Notre Dame Basketball = Better Than You

I don't know if you know this, but Notre Dame is a basketball school. In fact, we invented basketball back in the 1870s as a way to pass the time between football season, 5 am mass, and 7 am mass. With the success of our football team in recent years, our basketball program has been pushed into the background, but no more! As you are probably aware, I am the greatest Notre Dame basketball fan in the history of the school. I have started so many traditions I can't even remember, but I think one of them involved borrowing my roommate's credit card and selling his books back to buy weed. Apparently there are some copycat tradition makers on the team, which has resulted in a bit of trouble.

However, with our past ills behind us, Notre Dame basketball is on the cusp of greatness. In our most recent game, we dismantled the racist Orange of Syracuse with stunning precision. Our strategy lately has been to dominate the perimeter and hope that our shots go in, and if they don't then hope that the ball bounces back towards the shooter. This works really well when we make all of our three pointers, which I expect to happen in about 80% of our games.

Some of my friends like to scoff at our basketball prowess (one in particular who thinks his Ivy League "team" would be able to last 3 minutes against us), but I just ignore it for the most part. I know that we are amazing and you also know we are amazing because I am telling you this right now. We are only a couple of weeks away from the first of 21 straight titles, and boy am I excited!

Posting Up a Storm

As we all know, the mainstream media is biased against Notre Dame. Why else do you think we have to play on NBC when every other team gets to play on ABC, ESPN, or some awesome regional network? Instead we are stuck with the guy who announces the Triple Crown. Our football players are not horses, Tom Hammond (except for our fullback, who is a horse. The Genius saved him from the glue factory, and he was the reason our rushing offense did not finish last in the nation last year).

The latest round of bias is ESPN’s ranking of our current recruiting class. These fellows at “Scouts, Inc.” have Notre Dame ranked ninth in the country. Ninth! That’s not even in the top two, which is where we should be. Apparently 10 “ESPN Top 150” prospects wasn’t good enough for ESPN, since they ranked Alabama six spots higher than us with three few “ESPN Top 150” prospects. The bias is staring me right in the face! Georgia, USC, Ohio State, and Oklahoma are all ranked above us yet have few “quality” prospects. It just doesn’t add up!

Now, I am already a little suspicious of this ESPN Top 150 list to begin with, since all of our incoming freshmen should be ranked in the top 30. I mean, we’ve got Mike Golic Jr. coming in this fall. His dad works for ESPN. How could they not rank him higher than a 79? It just goes to show you how far the bias goes when ESPN is willing to purposefully misrank one of its own employee’s kids just to smear our school.

Now, all objective recruiting ranking sites have Notre Dame listed much higher than ninth. Rivals.com has us at number two behind Alabama, but this ranking is also a bit suspect. We have the highest star average in the country. Why shouldn’t we be number one? I’m not even going to go over the rest of the sites because my blood pressure is pretty high already. I’ll just let our performance this season speak for itself when we got 24-0 (we are playing the equivalent of a 1-A and 1-AA schedule combined) and top it off with a spot in the BCS Title Game at the Orange Bowl. You heard it here first.

I Got Game

I know I haven’t posted in a while. I’m not sure if all of you know, but I recently turned 30. I’ve gone into a shell since this development, as I’ve been depressed at my continually diminishing chance of walking onto the Notre Dame Football team, a la Rudy. Obviously, the older a person gets, the lower his or her athletic “upside” becomes.

As I tried out four years in a row and never managed to make the team during my undergraduate years at Notre Dame (as a matter of fact I am saddled to this day with a number of debilitating injuries), I am planning on attending Notre Dame to get my LLM degree and taking one more shot at my dream. I know the Genius will do right by me. Thus, I am now reinvigorated, training Rocky-style, and feeling ready to resume my blogging duties.

I’d like to discuss Notre Dame’s incredible basketball team. As many of you know, ND only recruits players of Irish descent to play b-ball. Thus, the team is normally made up of short, red-haired white guys. As you can imagine, this results in an understandable lack of competitiveness outside of the years that a guy like Troy Murphy shows up.

Well, this year there is no Troy Murphy, there are only short white guys. Yet the team is still amazingly competitive. The key, it seems, to this resurgence is ND’s newly relaxed policy on marijuana.

You see, Kyle McAlarney (short Irish guy) is an amazing basketball player, and particularly, a great long-range shooter. Last year, McAlarney was suspended from the team for smoking weed. Well, it turns out “Big Mac,” as I like to call him, can only shoot effectively when he is high (Kind of like that movie where Method Man goes to Harvard and is really smart when he smokes weed).

The distinguished staff at ND decided that in order to make a real difference this year, they should get Big Mac a medical marijuana prescription. As a result, Big Mac is averaging more than 15 points a game and ND has been ranked in the top 20 for almost the entire season.

I’m not sure if Irishmen of all kinds are better at things when they’re high, but I can tell you one thing - I’m gonna test myself ASAP. Wonder if this would work for JC? Maybe that’s why he didn’t get his Heisman last year. That and the biased voters.

A Victory On and Off the Field

No doubt you have heard of our spectacular victory against our hated rival Duke on Saturday. But what you may not have heard about is our scholastic victory against Duke. You see, when two schools of such high academic caliber get together on the field, we must also battle each other in a Quiz Bowl type competition while the game is being played. Tradition also dictates that the people who participate in the Quiz Bowl be players on the team, since we all know that Notre Dame players are of equal if not better intelligence then the general ND student population. Now, unfortunately for us, our smartest players are not on the practice squad. No, all of our defensive starters earn this accolade.

This has wrecked havoc upon our game planning throughout the entire season. We are very idealistic at Notre Dame; we think that because our players are so smart, that every team we play must be as smart as us. Therefore, we always send our Quiz Bowl representatives to the designated site each game day. Unfortunately for us, no one from the other team has bothered to show up, and our defense is forced to rush back to the game, usually arriving after we've already given up a substantial lead. But not this weekend. When our players arrived at the Quiz Bowl, they were shocked to find the Duke representatives raring to go. Of course, the Blue Devils sent their third stringers, but we were just glad to have someone to flex our academic muscles against. In the end, the Notre Dame defense held the Duke scrubs scoreless, clinching the game when Tom Zbikowski correctly guessed that the capital of Bhutan was Thimphu.

We are eagerly anticipating a second Quiz Bowl match up this week when we take on Stanford. I hope those crazy hippies have been studying.

There is Hope

Hello faithful readers,

I haven't posted much lately because God's team has played a little bit below my expectations. I'm so tired of scheduling those cheating service academies. They recruit the best players from anywhere in the country because they can offer a career in the military. How is ND supposed to compete with that? Everyone wants to be in the military! Add to that the fact that they run the impossible-to-stop option attack and I don't know why we don't just pencil in Navy vs Air Force for the National Championship game every year.

On a good note though, JC threw 3 touchdown passes on Saturday. This should vault him into the Heisman discussion. At the very least he'll be one of the five invitees to the ceremony. If this doesn't happen, it's because of the media bias against Notre Dame. Damn media is so predictable.

Also, as of right now, ND has the #1 recruiting class in the country. You know what that means: ND National Championship run next year! Let me list the factors that will come together next year for ND's return to glory:

1) JC returning after a Heisman-worthy season
2) Ty's shitty recruits being replaced by the Genius' #1 class
3) The Genius introducing a new offense that is unstoppable, producing 10 TDs/game
4) God stopping the "Job" treatment of ND this year and returning them to glory

Everyone can take their shots right now. We're Catholic, we make ourselves feel guilty about everything, so a little adversity during a football season isn't going to stop me. I've been worrying about the fact that I accidentally looked at a picture of a girl in a bikini all week and had "impure" thoughts.

Anyway, expect a stellar season next year. Go Irish!!

P.S. - Those second-rate Catholics at BC finally got what they deserved. Maryland?!?

Up Bright and Early for the Big Game!

Readers of this blog no doubt know of my fascination with time travel and quantum irregularities. Today I am going to challenge the very way you think about the universe and your perception of reality, sort of like The Matrix or Tron did. We all know what happened roughly two years ago when the Trojans last befouled our beloved town, but today we have a chance to rewrite history. No doubt you read about USC's shaky landing at the airport the other day, Evan Sharpley starting over Jimmy "The Carpenter" Clausen, and Mark Sanchez starting over John David Booty. These three occurrences are not random coincidences--allow me to elaborate.

Using the holy power of Notre Dame and an amazing knowledge of T2: Judgment Day, Charlie Weis has in fact sent The Carpenter back in time to that fateful afternoon when a certain cheating team cheated their way past the Fighting (and non-cheating) Irish. He has one mission: to warn the Genius of Reggie Bush's trickery on the final play of the game. With this warning in place, no doubt one of our amazing linebackers will be there to push that dolt Leinart back from the goal line as Bush tries to push from the other side. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you who's going to win that tug-of-war (hint: it's not going to be Leinart's spinal cord).

Unfortunately, USC coach Pete Carroll somehow caught wind of this plan and sent his own agent back in time to stop the Carpenter. If the similarities to T2 are eerie, it's because Carroll called up James Cameron to get some advice on how to send someone back in time. Cameron for some reason want to use lightning, so he rigged a lightning rod for the USC charter flight, connected some wires through a transistor radio to Booty's chair, and viola, instant time machine! When the plane began its harrowing descent, lightning hit the rod, was converted into nega-energy (aka going-back-in-time energy) and opened a time wormhole localized around Booty's chair, which sent him back in time to October 15, 2005.

Right now you're probably thinking, "if your time travel nonsense were even remotely true, couldn't we look up the score of that game and see if Clausen succeeded?" An excellent point, dear reader, but you are unfamiliar with how Terminator time travel theory works. While October 15, 2005 has already occurred for us, it has not yet occurred for Clausen or Booty. They are moving the timeline at an equal rate that we are and therefore the change won't occur until at the exact moment that today's game ends. So when the clock runs out later this afternoon, we will have TWO victories, not one, and I'm pretty sure that we can apply our newly-acquired victory from 2005 to this season, thus putting us back in the title hunt.

Of course, this all depends on The Carpenter's ability to out-think JD Booty and stay alive long enough to pass the message along to the Genius. I've got good intel that says that Carroll gave the order to kill the Carpenter should it be necessary, so I hope Jimmy is good at sneaking around quietly.

Anyhoo, it's going to be a very exciting day for Notre Dame football. GO IRISH!

Catholic Grudgematch: An ND-BC Preview

I don't know if anyone else noticed, but the Irish ARE BACK! It only takes one win to start a snowball effect on the whole season. Here's an early prediction: The Irish will win their next six games, bringing their record to 7-5. The BCS will realize the obvious (that the Irish are the best team in the country) and change the rules to automatically put ND in the championship game every year. The Irish will then easily beat whatever inferior opponent they face when JC (meaning Clausen, not the son of God, but they're almost indistinguishable aren't they?) throws for 500 yards and 7 TD's, thus validating his Heisman Trophy once and for all.

Ok, I got a little excited there, and I think the team and I just need to take things one game at a time here. So, here's my preview of the ND-BC game this weekend:

Boston College, currently ranked 4th in the AP poll, comes into South Bend this weekend with a 6-0 record. They have an established QB in Matt Ryan. They also normally have an above average offensive line, which allows Ryan the time to find his receivers and complement that with a decent running game. They average about 35 points a game and have an average margin of victory of 18 points.

That's great. What a nice little year they're having. I feel sorry for these guys. Right now they feel like they have some semblance of a chance to win the game on Saturday. They haven't had a challenge like this all year, and maybe never.

It appears the Genius' botched obesity surgery threw him off a little bit, resulting in 5 consecutive losses. Well, that's over now and the Genius is back to kicking ass. Just ask Carl Dorell. How do you like JC, UCLA? 20-6. What a beating.

I've watched the UCLA game 17 times since Saturday, and one thing is for sure: ND knows how to shut down a QB. McLeod Bethel-Thompson walked on as one of the most-hyped QB's in history and that big-time ND secondary took 4 picks off of him. Matt Ryan will pee his pants at the sight of all our 2-star recruits and converted linebackers in the secondary. I can't wait.

My pants are getting tight just thinking about this game. Here's my prediction: ND 77 - BC 4. Yeah, BC will get two safeties. Take it to the bank. But Ryan will be intercepted 8 times. You don't think the crappiest Catholic school in the country could possibly beat the best Catholic school in the country do you?

The Greatest Day of My Life

I have been rescued from the depths of insufferable torment. I have been saved from eternal damnation. Glory to Notre Dame! Go God and GO IRISH!