re: ITT we take a look at Notre Dame

I am not going to excuse the blow out losses to elite from about 1996 until 2010 or so - we were never all that great during those years, and I can say that with a straight face. I was a student at ND during some of those years where people thought we were pretty good, and it was obvious to these eyes that we were not on the same tier as the powerhouses back then.

We lost to two top ten teams on the road by a combined four points in dramatic fashion this year. We are down nine starters at this point and are on our 3rd-string RB and back-up QB; we are also down our best CB, starting TE, our best DT, our starting OLB, both of our good nickels, on and on and on.

In a broader view, I really do think we are back on the same plane with the elite teams and can play with anyone right now. We are going to re-load next year and should be very damn good yet again. I would have loved to have seen what this team could have done if they'd stayed relatively healthy. In contrast to the fifteen years after Holtz left, we are putting a lot of very good players in the NFL now (Michael Floyd, Golden Tate, Zack Martin, Kyle Rudolph, Tyler Eifert, etc, etc). We have the talent that we didn't have a decade ago.

You'll get no excuses from me for our performance during those down years. We were perceived to be better than we actually were, and I was present for a lot of those USC, LSU, Ohio State, and so forth beatdowns that brought us back to reality. The program now looks and feels a lot different. We can really play now, and we've got the players we didn't have back then.