Home Opener! Go Irish!

Go00000000 Irish! Beeeeaaaat Spartans!

#10 Notre Dame welcomes unranked Michigan State to Notre Dame Stadium...

Like many Irish fans, I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to go into the Michigan State game without a sense of dread. For a seeming eternity now, the Irish have appeared to be completely unraveled by Michigan State in the closing quarter. No matter the score at half-time, you can trust the Spartans will be within a touchdown of the Irish by the 4th quarter...

...and that's about the time the Irish Defense forgets how to defend against the pass over the middle... and Smoker slings the ball to a slanting receiver cutting across the middle and goes for 50..60..70 yards and a game-winning touchdown...

oh, sorry.. having a flashback there...

So here we are. with the Spartans coming to South Bend.. and that sense of dread comes with them.

Then again.. Weis seems to have changed the whole equation. The defense, a big weakness in many minds this year, has been a pleasant surprise. Linebackers Brandon Hoyte and Corey Mays -- we might have expected good things from them.. But Ambrose Wooden, and Tommy Zbikowski are off to great starts, as well ("Crazy" Zbikowski has been all over the papers this week) and it's clear that this defense is just better coached than any Irish squad in recent memory.

What a difference a coach can make?
What a difference 5 coaches can make!
Hiring Weis got the buzz going...
but when people saw the assistants he brought on board in the months that followed... that's when everyone really started to believe, I think.

And who could have guessed that that great collection of coaches could have such an impact so quickly? So where are they now? The pundits who insisted that Notre Dame's talent was inferior? That the University would, as Paul Hornung infamously (and wrongly) asserted on camera last year, have to reduce admission requirements to bring in 'difference makers.'

And let's be honest-- when you hear people talking about 'difference makers' in college football.. you know they're not talking about kids that look like Jeff Samardzija.

This assumption-- and it's an assumption made by college athletics top to bottom, from the NCAA on down-- that a kid can't be smart, athletic, and black is most troubling. It gets more troubling when you consider how much MONEY the NCAA and these universities make on the backs of kids brought in on athletic scholarship-- kids with little or no preparation for post-secondary academics who will almost certainly fail out of school (as soon as the football coach allows them to fail out, that is)...

NCAA makes its money.
College makes its money.
But where's the kid left? Without a pro football contract. And without an education.

A lot of pundits make hay, talking about how athletes in revenue sports should be given a portion of that revenue the University takes in.

What's wrong with making sure those athletes receive that education first?