Well, hello again! Man, it’s been a minute, huh?

For reference, the last time I wrote an update the college football world had yet to learn the name “Connor Stalions” — and it feels like a lifetime ago we learned about that particular development.

This season could have its own “We Didn’t Start the Fire” written about it — between the aforementioned cheating scandal, the first real controversy in the history of the college football playoff, and a whole truckload of lawsuits, it has been an eventful season off the field, even if the on-field results have been mostly predictable (it really says something when Alabama winning a football game is what causes the most chaos of the season.)It would have been futile to try to keep up with it all, so instead I decided to take some time and let things settle before picking through the rubble. We have a few Notre Dame-specific matters to get through today, so I’m punting deeper reactions to the season until after the championship is settled. After all, why write the story of a season before its finished?

Since apparently no one else wants to talk about it, though, I’ll will spill some ink on the biggest cheating scandal in college football in decades.

The week after Notre Dame-USC, word started leaking out the skunkbears were somehow under NCAA investigation again, for yet another instance of rule breaking (that’s what five instances of breaking rules or actual honest-to-god laws in the past calendar year?). And this one turned out to be extra juicy. Apparently, a M***igan staffer(s?) had been orchestrating a “massive spy ring” for at least two and possibly three seasons. The staffer most directly responsible, Connor Stalions, bought tickets in his own name to many Big Ten rivals, right on the fifty yard line, where people who apparently reported to him had an excellent view of the opposing sideline and could videotape away to their hearts’ content. Stalions, who has a background in, I swear to god, military codebreaking, would then decipher the opponents’ communication scheme and communicate his finding to M***igan’s coaching staff. While in-gaming sign decoding is perfectly legal and common practice in football, this kind of advance scouting is prohibited. If Stalions did what there is a clear paper trail of and video evidence for, M***igan broke rules designed to ensure fair play. Clearly, and obviously. That’s called cheating. Oh, and Stalions ran a vacuum repair business on the side and received funding from some guy named Uncle T who is definitely not Tom Brady, and was spotted on the Central Michigan sideline this season wearing literal spyglasses. This is about a Jeff Bridges cameo away from being a Coen brothers movie. 

It, of course, is the most quintessentially M***igan story of all time. After years and years and years of whining about other programs in the country cutting corners and not playing by the rules, the skunkbears, ever living in fear of having to actually beat their opponents in a fair fight, turn out to be the biggest cheaters of them all. The surest way to know if somebody’s doing something is they’re complaining about other people doing it, and boy howdy has M***igan proved that true. 

Of course, as anyone who’s caught cheating will try, the first defense is to make it out to be much less of a big deal than it actually was. M***igan fans and their media cronies (which, more on them later) insist that this actually didn’t result in a big competitive advantage, that anything gained from it could have been achieved through conventional in-game sign decoding. Which a) why do it then b) how is it exactly M***igan suddenly evolved from “barely functional” to “three-time BIG champions” overnight while also still managing to lose to TCU? No, common sense, as well as the opinion of the coaching community both within and without the BIG, suggests this was a quite large competitive advantage, actually. 

Our next foolish defense is of the man in charge, Jim Harbaugh himself. Defenders will claim there’s no evidence he knew. First of all, bullshit. I could point out that college football coaches may be the most detail-obsessed people on the planet and have a firm grasp on about everything that goes on in their program, but I don’t need to. Connor Stalions is standing right next to him. Stalions is talking to his coordinators. WITH A BIG SHEET OF PAPER WITH SIGNALS ON IT. Of course Harbaugh knew. Second of all, the thing about being paid multiple millions of dollars a year to oversee a staff of people is you don’t get to not know. Not only is this literally an NCAA rule now, it’s also just common sense — if it happens on your watch, its your fault. Either Harbaugh knew directly, or he created an environment where cheating was accepted and tolerated, if not encouraged. Either way, the flowchart goes to the same conclusion — Harbaugh is a cheater. 

What’s that? You think it’s a dumb rule? Ok, sure. In-game communication is probably due for some change, as much as I enjoy the spectacle of backup quarterbacks holding bedsheets over their heads to block cameras. But the way to change rules you disagree with in a sport isn’t to just ignore them. I mean, I think safeties should be worth more than touchdowns, but I don’t get to add nine points every time my team tackles a quarterback in the end zone. 

So we’re left with a very obvious cheating scandal that, in the opinion of a majority of coaches asked about it, resulted in a clear competitive advantage, that has seen absolutely no consequences for anyone involved. Sure, Harbaugh was kinda sorta half suspended for the final three games of the season, but as a head coach his role on gamedays is limited anyways, as became clear when the skunkbears more or less rolled to victories in each (btw, Ryan Day, you ok buddy? See what Lou Holtz was talking about yet?). No, anything resembling a real punishment would have affected M***igan’s ability to compete. This isn’t like the Astros scandal or the Patriots’ Deflategate, where the cheating was discovered well after it had occurred — the skunkbears benefitted from Stalions’ illicit activities THIS SEASON. Hell, they might STILL be benefitting from it, as we’re still not clear on the extent of the scheme or how many teams might have been impacted. (Multiple coaches have made clear that trying to fully revamp in-game communication for one game would be like trying to teach their teams a new language in a week, so no, teams can’t just “change their signs.” Also, for what it’s worth, Nick Saban’s had his team limit the number of iPads they watch film on and hey wasn’t M***igan’s last OC arrested for computer crimes in January whatever happened with that). Their results are totally invalidated, and the failure of anyone at the Big Ten, NCAA, or College Football Playoff to take necessary action to protect the integrity of their product is staggering. Simply, M***igan should not still be playing football in 2023. 

But I expect fecklessness from college football leadership. Their inability to lead is part of the grotesque fun of this sport. What’s been more frustrating has been watching everyone in the college football media pay lip service to this very obvious cheating and then promptly ignore it as it became clear the skunks weren’t going to lose to their very bad schedule or at home to Ohio State. This should be a golden goose for these folks — a legacy brand and an already controversial coach embroiled in the biggest on-field scandal in decades, calling everything about their recent success into question, all while the sport’s supposed leaders can’t or won’t do anything about it. (If you want an, um, interesting, thought exercise, imagine if this happened at Notre Dame.) Instead, we get “oh, well, there’s this alleged sign stealing” (sure looks like they got caught red handed!) and “man, the players have overcome so much adversity” as if they didn’t benefit from the misdeeds of the coaching staff. This should be the biggest story in sports, coaches should be constantly questioned about it, players should be interrogated about it at every opportunity, it should engulf Ann Arbor. The media should have held the Big Ten and CFP’s feet to the fire, calling on them to take action. Instead, we get acquiescence and silence, if not outright complicity. But, because a majority of national college football journalists (checks notes) work at outlets that have a clear and obvious financial interest in people watching college football, they instead do whatever they can to placate one of the largest fanbases in the country. Score yet another win for corporate media. 

So now we’re left in a position where Alabama, Ala-freaking-bama, is somehow the less offensive of the two possible Rose Bowl victors. Say all you want about Florida State and the grave injustice of leaving them out of the playoff (which, to be clear, is nonsense and also awesome, since it screwed over my two most hated teams at once — Florida State doesn’t go to the playoff and M***igan has to play Alabama), but the true travesty of this year’s CFP is the decision to total ignore the clear and obvious cheating by the program they have ranked #1. Unless you want to go full tinfoil hat and claim the committee picked Alabama as M***igan’s opponent specifically to punish the skunkbears without eliciting any real complaints from Ann Arbor, in which case, mad respect. 

But I don’t think for a second that that happened. No, the far simpler explanation is that, for about the ten millionth time in this very dumb sport, the big brand won the day over fair play, logic, and reason. It’s stupid, it’s unfair — it’s college football. 

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A happy Sun Bowl eve to all, as Notre Dame will once again enter a bowl game down two or more of their best players and with a different starting quarterback under center. 

That should hardly come as a surprise, as change has been the one constant in college football these days. In Notre Dame’s case, its treading down a few old familiar paths. 

Notre Dame has once again been in the market for an offensive coordinator, after a) Marcus Freeman chose to retain Gerard Parker in the name of staff continuity; b) Marcus Freeman immediately fired wide receivers coach Chansi Stuckey; and c) Parker left to be the head coach of Troy. Which, hey, sure. Remember, kids, ignore your problems and they will go away. 

The hire itself, LSU offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock, is a very solid one, given that he brings loads of experience, works well with mobile quarterbacks, and has a decade of experience in South Bend. (It also means ND wins another battle for a former Kelly assistant, lol.) He’s improved the offense basically everywhere he’s been, and has experience working with both Freeman and half the offensive staff since we’ve essentially turned Cincinnati into a coaching farm team. It looks like a good setup, though I have some slight concerns about reverting to a lot of stuff from the Cincy days that is readily available on film. 

Still…

Look ok I know it was never gonna happen but… man sure would’ve been nice to bring Tommy Rees back!

Yes, indeed, our erstwhile offensive coordinator, who is so bad at his job he’s now been to the College Football Playoff with two programs, has figured out how to solve yet another tricky quarterback situation (hey did you know Jalen Milroe’s last OC thought he shouldn’t play quarterback), lean on a unit’s strengths, and win a whole bunch of games. In partnership with Nick Saban and an elite defense, Alabama, who was written off after an ugly game against South Florida (which Tommy of all people should appreciate) has won the SEC title, ended a nearly three-year run of Georgia dominance, and now gets a chance to help Cheatin’ Jim Harbaugh complete his Bo Schembechler impression by losing the Rose Bowl. The fact that “Tommy Rees, SEC champion” is a real sentence should really speak for itself, but he has done yeoman’s work in Tuscaloosa this year, even if the start was rougher than some Alabama fans have been used to. I’m sure a pettier ND fan would look to the fact ND’s pass game was still barely functional at times with a sixth-year quarterback as evidence that Tommy was never the problem with the offense, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from the above facts. 

With the news of Tyler Buchner and Drew Pyne returning to Notre Dame to pursue non-football related Irish careers — Buchner’s gonna play lacrosse and Pyne’s going to finish his degree — all we need to do to get the band fully back together is to lure Rees back to campus. I don’t care what role, but we gotta get him back (as soon as he’s done ridding the nation of the skunkbears on New Year’s Day, that is). 

Rees can return from his internship with Saban full of new ideas and an increased recruiting acumen to help lift his alma mater back to elite status. Hell, while we’re at it, let’s hire Ian Book as a GA! I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but hiring program alums to key roles has worked out really really well for women’s basketball, so why not for football?

I kid, I kid. While I do legitimately hope that we see Rees in a Notre Dame booth (or on a sideline…???) again one day, that’s nowhere in the near future. I fully expect him to move on to the NFL or a college head job by the end of the 2024 season; he’s certainly earned his shot. And, while I hope Marcus Freeman is the head coach at Notre Dame for a long long time, he won’t be here forever, so it would be nice to have a program alum and longtime assistant get out the head coaching kinks elsewhere first wouldn’t it?

In the meantime, we’ll place our trust in the Leonard-Denbrock team-up. Leonard, who Notre Dame beat at Duke in a thriller earlier this year, will be the latest quarterback hailed as “the guy” for Notre Dame. before incoming freshman CJ Carr is hailed as “the guy.” A Denbrock-Leonard pairing certainly is exciting, and combined with a much-needed influx of wide receiver talent, the 2024 outlook for the offense is a lot better than it was on Thanksgiving. But, if there’s a lesson from the 2023 Notre Dame football season, it’s that there are no shortcuts, no easy ways out. There’s rarely just “a guy” that is the answer to all of our problems. Sam Hartman was not perfect, but I’m not sure Trevor Lawrence could have gone 12-0 this year. We have to keep climbing, keeping improving all aspects of the program, keep rolling our rock up the mountain. 

But, uh, speaking of extremely hyped players…

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I’m struggling to find words to describe how awesome it is to watch Hannah Hidalgo play basketball. So instead I’m gonna do it with a few anecdotes.

There are exactly three people in the world who get to compare a college basketball player, let alone a college basketball player at Notre Dame, to Skylar Diggins — Muffet McGraw, Skylar herself, and Skylar’s lead recruiter and former position coach. So when Niele Ivey starts dropping this in the preseason, you know to take it seriously. And that was before Hidalgo dropped 31 points against a two-time national champion in Paris in her debut. 

Hidalgo is a ferocious, fearless, tenacious player, a 5’6” ball of energy that is absolutely relentless on both ends of the floor, can score from all three levels with abandon, and is a defensive terror who makes a living of giving opposing ballhandlers the worst day of their basketball lives. We knew Hidalgo was a prodigious talent from her trunk full of high school accolades — McDonald’s All-American, MVP of the McDonald’s All-American game, and gold medalist with USA Basketball in the Under-19 World Cup, to name a few — and had plenty of exceptions of being a standout player for the Irish by the end of her career. It didn’t even take a game. To put it mildly, it’s a tall task to come in to a blue blood college program, fill in for an injured star point guard, have a key injury to your veteran backcourt mate in game 3 (please get well soon Sonia) thrust even more responsibility on your shoulders, and then lead the team in scoring and assists while winning nine straight games in nonconference play, but Hannah’s done just that. Oh and did I mention she’s leading the nation in steals per game?

Speaking of steals, this one was so awesome it interrupted an ESPN ad. I’m about half a foot taller than Hidalgo and *I* can’t jump that high. And this was after a whole game of harassing Western Michigan defensively, including attempting this exact interception of a cross-court pass earlier in the evening and barely missing. That, based on a whole whopping ten games of evidence, is the essence of Hidalgo as a player, I think — a relentless determination to get better, and get better quickly, and do absolutely everything she can at each moment to help her team win. Given that her skillset seems to include just about everything you can do on a basketball court, that turns out to be quite a lot. There was a Bronco whose entire defensive assignment that night appeared to be “don’t let Hannah go left” and stood at about her 9 o’clock every time she handled the ball. It, uh, did not work. Hidalgo posted her first career triple-double that night, four days after being a rebound, two assists, and two steals from a quadruple-double. 

It also doesn’t hurt that her name makes her sound like a Marvel superhero — “Hannah Hidalgo” is just really fun to say, which is good, because we’re gonna be saying it a lot for the next few years. Even at a program that’s seen more than its fair share of star guard play, Hidalgo is making a standout impact, and I have a feeling she’s just scratching the surface.

While we should all appreciate the Hannah Hidalgo Experience™ for what it is, I’d also encourage everyone to pause for a second, look longingly into the middle distance, and contemplate how unbelievably awesome a backcourt lineup of Hidalgo, Sonia Citron, and Olivia Miles is going to be. Any one of those three could anchor most teams in the country — and fans would have a blast watching them do so — but they’re all Irish. A fact which seems surreal now and will feel downright absurd when they’re all playing together. 

Guard University indeed. 

It won’t necessarily be smooth (Miles and Hidalgo can both be quite ball-dominant — Miles is a stronger facilitator at this stage though, while Hidalgo’s a better scorer, so one assumes she slides to the two and Citron plays a small three? I dunno but there is no one better equipped to solve this extremely-good-to-have problem than Niele Ivey, who basically has a doctorate in coaching WNBA-level guards at this point.) (Alternatively, possibly the only thing more terrifying for an opposing coach than having to gameplan for Hidalgo and Miles together is having to gameplan for your opponent having an All-American point guard on the floor for literally the entire game — imagining the look on Geno’s face when Hidalgo checks in for Miles is the stuff of Christmas dreams.) There will be growing pains, and depending on when Miles is fully ready to go (which, honestly, who the hell knows, but if its not gonna be soon can she do Irish nation a favor and stop making three pointers during warmups) it may not be advisable to try to figure it out in the home stretch of the season when this team is absolutely good enough to make a deep March run with Hidalgo running the show. 

But with those three on the floor… like, who do you guard? How do you guard them? You can hope one of them misses, but you can’t trust that all three are going to. Post play (defense especially) remains a concern but do you really need to do more than hold serve down low with that backcourt trio? Well if you do hey would you look at that there’s a five star talent waiting in the wings (I don’t know much about the finer points of post play but this seems pretty good I dunno) and friendly reminder Nat Marshall and Maddy Westbeld have Covid fifth years, please use them. (There will be a Nat Marshall appreciation section next time I promise because she’s been dynamite through nonconference play and deserves all the shine.) I feel like I’ve been saying this for about four years but next year could be so so big for women’s basketball with a fully healthy (or honestly even like 50% healthier) team. 

Until then, let’s build some depth and enjoy the ride. This team is really fun to watch and is only gonna get better, and can absolutely challenge for a repeat ACC title even shorthanded. Excited to see what they can do. 

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I want to wrap up by giving a quick shout-out to Jeff Jackson, possibly the most underappreciated coach at Notre Dame, who’s singlehandedly crafted the hockey program into a legitimate national player through nearly two decades of noble service, for notching his 400th win at Notre Dame by thoroughly embarrassing That School Up North. It’s been an up-and-down few seasons for hockey, but a consistent bright spot has been Notre Dame’s domination of the skunkbears, notching a 7-2-1 record against their archrival over the past ten outings. Most of these have been tightly contested, thrilling affairs, but Jackson’s squad made sure that Coach’s 400th win would be a massive one. The defense held M***igan without a goal that didn’t come on a 5-on-3 play, while notching six of their own. 

Unfortunately, this is probably still a rebuilding year for hockey, as they’ve looked thoroughly outclassed by some of the top teams in the country and not all that competitive against the top half of the Big Ten. The good news is that the core of the team is very young and they could absolutely find a rhythm in the second half of the year, especially with the hyper-experienced Ryan Bischel minding the net. The other good news is that they end the season in Ann Arbor, so there’s an opportunity for a very fun closing statement.

That is, assuming the skunks don’t stash the puck next to Connor Stalions’ vacuum collection.

– EC