AbuTheMonkey

I am assuming no one here is watching ND / Navy but Jeremiyah Love had an absurd touchdown about fifteen minutes ago. I’ll try to take off my ND bias but Jeremiah Smith and Jeremiyah Love are the two best offensive players in the country this year.

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ND offense is better than Georgia. That’s not even a controversial statement. Just because you weren’t impressed doesn’t mean much, when every SEC team would give up their season high rushing total if they played ND.

ND defense was their issue. But how good is Georgia’s defense really?
Their pass defense looks about as bad as ND.

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And our defense has improved a ton over the last 5 games or so. Our pass defense in particular was truly awful through 2 1/2 game (it wasn't just you guys - Miami in the opener and fricking Purdue of all teams in the first half against them absolutely diced us up throwing the ball); that appears to have been mostly fixed since then - there was always too much talent on that side of the ball to be quite that bad, and they are getting to be more than respectable at this point. New DC, really potent passing offense for A&M, etc. just was a bad combination at that point in the season. Craver and Concepcion were wide the F open all goddamn night, and that will be my lasting memory of that game.

We've played two good offenses in Arkansas and NC State and one of the best offenses in college football in SC since then and squashed the first two and held SC in check pretty well. It's been Freeman's hallmark since he has been at the program - the team improves a ton over the course of the year, in particular on the defensive side of the ball. Last year's unit was almost certainly one of the 3 - 4 best defenses in the sport by the end of the year but definitely had some problems early on with some teams that would raise eyebrows like NIU (obviously) and Louisville.

These people are squawking because they know damn well a 9 or 10 seed Notre Dame is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a 9 or 10 seed BYU or Virginia or even Miami or likely Oklahoma or Vanderbilt or whoever the hell else would be in that slot. There are about 6 - 8 teams that can truly win this thing, and you all and we are two of them. Combination of talent, depth, ceiling, coaching capability, and so forth limits all but a handful of teams from reaching the pinnacle; of the 18 teams that surpass the Blue Chip Ratio test, only Alabama (89%), Ohio State (89%), Georgia (84%), A&M (83%), Oregon (78%), Texas (78%), Notre Dame (73%), Oklahoma (70%), and Miami (64%) - kind of - are still in this; LSU (73%), Penn State (68%), Florida (64%), Auburn (64%), Michigan (57%), USC (57%), Clemson (55%), Tennessee (54%), and Florida State (54%) are all out.

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It’s time to go back to some sort of bcs formula and eliminate the committee

With 12 and likely going to 16 the old bcs formula would work just fine and when you get down to 15/16 compared to 17/18 you can live with those arguments

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Right now the BCS rankings would be the exact same twelve at the top with the only difference being that the BCS would have 7. Oregon, 8. BYU, 9. Texas Tech vs. the CFP rankings have 7. BYU, 8. Texas Tech, 9. Oregon. Otherwise, they are identical for the top 12.

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quote:All that matters is payroll and market size. Toronto came up just short of pulling off a massive upset Toronto has the 5th highest payroll in MLB

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And is the 4th largest metropolitan area of any MLB team. And that doesn’t take into account that virtually everyone east of Alberta who follows baseball is a Jays fan.

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I don't know much about Kentucky, but kinda surprising they are low. Guess they don't get high on their supply.

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If you look at it a bit more closely, metro Louisville, Lexington, and northern Kentucky (metro Cincinnati) are all pretty deep blue. Without looking it up, I'd guess more than half the state's population is in those three metropolitan areas. Jefferson County (Louisville) is dark blue, and I can assure you that is a big drinking town.

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quote:Telling them how soft his teams were and how he blows big games while being a G5 win merchant was ONLY because ND fans were bitter. As long as the man has been coaching, his best wins throughout his entire career are regular season OT victories against Clemson (without T. Lawrence) and Alabama with B. Young coming back from a shoulder injury. If I'm leaving anything out, let me know.

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Probably doesn’t get enough run and is kind of forgotten, but he somewhat randomly beat a really good Michigan State team in 2013 at home. That team - and not Auburn - would’ve been playing FSU in the national title game that year had he not pipped them in week 4. That MSU team beat Ohio State in the B1G title game that year and beat a good Stanford team in the Rose Bowl. That Stanford team he beat in 2012 was pretty damn good, too. I dislike the guy, but give credit where it’s due.

Other than that, you’ve got the rest covered.

Acting like you’re something now against an LSU team that’s quit and ignoring a squeaker against Arkansas just last week that we beat by infinite.

We’d beat the frick out of you all now

It turns out that Kelly was his own ceiling at ND, and not the program. Not like we told LSU fans that over and over again when he left.

Funny how that works.

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Notre Dame in the NIL era is not fair to compare to Notre Dame in the pre-NIL era.

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As an ND fan, I do think that’s a fair statement. We have an advantage now that we didn’t have ten years ago. But that also makes me question the structure pre-NIL, because a lot of these programs, especially Southern programs, kinda struggling post-NIL are in actuality resource-poor programs who were willing to cheat their asses off and don’t know what to do now that everyone, including truly wealthy schools, can pay players.

But John Casey also conveniently leaves out Kelly’s first SEVEN years at ND when we had a lot of middling to bad teams. Freeman has never and will never have anything as bad as 2010 (which was a loaded team talent-wise - the one thing Weis could do well was recruit) or 2011 or 2014 or 2016.

Kelly had his hand forced by our old AD to stop hiring crony coordinators and he pulled in, consecutively, Mike Elko, Clark Lea (LB coach under Elko), and Marcus Freeman to stem the bleeding after ‘16 (otherwise his arse was gone). Not sure that’s the sign of a quality coach to have that forced on you, but take that as it is.

There’s also the intangible element that’s hard to fully articulate, but Kelly’s teams, even his best ND teams, never played with the edge and physicality that Freeman’s teams play with. That clown show LSU had today at the goal line gave me goddamn PTSD.