Welcome back to another edition of Irish Illustrated Insider,

brought you by Irish Illustrated.com with Pete Samson and Tim O'Malley.

I'm Tim Priester.

We are 18 days away from a Notre Dame, Ohio State Fiesta Bowl, 13 days, I believe it is, before we all depart for

Scottsdale, Phoenix area. And we had an opportunity to spend some time with Brian Kelly the

other day talking about a variety of topics. We also know that Ohio State minus Adolphus,

Washington, plus Greg Shiano.

And it sounds like Notre Dame plus Geron Jones, but certainly Durham Smyth, which should help

Notre Dame in the red zone.

Yeah, I mean, I think Durham Smyth is, I don't want to say more significant than Geron Jones,

but I just feel like he's going to be more of a contributor than Geron Jones. Well, I think he's more prepared to play. It certainly sounds that way. Yeah. So if that's the case, we were kind of joking about before we started the show about this might not be the game where Notre Dame's red zone offense gets fixed out as Ohio State has two defensive coordinators working on Notre Dame for a month. But Durham Smythe, I think, would make a difference.

And, I mean, Tim, you asked the question on Saturday.

It's a good one.

Like, what do you think this offense would be if Durham Smyth had played 12 games?

And, I mean, I got to think it's worth at least two extra red zone touchdowns. And, I mean, who knows if those happens in the right game? Maybe we're not talking about it. Yeah, I kind of figured like four or five scores for him over the course of a season. I mean, it's kind of a cop-out because they pretty much in the six years of Brian Kelly have struggled in the red zone. So, you know, I don't know that one individual.

This is actually an average season by Brian Kelly standards for the red zone.

Right, right.

And, you know, I mean, it's still an offense averaging 35 points a game.

So they did obviously a ton of great things.

It's just that, you know, and you say the same thing about the defense.

If you could prevent a couple of these things, you'd be, you know, 11 and 1, 12 and now sitting in a better spot.

Well, I just thought, I wasn't even thinking along the red zone lines with Smyth as much as you needed two tight ends to do his job,

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