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.

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!

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!

Umm yeah...

So at this point in the season, I'm left to wonder what my expectation should be for the next two months. Should I get my hopes up, pray for a miraculous 7-game winning streak, and a bid to the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl (or, fingers crossed, the Pioneer Pure Vision Las Vegas Bowl; I love Vegas!)? Or root for the Genius to take the rest of the season off and concentrate on recruiting and coaching the JV squad?

I am going to go with the latter. Obviously, our team has been handicapped this season by the awful recruiting of a certain former golf playing coach. Apparently, during his last year at Notre Dame, said individual's recruiting strategy was to go around to various golf courses around the country and hope that some of the caddies would also be high school football players. This is evidently how our entire offensive line was recruited.

I propose that the Genius turn the reins over to me for the remainder of the season while he visits every recruit's house three times a week. Not only will this let me live out my ultimate fantasy, but the school would stand to save a lot of money by having Mr. Weis eating most of his meals off campus.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that several of my friends are out of the country this week. Hopefully this will translate into more luck for the Irish, since the team mysteriously started playing amazing last Saturday after their plane took off. If this is what it takes for us to win this year, I will pay you guys to stay over in Europe until Christmas.

We're blowing up

I decided it was time to drum up support for the blog on the message boards and we are getting a flood of new readers. Welcome! Please be sure to check out the voluminous archives of my various musings, recounting the glory days of 2006. With any luck, the Dumpster phenomenon will spread across the Internet and we will be linked to on Deadspin! A man can only dream.

Baby Steps

Ok, so we finally got one monkey off our back (an offensive touchdown! two even!), and now we are poised to begin what I'm calling Operation Baby Steps. Normally, we accomplish all of what I'm about to relate to you in the first five minutes of the first game, but due to circumstances beyond the team's control this year, it's taken a bit longer. Anyway, here is our plan for the rest of the season:

1. Get a lead during a game
We got this out of the way against Penn State. Go IRISH!
2. Score an offensive touchdown
Take that, Michigan State!
3. Score another offensive touchdown
They'll be hurting down in East Lansing tonight!
4. Score a passing touchdown
I hope the Purdue secondary won't crap their pants once they see the types of passes that are going to be thrown in their general direction by the legend himself, Jimmy Clausen.
5. Win a game
Again, I hope the Boilermakers are ready to experience the beatdown of a lifetime. Once we are done with them this weekend, they're going to wish Drew Brees was still playing there.
6. Go back in time and prevent the first four losses from happening.
This last part of the plan might take some time to figure out as modern science has concluded that if time travel is possible, it would only be in one direction: from the present to the future. I have found a way around this conundrum. I will travel forward in time to a parallel universe that is several weeks behind our current universe. By converting my body into pure energy and traveling through quantum irregularities, I will be able to reach the wondrous reality where the season hasn't started yet. Having brought with me the game film from our first four games, I will know what plays are coming and will therefore be able to relay to the Notre Dame offense what defensive package is on the field. Bill Bellicheck is a mere amateur compared to me!

What's Next?

I'm feeling pretty down right now. I didn't necessarily expect the Irish to beat Michigan, but I was hoping to see some progress. What's going on with the Genius? Look at these two lines: 7-15, 90 yds, 3 TD, 0 int; 11-17, 74 yds, 0 TD, 1 int. If you had asked me before the game which was Clausen and which was Mallett, I would have bet you my priceless sculpture of a nude Brady Quinn that the one with 3 TDs was Clausen.

But alas, Clausen had 0 TDs and ND had 0 points. In fact the Irish only had 79 yds the whole game. Maybe the Genius stopped illegally taping opposing defenses after after the Pats got caught. If so, I'll go tape those bastards from Michigan State myself. Anyway, I'm pretty sick of talking about this, I'm gonna take all my clothes off, wrap myself in my Notre Dame blanket and watch Rudy for 12 straight hours. It's the only thing that will make me feel better.

ESPN.com: Someone's Gotta Win

For the first time this season, I will not be in attendance at this week's Notre Dame game. I think my presence was distracting the team just a little bit. It's as if the players could sense me live-blogging about them while they were on the field, and their expectations shot through the roof. To help the team concentrate more this week, I will be a full 1000+ miles away from them when they start kicking the crap out of the Wolverines in a few minutes. Although, I hope the team doesn't subscribe to the "Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder" philosophy.

What if...?

Sometimes after a tough Notre Dame loss (Hypothetically of course; as we know, the Irish have never lost), I look back at the game and wonder what would happen if only one play went differently. Well, this weekend at the game, I not only wondered this, I LIVED it. While most of you saw Notre Dame fail to score from the five-yard line and settle for a field goal, I did not.

On third and 5, I felt a strange tingle in my hand. Looking down, I was no longer wearing my white ND shirt. Instead, I was somehow wearing my green ND shirt! Odd, I know. Clausen took the snap, pump faked, then ran a brilliant 5 yards for the touchdown, knocking over several Penn St. players and I think JoePa as well. This proved to be the turning point Notre Dame needed to mount a comeback and topple Penn State.
Needless to say, the Beaver Stadium crowd was not happy at the end of the game while I gloated in the parking lot (see above).

After a night of revelry with the other ND faithful who made the trek to formerly Happy Valley, I awoke to a bird chirping on the windowsill in my hotel room. Suddenly, I felt another tingle in my hand. I looked down, and, as a Antarctic chill swept over my body, I found myself back in Beaver Stadium, clad in my white ND shirt. As I looked up, I saw Jimmy "Jesus Christ" Clausen's pass fall incomplete. Field goal. Momentum halted.

I know what you're probably thinking. "This sounds like the musings of a slightly insane person or a slightly awesome one. It was probably just a dream." I beg to differ. Driving back home, I was sadly looking over the pictures my friend Jonny took with his camera phone during the game, and stumbled upon the one you see above. Do you see who that is? THAT'S ME IN MY GREEN SHIRT CELEBRATING OUR VICTORY! Somehow I must have stumbled into an parallel universe where Notre Dame not only won the game, but also had won the previous 25 national titles. It's like that episode of the Twilight Zone where William Shatner stops in that diner with the fortune teller machine! Somehow, this picture made its way over to our universe, but the quantum transfer must have fucked up the quality, hence my blurry appearance.

Nevertheless, there exists a universe out there where Notre Dame reins supreme, and God willing, one day I will return there!

Live From State College

STATE COLLEGE, PA.- This post is coming from you live from the Beaver Stadium concourse (I'm dictating it to my sister from a pay phone by the men's bathroom). I'm not going to lie, I'm not having a good time. I accidentally wore my white Notre Dame t-shirt to the game, and today is apparently the "White Out," so legions of stupid Penn State fans have been coming up to me to give me five, only to look at my shirt more closely and then slap me in the face. Not a good time.

On the field, we are not doing much better. It's like last week all over again, except I'm surrounded by people who will probably kill me if I cheer after Jimmy Clausen completes a pass. The silver lining in all of this is that by playing such tough teams early in the season, we should be clicking on all cylinders when we enter the brutal stretch of schedule later in the season.

Finally, I would like to give a shoutout to my friend Jonny for allowing me to experience Penn State football in person. I hate you.

Just a Little Taste of What's To Come

SOUTH BEND, Ind.-- I'm writing to you here from our nation's capital (my nation is Notre Dame, not America), and it has been a whirlwind 72 hours. Now I know some of you were expecting me to be depressed because of what happened during yesterday's game against Georgia Tech, but nothing could be further from the truth. Despite what the box score said, Notre Dame was the clear winner yesterday. Let me explain.

Mr. Weis did not name a starting quarterback until game time. I thought this was a clever ruse to hide the fifth coming of Brady Quinn under the new NCAA eligibility rules that were passed in a midnight session Friday night, but what actually happened was much, much better. Our brilliant coach utilized all three quarterbacks, in a new scheme I'm dubbing the Triforce Offense. As you know from the Legend of Zelda series, there are three separate Triforces: Wisdom, Power, and Courage. These three triforces are represented by each of our quarterbacks: phenom Jimmy Clausen is Wisdom, sophomore Demetrius Jones is Power, and Evan "Sharpie" Sharpley is Courage. Now what this new scheme means is that all three quarterbacks line up in the backfield for every play. Before the snap, there is a colossal meeting of the minds, wherein all three debate on the appropriate course of action. Claussen runs a Wisdom play when he spots a subtle yet devastating weakness in the defense, Jones runs a Power play when our players hold the physical edge, and Sharpley runs a Courage play when the odds appear to be even (although, as we all know, Notre Dame always holds the edge), relying purely on the courage and heart of our Notre Dame squad.

This chain of events happens very quickly and silently, as the offense has been learning telepathy all summer. Unfortunately, it appears they were a little rusty yesterday, with it being their first real game with their newly-augmented mental abilities and whatnot. I'm sure the coaching staff will work out the kinks during the week. I just feel sorry for our next opponent. They are going to be on the tail end of a mental and physical beat down!

Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated Part II

Yes, I am still alive. It has been a slow couple of months, the only newsworthy item being Charlie Weis losing his medical malpractice lawsuit. Thankfully, it is August, and that means we are only several weeks away from the return of the greatest athletic team of the past 263 years. Now I realize that my readership has dwindled considerably since the heyday of last November, but be prepared, dear reader, for an onslaught of Charlie Weis's weight proportions.

Here are some upcoming posts you should be looking forward to:
1. Summer in Review: No Football = Terrible
2. Can the Pirates Win the Pennant? (Short answer: Yes)
3. Notre Dame Season Preview!!!
Part 1 - 2006 Season Wrap up
Part 2 - Brady Quinn Daily 3rd String QB Report
Part 3 - 2007 Notre Dame Schedule Analysis
Part 4 - Position-by-position Breakdown of the 2007 Squad (quite possibly the best team EVER)

It's going ot be an exciting couple of months and I hope all of my 4 current readers will spread the word that THE DUMPSTER IS BACK!

Back with a vengeance!

After the Irish's graceful exit in the first round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, I must now turn my attention to other sports that Notre Dame is good at, namely hockey. As you may have heard, the Skating Irish grabbed a No. 1 seed in the Grand Rapids region of the upcoming NCAA Mens Hockey tourney, where they will face Alabama-Huntsville in the first round on Friday. I'm a bit torn, considering my love of everything in the state of Alabama, but UAH is pretty far north and I'm not 100% positive it's actually in Alabama, so I think I'll be safe in rooting (aka pretending to care on Sunday when we make the Final Four) for the Irish in this one (although I will be praying with all my might that we get to face Michigan State in the Elite Eight).

Final word on Signing Day

Apparently we lost some key recruits at the last minute, so our recruiting "ranking" tumbled. I don't see why they feel the need to update these things so frequently. We should hold off all judgment until three years from now when Notre Dame would currently be in the middle of a 60-game winning streak.

This morning I noticed a poll on ESPN.com which asked: Which school won signing day?
Eagerly looking to click Notre Dame, I was shocked to find my choices were Florida, South Carolina (?!?!?!?), Texas, and USC. I then tried to highlight the entire column, in case Notre Dame was a secret fifth invisible choice, but that did not work.

After voting for USC (it will be even more hilarious if they win the poll only later to get punished), I looked at the geographic breakdown and saw that Indiana had overwhelmingly also voted for USC. I then noticed that only 260 people in the state had voted and I knew everything would be alright. You see, all the Notre Dame students are still in 5-hour Saturday morning mass, and once the computer science guys get back to their computers, they will hack the site to transfer all of the USC votes to the new Notre Dame option. There's nothing the Irish can't do!

The Real Draft - Chummy's Top 15

I'm sure many of you know that tomorrow is official signing day for high school recruits. I've spent many a night sitting in my underwear, watching videos on the internet of high school boys playing football, and I'm pumped about Notre Dame's incoming recruiting class. Because I've done more exhaustive research (what I mentioned before with the underwear and videos) than any Rivals site will ever do, I'm going to reveal my top 15 recruiting classes. When these teams are tearing up the NCAA, you can say, "I remember when Chummy dropped a load of knowledge on me and told me those players were going to kick A!"

1. Notre Dame -- If you didn't know this was coming, you don't this blog, or college football for that matter. All I have to say is Jimmy Clausen. I'll say it again, Jimmy Clausen. If Notre Dame doesn't win the title next year it will be because of a Tonya Harding-like injury to Clausen at the hands of the biased, jealous media. Didn't recruit defense you say? I can't believe people don't trust in the Genius by now -- we'll move more running backs to linebacker! I don't know why more teams don't recruit offensive players to play on defense, it obviously works.

2. Michigan -- Fortunately for them they got Ryan Mallet. Unfortunately for Mallet, he faces a long career of getting the beatdown at the hands of Jimmy Clausen and his four Heismans.

3. Penn State -- Picked up some big time O-Lineman and a pretty good receiver named Sukay. Won't be enough to outscore the Genius though. We're going to have former running backs pancaking those big O-lineman.

4. USC -- Picked up some running back and another QB. Whatever. They're all going to have their wins taken away for cheating just like Reggie Bush. Catholics don't cheat.

5. Boston College -- I don't really know who they've recruited, but they're Catholic and I have to give them credit for that.

6. Air Force -- Have you seen how good the basketball team is? Football recruiting is following suit.

7. UCLA -- Bruins got seven 4-Star players. That's pretty big time, but Clausen counts for infinity stars.

8. Georgia Tech -- Caleb King is the number 8 running back in the country. Too bad he's not number one, like the Fighting Irish.

9. Michigan State -- They've got four 4-Stars coming in. That's fine. I just wish John L. was still there.

10. Navy -- Anapolis is a recruiting mecca. Second only to the wonderment of South Bend.

11. Stanford -- They're bringing in the recruits that USC coughs up, and just like USC, they'll be schooled by ND.

12. Purdue -- To be honest with you I don't have a clue who they're recruiting, but it's probably good.

13. Duke -- Oh yeah, up and coming program after not getting blown out by Miami without 10 of their players.

14. Florida -- They get some decent recruits after that joke of a national title. Everyone knows ND should be holding that trophy.

15. LSU -- They had a good recruiting class after cheating and getting their bowl game against the Irish played in Louisiana. Ridiculous.

Well, there it is folks, the prophet has spoken. Incidentally, Notre Dame has also come out with their 2007-2008 schedule and you should check that out here.

Down But Not Out

I realize the readership of my most amazing blog has somewhat petered out over the last month, and for this, I apologize. It's not easy to switch gears from Notre Dame football to Notre Dame/ Gonzaga basketball and Notre Dame hockey. While I doubt many of you will read this, I am hopeful that you will still spread the word that this blog may be down, but it is not out (see the title of this post). Once the Super Bowl is over, you can expect semi-daily posts on anything and everything that is awesome. That's quite a lot of content, so be sure to come back here regularly.

Speaking of the Super Bowl, you are probably expecting some sort of analysis, but since college football is my drink of choice, I can only look at things through green-tinted glasses. The Colts have three Notre Dame alumni on their squad (although one is the third tight end and he's injured), whereas the Bears have a whopping ZERO Fighting Irish. I think this tilts the scales in favor of the Colts, especially since the Colts punter, Hunter Smith, is one of these former Notre Dame players. Because he went to Notre Dame, Smith knows how to punt the ball using all sorts of different spins, which Devin Hester won't know how to deal with. Don't be surprised if on one punt, Hester tries to catch the ball off a bounce only to have it ricochet up into his crotch pointy-side forward. He won't be able to do much with that.

Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Yes, I am still alive. I have spent the last two weeks wallpapering my room with all the pictures of Jimmy Clausen I received from all of you. If you are ever in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by the Chumdumpster Mansion and see what all your hard work has wrought.

Moving on, Notre Dame football was recently in the news, as former WR Jeff Samardzija decided to forego entering the NFL Draft in favor of signing with the Chicago Cubs as a pitcher. Samardzija has stated that baseball is his first love, and that even though he will be playing in obscurity in the middle of Idaho for the five years, he would still prefer that than playing in the NFL.

To say I am angry at this pronouncement is an understatement. I was a bit perturbed that Charlie Weis even permitted Samardzija to play two sports in the first place because I doubted his commitment to the football team. Clearly my misgivings were entirely correct. It is clear that Samardzija, unlike the rest of the team, did not commit his heart and eternal soul to Notre Dame football. This had grave consequences for the entire season. Since he was trying to preserve his baseball career, Samardzija did not give the 117% effort required by the Genius (who mathematically increased the maximum percentage in 2005). Brady Quinn was extremely limited in his passing options, because he knew he couldn't throw it over the middle lest Samardzija make a half-ass attempt to catch the pass, but then back out at the last second to avoid contact.

I hope in the future that Charlie Weis will strenuously question new recruits as to their other athletic interests. If they have ever played another sport at the varsity level in the past four years, I think we should definitely pass on these youngsters. I just hope that Jimmy Clausen doesn't have a passion for fencing.