Being an anarchist SEC fan, we cannot comprehend the idea of having an official team shirt everyone gets excited about. One shirt? That everyone gets really excited about? We’ve got hundreds of t-shirts. Most of them involve some abominable pun like “Skin the Cats,” or “Tame the Tigers,” or “Give Smallpox-laden blankets to the Seminoles.” Others feature anthropomorphic and steroid-inflated alligators performing various acts of physical domination over the opponent, up to and including oral sex, a great idea visually given how many mascots have sharp carnivorous animal-type incisors. Most of them are sold on street corners or out of the back of trucks, just like any other reputable product you can purchase below the Mason-Dixon line, including fresh shrimp, handguns, and infants.

Notre Dame gets really excited over THE SHIRT, something that comes out each year to great commotion. This year’s edition sounds like a slogan Gus Johnson would intone as a 1930s labor organizer: RISE AND STRIKE! Holly’s version is a bit more clear, we think, but she usually is a step ahead of things.

Alternate versions of this idea appear here, here, here, and here.

One thing seems inaccurate about this, though: given their schedule, Notre Dame should win at least 8 games with the crew they have on hand, meaning either a mid-range bowl bid of good value, or even more if they ascend to the 10 or 11 win mark. This sets up a replay of ND’s 2007 and 2005 seasons, where they ballooned upward on a relatively easy schedule’s tasty fatness, and then plummeted to earth when they faced the inevitable “national title contender who dropped one or two games and then arrived at the bowl game covered in a corona of howling Satanic anger.” This is all to point out that Notre Dame will probably have a nice record this year, and that Phil Steele agrees and therefore it must be likely, and that you’ll have to wait until after the bowl game to break out the “Piss and Moan” shirt around your friends, or even around the subhuman frontrunners who will shed their Yankee gear post-baseball season and don Irish gear to continue their impersonation of people in every season, including our beloved college football season.