Welcome back, everyone to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast, brought you by our friends over at Banduel. Happy Thursday. We have another fun and loaded show ready for you. We are back after taking the day off yesterday. Brian's got his voice back. We are ready to rock and roll. And we move the midweek rundown to Thursday, no longer the midweek. So today we have just the Notre Dame rundown. We're covering a lot of different topics today, guys. We are talking about star power on the defensive side of the ball that's going to be in show one today. Part two of today's show. We're talking about the biggest spring questions for the offensive side of the ball. We'll be talking about defense next week because, Brian, believe it or not, spring ball starts next Friday, which is just crazy to think. I mean, this time is absolutely flown by and I'm very excited to be up on campus to watch the boys out of practice. That's for sure. And then in part three of today's show, we're talking about Chicago recruiting.

That's been a constant topic that we've been talking about over the last couple weeks here in the off season.

Chicago is a recruiting ground that Notre Dame absolutely has to have success in over the next couple cycles.

We're going to break down some of the top prospects in each of the 27 and 28 class.

And then we're going to wrap everything up today with the next show. We're broadening our view. And we're talking about the next programs from each conference that we believe have the best shot at making their first playoff appearance. Now, we're talking about the 12 team playoff. And the 12 team playoff is kind of a different era than what the 4 team playoff was. So I'm going to have a lot of fun conversations around that today as well, Brian.

Fun show today, man.

Really fun show.

Yes, I'm excited about it, Treb.

It's going to be a blast.

The Chicago recruiting one is going to be very interesting.

And I hope the summer goes by as fast as it has so far. It's like December, January took friggin' forever. It felt like. Well, once we got through the portal, it's kind of like the last month and a half, two months is just flown by. And I hope that, you know, that's the same thing as true of May, June, and July anyway. But probably for anyone who's a teacher,

it's probably like, dude, you shut your mouth right down. Sorry about that, y'all. But no,

I'm ready to rock and roll, Trev. You know, we got some fun topics to talk about today. And really,

it begins with kind of building on what we talked about last Wednesday. We talked about

the star power on offense. We're going to talk about star power on defense today. We're going to talk about our biggest questions for the offense going into the spring, which you said I'm excited about. But I'm also very interested. We're going to talk a little college football today, as you mentioned, Treb, and get into the top five, the teams that we think have the best shot to make their first

playoff birth this year. And it's going to be a lot of fun, man. But let's kick things off,

Trev. Star Power. We talked about it last week. Offense, star power. They need it. They have potential

to have it. We're going to talk about the same thing on

defense, right? Like, hey, look, there's star power on defense. Who is it? Who can be it? But I think

the interesting conversation to have at the beginning, Trevor, is this, is to pose the question,

is there one side of the ball where more star power

is needed to be an elite unit?

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