…after extremely careful calculations (i.e. a hotel pad and some hasty chickenscratch) we have determined that the thirty dollars from yesterday’s offered apology bet goes to: Notre Dame over USC, straight up.

Mr Swindle, you’ll never regret this. Think of this as the first day of the rest of your life! You may have been unable to get into Notre Dame, but you’re not alone there: many people can’t realize their dream of going to Notre Dame thanks to its rigorous admissions standards and challenging curriculum. In fact, you may be surprised to learn many people most people make the mistake of never even applying to Notre Dame or visiting. This is clearly evidence that “the elected are sometimes the self-selected.” This is a line from my forthcoming motivational and personal growth series “Elect Yourself! Running For the Presidency of Your LIfe.” I have enclosed a copy for review, which would be great if you could do by next week, tweet to your followers, post on Facebook, and suggest to other writers and friends via social networking sites over the coming months. I am available for interviews immediately, but book now! When this thing takes off, you’ll want to be on the ground floor, just like you’ll be in old Notre Dame’s return to glory after betting on them Saturday.

Thank you, Tommy, for your endorsement, and for your terrible motivational book, which we will use for the golden chalice we purchase after raking it in when the Irish, playing with machetes, cut their way through the jungle grass in South Bend en route to a 3-0 win. Matt Barkley will be lost to the Trojans for three weeks when he becomes disoriented, is separated from the group, and lives off sprinkler water and stale popcorn until he is found by the grounds crew somewhere around the 30 yard line.

Tommy Kilborn, ND Law Student, Admits He Was Wrong.

I have to confess, everyone: I was wrong. There was a time, early in the first quarter at the stadium on Saturday, when the Notre Dame defense had allowed a few runs there and there to the Nevada Wolfpack, that I really thought about giving up. After all, I called for the firing of Head Coach Charlie Weis just one short year ago. Those were hard times, and I thought that rather than finding the silver lining, those gray clouds just above our heads would just stay where they’ve been for most of Charlie Weis’ tenure: right above our head and raining.

Turns out I was as wrong about that as I was wrong about Coach Weis, since the only thing raining down on the stadium Saturday were touchdown passes from Jimmy Clausen to Golden “Hands” Tate. For the first time, I really think I can say this:

Wake up the echoes, because we’re back, baby! (more…)

We rate the top 25 estimates by national security. Nerd up, geek out, and follow along for number 23, Notre Dame.

23. Notre Dame.

Companion Country: Russia. Ruled by a strong man who, after a long losing streak in contests abroad finally led his nation to victory against inferior opposition in 2008.

Like Putin, enjoys photo ops emphasizing his cold lethality.

Economically, Notre Dame is also a single commodity market, dependent largely on the performance of their quarterback, Jimmy Clausen, who coordinated the respectably ranked 34th ranked passing game despite being “protected” by the 100th ranked pass game, a natural analog to Russia’s formidable ability to bomb away at distance with nuclear weapons while sitting behind 12,514 miles of land border. If his value declines, the whole country’s economy collapses. Clausen also shares Russian gangsters’ fondness for hair gel and numerous gaudy rings, and could easily double as a Muscovite oil tycoon-on-the-make bribing a traffic cop/ND usher to let him out of a traffic ticket/make noise during a football game.

Also, Charlie Weis likes to poison his opponents with radioactive tea. < ---totally untrue and completely speculative both for Weis and Pooty-poot. Luv u Vladimir plz dont kil me kthx. (more…)

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.

–Iowa, Notre Dame, 1939, Nile Kinnick goes off.

–No sound, but we’ll fill in for you: harumphharumphISAYTHEREGOODSHOWharumphharumphYAAAAAYYYY. Fill in any blanks with thumping oompa tubas and bass drums.

–It’s chilling to think how many people on the field were killed in World War II. One was Kinnick.

(HT: BHGP)

Sometimes human behavior can be easily programmed and predicted. To save time, we’re encoding college football internet commenters by school. Notre Dame fans, we’ll save you the trouble by alerting you that BUTTHURT is present, skip to step 50 and proceed.

PROGRAM CODE “NotreDameCommenter@aol.com”

IF “notre dame” PLUS “EDSBS” THEN “mandatory philbinpic.jpg” NOT “Deadspin”=”Gay_Brady_Quinn.jpg

10 INPUT: “Notre Dame”

20 IF (Mention of ND) Then (EXAMINE FOR SIGNS OF BUTTHURT)

30 IF (Mention of ND)=(lack of BUTTHURT minus FLATTERY) then SKIP TO 50

40 IF (BUTTHURT=PRESENT) then NEXT

50 RUN “BUNKER MENTALITY” NEXT

60 Type COMMENT 1=(accusations of jealousy) + (citations of past glory you had nothing to do with)

70 IF COMMENT 1 clash (malfunction RIPOSTE) THEN NEXT

80 RUN “WILLINGHAM EXCUSE” NEXT

90 IF “WILLINGHAM EXCUSE” clash (malfunction timeframe expired) THEN REPEAT

100 If REPEAT = (clash malfunction) RUN “IMPENDING SUCCESS” NEXT

110 “IMPENDING SUCCESS”= type (”Signs of improvement”) + (”highly touted recruiting classes”) + (”Get your shots in now”) NEXT

120 REPEAT IN LOOP

130 If 120=FAIL Then RUN “ACADEMIC EXCUSE”

140 “ACADEMIC EXCUSE”=(”We’re smart and you’ll work for us someday.”) REPEAT

140 END

Incompetence is to blame. It’s not really fair to say Notre Dame airbrushed Charlie Weis’ record from the books completely, as a post of ours over on TSB said. Doc Saturday was all over this as exaggeration, since you may see Weis’ full record on the following page of the media guide which includes all the painful losses you care to see from 2007 and beyond–even the loss to Greg “Paddling Uphill” Robinson.

This was the worst kind of rushing through shit, something we’re terribly guilty of all too often. We can’t even blame the painkillers, as they would have done the same thing stone sober, most likely. There’s a clarification in the post on TSB, and a total mea culpa here for the lack of effort. Michael Irvin would cut us from 4th and Long for it, and we would have taken our pads out of the lockerroom happily.

In some kind of act of atonement, we offer the finest in stunning slant from coaching bios:

Al Groh, UVA coach, whose entry includes this glowing boast:

In addition to his 56-44 record, Groh’s teams are 34-30 against ACC competition.

Wow: that’s truly notable mediocrity, anonymous ACC media writer. It certainly lacks the De Goya-esque gore of Dave Wannstedt’s entry, brought to you by the bloody, misbegotten prose of Dennis Dodd: (more…)

Do not underestimate the desire for self-delusion.

Presenting a matchup so retro one should be forced to watch it with a pair of hot-orange Oakleys on and while wearing a well-gelled mullet: Notre Dame and Miami are considering re-upping for their rivalry game, a series that has been on hiatus since a three-game stretch in 1987-1990 and was dubbed “Catholics versus Convicts,” an unfair accusation towards Miami in so many ways. (Probation is a totally different thing, and if you’d ever done anything fun enough in your life to get arrested for it, you’d know that.)

We’d watch it even if Miami in the 2000s has been less Miami, and more “Clemson With Skin Cancer” since joining the ACC. (Similarly put, Notre Dame would just have be “Notre Dame, but with a lingering bone cancer.)

Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick shows off his flair for bland but simultaneously inaccurate rhetoric in describing the matchup on more than just a football level:

Playing Miami is appealing, Swarbrick said, because “they are two great academic institutions. We’re eager to play schools that share our values. There’s a lot of great history around the games.”

We weren’t aware of Notre Dame’s declared love for chunky asses and teetering donks, and was equally ignorant of Miami’s fondness for cold weather and overpaying coaches. There’s no set date on it yet, but talks will resume in April to figure out which slots in Notre Dame’s remaining contract with NBC–good through 2015!–can accommodate the game. If it features anything like converting 3rd and 43 from your own goalline, it will be worth any trouble you care to go through to make it happen.