Your weekly dose of Notre Dame news, opinion, and other stuff.
Top News
Notre Dame has announced the hiring of Al Golden as the new defensive coordinator following the end of the Cincinnati Bengals season. The Irish have also made the hiring of tight ends coach Gerad Parker official. You can read Brendan’s recap of the new staff HERE.
Ben Skowronek had 2 catches for 12 yards on 5 targets with a drop/interception in the Super Bowl but comes away with a ring following his rookie season.
According to a report, NBC is seriously interested in obtaining the Big Ten rights. It’s expected that NBC, CBS (remember they’re losing the SEC rights), Fox, and ESPN will all bid for the Big Ten which means $$$ is coming the conference’s way.
Jim Harbaugh’s deal at Michigan was extended one year through 2026.
Dave Aranda received a healthy contract extension from Baylor through the 2029 season.
Cincinnati has given head coach Luke Fickell a new $5 million per year deal through 2028 and upped his assistant salary pool to $5.2 million per season.
After reaching some sort of vague agreement/partnership/understanding the Pac-12 and Big Ten are now backing off the idea of switching to 8 conference games for football.
Marshall, Old Dominion, and Southern Miss are moving up their timeline by a year and switching from Conference USA to the Sun Belt at the end of this current school year. The Conference USA recently released their schedule including those teams, so this could get spicy!
Uniform of the Week
Not that we need more reasons to start hating Michigan even more. But, here’s another—Jim Harbaugh has absolutely butchered their look since becoming coach. Their program started making big changes back in 2011 introducing some alternate uniforms, and later blue pants, but they were only worn very rarely. Harbaugh hasn’t brought any wacky one-off jerseys but rest assured he’s ruined things more completely.
He’s introduced white pants and the team just loves going with a monochromatic look these days. That’s even included bringing a maize jersey for the appalling all-maize look above. Take their last 3 games in 2021. They went all-blue against Ohio State, blue pants with their road uniforms in the Big Ten Championship, then back to the all-blue in the playoffs. They deserved to get blown out by Georgia, it’s amazing to me that the wouldn’t go with a traditional look. Also, Harbaugh has introduced an absolutely insane amount of helmets stickers that should land him in jail. What a damn weirdo.
Recruiting
Linebacker prospect Preston Zinter (0.8968) committed to Notre Dame last Friday afternoon. You can read our commit post on him HERE.
Findlay, Ohio offensive lineman Luke Montgomery (0.9776) is staying in-state after giving a verbal to Ohio State.
Top 200 player Brenden Jordan (0.9271) is a safety prospect who gave a verbal to Texas Tech.
Local defensive end Quincy Rhodes (0.9000) is staying home and committed to Arkansas.
Arizona State quarterback Jayden Daniels announced his intention to transfer yesterday. In 29 games with the Sun Devils, he’s thrown for 6,025 yards with 32 touchdowns and 13 interceptions, plus rushed for 1,288 yards and 13 more scores.
Edge rusher Khari Coleman is leaving TCU after a huge 2020 freshman season with 15 tackles for loss but was battling injuries all last year.
Linebacker Mitchell Agude finished 3rd on UCLA’s team with 6.5 tackles for loss last year and is in the Transfer Portal.
Redshirt freshman corner Daryl Porter started at West Virginia in 2021 and is transferring.
YouTube Channel
Big ships are quite literally awesome. Every once and a while when I’m visiting my parents I’ll see an enormous freight ship hauling grain or whatever coming down the Niagara River and entering the tiny Black Rock Canal on its way to Lake Erie. Every time I see one my brain is like, “It’s not gonna fit, it’s not gonna fit, it’s not gonna fit.” On my honeymoon as we were being driven from the airport to the resort in St. Lucia we briefly passed the tiny little port where cruise ships come and it was shocking to see their size that up close on such a tiny island. It looked like THIS.
After the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal I was doing some Google research on these container ships and their size. I feel like the weight it can carry is hard to grasp, in this case 220,940 tons or nearly 442 million pounds. Yeah, that’s heavy! But it’s the amount containers that blows my mind. The biggest cargo ships in the world can carry over 20,000 containers. It’s wild that this type of shipping basically wasn’t a thing until the Vietnam War and if you notice in the Vox video, a place like Walmart imported 700,000 of these containers in 2020 alone. Somewhere, there are people unloading nearly 2,000 containers per day just for one company.
Tunes
We’re back on the grunge scene again. First off, I enjoy the myriad of people out there who mainly publish reaction videos to songs. Below is one of my favorite guys to do it and in this video he’s listening to Candlebox’ 1993 hit song “Far Behind.” Full disclosure, I don’t think Candlebox was very good but this debut album with them standing in a field of flowers is painfully mid-1990’s nostalgia for me.
However, I have to put “Far Behind” in the pantheon of greatest sounding records of all-time. The production and sound of the vocals, guitar, and drums (the bass isn’t busy and doesn’t get in the way thankfully) is so damn good. Also, this is one of my favorite guitar solos from this era. This song is one of my favorites to absolutely crank the volume up in my car.
Trivia
Who was the last non-quarterback to throw a touchdown pass for Notre Dame?
The Other Football
The Champions League Round of 16 knockout phase began this week highlighted by PSG’s 1-0 win over Real Madrid thanks to Kylian Mbappe’s last-minute winner. Liverpool and Man City took strong leads in their first legs while Bayern Munich and Red Bull Salzburg drew 1-1.
Ronaldo’s longest goal drought in over a decade ended in Man United’s 2-0 win over Brighton. The Red Devils moved into 4th place in the EPL with the victory.
The new FIFA World Rankings are out and the United States men’s team has fallen 2 spots to 13th. Canada is now at its highest-ever position in 33rd in the world. Rivals Mexico are just ahead of America in 12th place. Your top 5 in the world currently include Belgium, Brazil, France, Argentina, and England. Italy must be furious.
Gareth Bale is set to leave Real Madrid at the end of his contract this summer. A return to Spurs is rumored.
Streaming
The Coen brothers nailed this anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs released back in 2018. I walked into this streaming on Netflix about 18 months ago and would really recommend anyone take the time to watch it. The whole thing runs just over 2 hours but there are 6 stories.
The first 5 stories are all excellent, the last maybe is one you could skip. The 5th story “The Girl Who Got Rattled” still sticks with me today. Seriously, the Cohen brothers are amazing. I wish more things like this were released on the streaming services.
A Look Back
The Fenway game. What are your first memories of this one? For me it’s that Fenway didn’t look very cool on television and the poor lighting affected what should’ve been way cooler looking green uniforms. Two, at the time we weren’t thinking much of that C.J. Prosise injury but man did that really end up stinging for the rest of the season as it was his last carry ever for the Irish.
Lastly, the sheer frustration of not pulling away is the biggest memory for me. If this game was played 10 times Notre Dame wins by 20+ in about 8 or maybe 9 of those games. It was like the Irish couldn’t stop shooting themselves in the foot, Boston College literally made like 2 plays, and all of a sudden there’s an onside kick for a possible massive upset loss.
18S Paddock Club
McLaren unveiled their new car late last Friday, although it was featuring several missing items including no tunnel strakes and covered floor. They switched to a slightly darker matte papaya (possibly reflective under lights!?) and considerably lightened the blue in a nod to last year’s immensely popular throwback Gulf livery. Black trim is heavily added (including the horizontal strip for sponsors) while nicotine patch company Velo is on the sidepods and front wing.
Their nose and front wing isn’t too dissimilar from the Aston Martin car although the wing sits much lower to the ground. As rumored, they have switched to a pullrod front suspension–and more surprising–a pushrod rear suspension.
The McLaren MCL36
The sidepods are fairly narrow with larger intakes but the body aggressively narrows past the cockpit leaving a large area of the floor visible, although the end of the bodywork tail is quite wide for cooling. It seems this car will have many changes once testing begins, especially along the floor. There are some interesting tidbits (vanes on the halo, no vertical mount on the curvy mirrors) although the DRS doesn’t look fully operational and McLaren were careful not to show any good shots of the rear of the car.
AlphaTauri unveiled a digital rendered car on Valentine’s Day featuring a slightly altered FIA model with the front and rear wings, suspension, floor, and tunneling. The livery is tweaked to feature a white engine cover and bull while the team name is much larger running across the sidepods. Both wings and the halo are now white instead of blue, while shipping container company Flex Box is featured on the outside of the front wing endplates and software company Epicore featured on the inside of the plates.
The AlphaTauri AT03 livery.
However, the main chassis does look like Alpha’s own design with box-like inlets leading to very aggressive and sweeping sidepods angling towards the floor with reclined radiators. The rear of the body leaves a pretty wide opening for cooling.
Williams unveiled a show car with their updated livery on Tuesday morning only about an hour later to have a shakedown with their real car at Silverstone. The livery has increased last year’s three shades of blue now covering nearly the entire car, while red trim has replaced the yellow from 2021. Besides the new Duracell deal, the ad placements are essentially the same.
The Williams FW44.
The real car features a round finger-like nose with a center loaded wing in the middle and pushrod suspension in the front combined with pullrod in the rear. They’ve adopted centerline cooling with a tight cannon exit with the inlets being very large but the sidepods–and the car as a whole-looks to be packaged incredibly tightly as they sweep down and away very aggressively. You can even notice where Williams wrapped the car in black vinyl to hide the rear and floor. Also, check out the single pylon connected to the rear wing, similar to McLaren.
Ferrari unveiled their car on Thursday morning to much fanfare. Celebrating the 75th anniversary of their first production car it features the removal of Mission Winnow sponsorship, fully black wings, with logistics company Ceva, Spanish bank Santander, software company Snapdragon, and blockchain company Velas are new sponsors getting prominent signage on the car. The red is a bit darker than 2021, although the fade to a darker color at the back is gone completely but the black halo remains.
The Ferrari F1-75.
Despite rumors stating otherwise, Ferrari has kept the pushrod front and pullrod rear suspension. The wings and floor look to be purposefully basic before testing. The nose is extremely slender finishing into an almost fountain pen-like tip. A triangular roll hoop with side fins runs down to a narrow cannon cooling exit but it’s the sidepods that has everyone talking. They feature very wide inlets with a wide sidepod, and a concave top surface with many cooling gills.
Alfa Romeo wasn’t supposed to unveil their new livery until after next weekend’s first set of testing in Barcelona but pictures of their new car in a special camouflaged livery were taken on Tuesday during a shakedown on the Fiorano track.
Alfa Romeo C42 test livery.
The car features a very unloaded front wing at the outermost section and a drooped main plane making room for the wedged nose. There are practically non-existent brake ducts although the spec wheel deflectors have been pushed a bit off the wheel. With pushrod front and rear suspension, the car features large cooling inlets and very high-waisted sidepods with cooling gills. Plus, a very detailed floor with an edge wing sticking up near the back.
Trivia Answer:
Wide receiver John Goodman vs. Western Michigan on 10/16/10.
Does the fake field goal against virginia count? ( or was that kizer who served as the holder on that)
The fenway game was like a microcosm of pre 2017 kelly. sloppy coaching, never putting a team away, ridiculous turnovers. Look at how many 20 point wins they had over power 5 teams from 2017-2021 and that team had like 1. coaching sucked, situational football sucked, and they were so talented
That was indeed Kizer on the fake field goal at UVA. Funnily enough, it was his first career TD pass. More people remember his second.
I looked it up. It’s been quite some time.
To be fair ,someone should have caught on to the answer by now
My guess was Torii Hunter, I remember he had a few pass attempts but I didn’t remember that he had ever hit on a TD, so I didn’t think that was right.
With the advent in popularity of the Philly Special play it is kinda surprising that Ian Book never caught a pass from Avery Davis. On paper that seems like it could have worked. A bit of a surprise that Davis has 0 career pass attempts.
Looking back, in fact, the last non-QB to throw the ball for Notre Dame was Cole Kmet in 2017, and even that was just once. Tommy needs to dial one up at the Horseshoe!
I was thinking of Arnaz Battle (when he played WR).
there’s a hint there.
An answer to what? I think we all remember Kizer’s famous TD to Fuller to win the game.
“fair” “caught” = John Goodman. Which I understood, but the answer was already flat out given in the article.
Right, the answer is in the article. That’s why I was confused by the questioning in the comments. Maybe he just missed that part. It happens.
Yeah I read the answer in the article but I was trying to think of something else. And frankly the fake fg is a far more interesting conversation topic then john goodman vs western michigan. Don’t remember much from that game
I guess I lost my focus with the Formula 1 stuff and missed seeing the answer.
Kelly should have been fired as soon as he brought BVG on staff.
Coens’ “Meal Ticket” stuck with me for a while. Gutting.
Yeah, it’s a tough watch. But amazing film.
Both “The Girl Who Got Rattled” and “Meal Ticket” are great stories that I just can’t forget. Well worth watching. But, the Coen Brothers are usually well worth watching.
I was in high school when that Candlebox album came out, and I really liked it. It kind of lost its luster until Eastbound & Down. One of the funniest scenes in all of TV, and he carried through with it for the entire song.
Also, am I wrong thinking the phrase is “once in a while”? Have I been saying it wrong my whole life?
Dear lord, man. Put a content warning up if you’re going to post something obscene.
My kids were in the room when I opened the article and that Michigan picture came up.
Well, it’s time that they were exposed to how awful the world can be.
I enjoy Jamal’s song reviews as well. I do “music education” with my kids (12 and 10) to at least introduce them to artists that they will (hopefully) one day remember as they refine their tastes. The kids have enough patience to stick it out for a song or two but it usually ends up with me doing a solo hour-long deep dive into musical nostalgia and wondering whatever happened to Johnette Napolitano. (Heal It Up). The early 90s were a great time in music.