The clock clicked to zero and the players on the field began to jog into the locker room. It was halftime and Notre Dame was beating up on North Carolina. The score was 17-9 and by that alone, you couldn’t tell that the Irish were playing some of the best football I’d seen all season. The Notre Dame defense held the North Carolina offense to…

It’s more than a clever motto: if you’ve ever visited the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of Notre Dame, you may have seen this phrase engraved deep into the stone above the side door. For the thousands of Irish fans across the globe, this phrase personifies the place that Notre Dame has in their lives. But, what does this phrase mean and…

Clashmore Mike would like to welcome Anthony Pilcher to our writing team. He is an Irish enthusiast who specializes in statistical analysis. Additionally, he’s a skilled writer who does a great job recapping games from an X’s and O’s perspective. We invited Anthony to our team partly because he’s a very good writer and partly because we feel sorry for him because he lives in…

Anyone who has attended multiple games at Notre Dame Stadium keeps a personal record of wins and losses while they were there. My mother, for example, has a horrible record as an attendee—Notre Dame has lost every game that she’s attended. Previous to last season, I had a 4-0 record as an attendee; however, the last game I attended was last year’s game against Navy.…

Whenever the Irish saddle up to play the Boilermakers, I am usually looking forward to a game of little excitement. Even though Purdue is a team that likes to dink and dunk the ball down the field, they usually end up playing a vanilla type of game with the Irish. It’s not like when Notre Dame faces USC or Michigan—where you can expect a certain…

On Saturday, I sat with my brother, cursing at the television. I could not understand, for the life of me, why a team who showed so much promise against San Diego State and Michigan, a team that had some unexpected players starting to make game-changing plays, could lose so poorly to Michigan State. It wasn’t that the Irish lost by a big margin, they didn’t,…

It wasn’t quite the Miami/Florida International brawl. However, anyone who went to the 2008 Blue-Gold Game remembers the scuffle that occurred when Harrison Smith intercepted a Jimmy Clausen pass and ran it into the end zone for a touchdown. What we saw that day was what had been brewing since December.

This past off-season, Charlie Weis did some soul searching to figure out if maybe…

In light of last week’s game against San Diego State, I was pretty wary about watching the Irish this Saturday. It’s not that I didn’t think that the Irish would perform badly, but that there was so many unknown aspects about both Notre Dame and Michigan that could make this game a pleasant surprise for Irish fans, or a hellish nightmare. Luckily for Irish fans,…

On Friday night, I couldn’t sleep. As part of my annual tradition, I watched Rudy. I know—in my previous article, I bashed people who watch Rudy and then make predictions on the new football season. Let’s just say I was trying to gear myself up for a new year of football laced with optimism. Plus, I’ve already made my season predictions.

Finally, Saturday morning rolled…

On Saturday, I felt very empty. While the rest of the country was enjoying the first games of the 2008 College Football season, I was sitting at home watching the television, wishing I could root for one team or another, but I’ve never been able to root for a team that isn’t wearing the interlocking ND on their uniforms. So far, the 2008 season has…