Notre Dame faces Miami in the Sun Bowl New Year’s Eve. The game marks the first meeting between the two teams since 1990 and is a preview of three future contests—a neutral site game at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 2012 and a home/away series in 2016 and 2017. In many ways the two teams are […]

The Fighting Irish return to South Bend Saturday on the heels of their second consecutive loss and looking to avoid a second-half season meltdown. Despite the promise this squad showed early in 2009, the last handful of games have looked eerily similar to the last six games of 2008 when the Irish sputtered to a […]

Notre Dame opens the 2009 season Saturday by welcoming Nevada to South Bend. For many this is the “make it or break it” year for head coach Charlie Weis. Two consecutive disappointing campaigns have exhausted all the leniency from the overachieving Irish squads of his first two years. Weis made several changes in the off-season: […]

Notre Dame’s season opener against Nevada is right around the corner and a seemingly eternal off-season can’t end soon enough. Fans seem tired of attempting to produce logical explanations for the last two years: a disastrous 2007 season and an underachieving 2008 campaign. Head coach Charlie Weis’ said it best at Notre Dame’s media day, […]

The beginning of Fall practice marks the end of a long off-season for Notre Dame football. After limping through the second half of the 2008 campaign, questions surfaced about head coach Charlie Weis’ job security. Despite this, the Irish coaching staff hauled in a solid—albeit not great—recruiting class, and subsequently underwent several coaching changes. If […]

Notre Dame has concluded their regular season, and a reflection on the Irish offense’s progress (or lack thereof) is warranted. The mid-year numbers are here, and this analysis was performed in similar fashion by benchmarking against the competition. Facing the 73rd toughest AV Ranking strength of schedule, the Irish only managed to go 6-6. But […]

pro⋅gres⋅sion Pronunciation [pruh–gresh–uhn] – noun 1.    the act of progressing; forward or onward movement. 2.    a passing successively from one member of a series to the next; succession; sequence. Progression—in football, it’s used to describe two things. First, it’s used to describe the mental and physical process a quarterback goes through on a passing play […]

With the offense out of the way, it’s time to move on to the defense. For Notre Dame’s defense the story of 2007 was really the inept Irish offense. The offense didn’t control the ball, frequently turned it over, and often times failed to change the field position. This made playing four quarters of solid […]

At first glance the Irish offense seems dramatically improved from a unit that spent last year near the bottom of the country in every meaningful statistical category. A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals a different story. For example, through six games the Irish stand at 4-2, a far cry from the 1-5 record […]

Despite dominating multiple statistical categories, Notre Dame was unable to come away with a victory. Coming into the game, North Carolina was an opportunistic team, capitalizing on opponents’ mistakes to win games. The Irish certainly did their part to help the cause, ultimately giving the Tar Heels exactly what they needed to inch out a […]