The Can
by Jakers

There’s no sense in dissecting a game that’s been skewered and flambe’d across the web in record fashion for the last few days. The basics are just obvious: The Irish offense doubled South Florida’s yardage and scored only 20 points. Crist was the same shell-shocked, drought-prone player he was a year ago. And the defense played statistically well from an aggregate standpoint: Just over 250 yards of Total Offense surrendered, 3.5 yards per play, and 16 offensive points…..numbers you’d theoretically take every week.

Missing from the birds-eye view are some key issues that contributed significantly to the loss: Stupid penalties that extended scoring drives (two idiotic face-masks, an unnecessary roughness foul), zero turnovers created, and roughly 250 “would-be” yards that the Bulls never needed because Ben Turk decided to spot them 50 free yards by kicking well below his average distance all day, because their defense covered 96 yards in one play when Marcus Wilson Jonas Gray puked up the ball on the goalline and watched it go for six the other way, and of course because we gave up over 100 yards on combined kick and punt returns.

Perhaps more frustrating than those is the fact that – with the Irish finally on the board and having some momentum at 16-7 – the supposed strength of the team allowed a 14-play, 80-yard touchdown drive that left them with too many points to make up and less than 12 minutes to do it. Twice the Irish defense extended the drive via penalty, and four times they failed to stop a 3rd-Down play.

While Rees and Floyd still managed to close the gap and bring it all down to an onside kick (which, I swear to God I cannot remember us ever converting or stopping – we suck like Calli Cox at onside kicks), it was just one of those weird games where you never felt like the boys had much situational awareness or their heads in the game in general.

We started the season in the same bizarre, strangely under-achieving manner twice before in recent history: 1995 and 2003.

In ’95, an Irish team with plenty of returning starters and young talent that now had a year of experience under its belt was primed for a run with lots quality depth and a favorable early schedule. They opened against a Northwestern team (whom they’d clocked 42-15 a year earlier with a lesser squad of their own) and managed to lose 17-15, throwing every Irish fan in the world into a panicked frenzy of doubt about what to expect against the likes of Texas, Ohio State, Washington, and U.S.C.

Rather than folding, however, they went on the road the following week and beat Purdue and proceeded to rip off an 8-1 stretch and ultimately earn an Orange Bowl berth against Florida State.

And of course, that shitty Northwestern team that hadn’t finished a season with a winning record since 1971 ended up winning ten games under Gary Barnett and playing in the Rose Bowl against U.S.C.

Dear Notre Dame Football…
by Six

Fuck you. Fuck everything about you. Fuck your losing mentality, fuck your way of fucking up good things, and definitely fuck you for making me feel like shit every fucking Saturday in the fall. It’s the best fucking time of year and you have to go and fuck it all up. I am sick of you acting like a dead beat father that shows up in my life every fucking fall with these new feelings of excitement and then goes about kicking the shit out of my emotions every time we are together.

Fuck you for that shit. I know that sometimes you do exciting stuff that makes it seem like you are so fucking awesome, but deep down, you haven’t changed one fucking bit. You are the same fickle bitch that ruined my life every year for the past ten years. And I fucking hate you for it. You bring me new, shiny things that supposedly make you better. Only thing is you always seem to leave out the fact that you haven’t really changed and at the worst possible times, your true colors show through. Fuck you.

From here on out, I’m going to start enjoying my weekends without you. Yeah, we can keep tabs on each other, but I’m not going to set aside our time together as something special anymore, because you always seem to fuck it up. So that’s it. As of tomorrow, we are done. And it will take a lot for you to get me back. I don’t know if this will be reparable.

Fuck you.