath of Alabama starting 11-0 they’d come off the embarrassment of the “Kick Six” loss to Auburn in the Iron Bowl and face Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. Incredibly, the Tide were 17.5-point favorites in this game. At the time, it made a lot of sense. We saw this Oklahoma team in South Bend and they weren’t that good. At the end of the year, the Sooners would be just 31st in the FEI ranking and Alabama finished 2nd nationally. This was one of the more high profile games where Alabama got the SEC “didn’t want to be there or care about the game” treatment. It was also a big night for quarterback Trevor Knight suddenly becoming a thing as a future superstar.

Knight played well (32 of 44 for 348 yards, 4 TD, 1 INT) against the Tide and went into 2014 as a top 10 Heisman favorite. Unfortunately, Knight played pretty poorly (5th in Big 12 passer rating in an extremely down season for quarterback play in the conference) and eventually lost his job in 2015 to a fellow named Baker Mayfield. Turnovers imploded Alabama in this Sugar Bowl. They gained 516 yards at just a tick under 8 yards per play but ended up -4 in turnover margin.

18S Paddock Club

It was all there for the taking for Charles Leclerc to win his first Monaco Grand Prix. During qualifying, the Ferrari driver took pole with his penultimate hot lap by almost 2.5 tenths over teammate Carlos Sainz before a late Sergio Perez shunt stopped the final laps for the top of the grid. Leclerc’s aborted lap was even faster than his pole time so expectations were sky this past Sunday.

On race day, the start was delayed due to poor weather and then the session was red flagged after a formation lap due to even heavier rain. About an hour after the scheduled start, the show got going with a standing start behind the Safety Car.

With the 2 Ferrari’s and 2 Red Bull’s at the top all on wet tires, Perez was the first to pit for intermediates on lap 17 and dropped down to 5th place for 1 lap before Lando Norris in his McLaren also took to the pits. Another lap later, both Leclerc and Verstappen switched to inters which vaulted Sainz up to 1st place. Crucially, the undercut for Perez worked as he’d be about 5 seconds ahead of Leclerc when the Ferrari driver exited the pit lane.

At the end of lap 21–with the Perez/Leclerc/Verstappen trio on inters quickly eating up his lead–Ferrari brought Sainz in for hard tires, but fumbled their strategy even worse with a double-stack to also bring Leclerc back in for hard tires after just 2 laps on the inters! As Leclerc came to the pit entrance his engineer says, “And box now. Box. Box now for hard.” Four seconds later after Leclerc has turned into the pits his engineer says, “Stay out, stay out, stay out” as the driver loses his mind as his chances for 1st place quickly evaporated.

Red Bull countered with an immediate overcut 1 lap later and it paid off. Both Perez and Verstappen switched to hard tires with a much smoother double stack and–thanks to a controversial Latifi in his Williams holding up Sainz under blue flags–Perez would come out ahead of Sainz for 1st place and Verstappen came out ahead of Leclerc for 3rd place. A red flag came out several laps later after Mick Schumacher crashed and the only remaining drama was Red Bull switching to medium tires for the re-start versus Ferrari staying on hard tires. It just worked out as the race (up against the 2-hour window) only lasted to lap 64 instead of 77 with the Mexican Perez taking his 3rd career victory.

After his win, Red Bull announced a Perez contract extension through 2024.

These past 2 races in Spain and Monaco were supposed to be Ferrari strongholds and yet Red Bull has picked up twice as many points with both race victories. Elsewhere on the grid, George Russell continues his streak of finishing in the top 5, Lando Norris finished 6th with the fastest lap, while Pierre Gasly’s charge from the lower quarter of the grid after a shambolic qualifying strategy came up just short of points in 11th place.

Formula 1 is off this week and will return to Baku, Azerbaijan on June 12th.

F1 Fantasy: We have a tie for Monaco as Marko and Michael B. both finished atop the standings with 195 points.

Trivia Answer:

Ian Book, 2019, Bowling Green, 272.12 passer rating on 16/20 for 261 yards, 5 TD and no picks.