Welcome back to Irish Illustrated Insider.

It's USC Week, which means we brought in the heavy hitters from across Michiana for today's podcast.

We have Southeast Side Zone Pete Sampson of the Athletic, Southsider and owner of Irish Illustrated Tim Priester.

We have John Bryce fanciful from right outside the shadow of the dome and football scoop fame.

And me, Tim O'Malley from Parts Unknown, guys, we had 15 minutes with Marcus Freeman via Zoom today,

and he dropped some unfortunate news.

J.B., you handled that for The Notebook for Irish Illustrator.

I'll let you start, Gabriel Rubio out, elbow injury.

Yeah, Gabriel Rubio out with

the left elbow injury. I know O'Malley, you and I discussed that on Tuesday. It looked very

concerning for Rubio. That's significant. Now, USC has its own issues in its offensive

backfield. You would feel a little bit worse about that if you're Notre Dame.

If USC was fully healthy,

the Trojans don't have their full complement of tailback.

So that's significant.

But no Rubio and no Logan Thomas.

And this is, I think, by far, Lincoln Riley's most physical USC team.

So incredibly noteworthy because that just increases

the workload on a bunch of guys and Donovan Heinish is undersized. We know that. Now he's going

to have to play even more snaps and let's not ignore the cumulative. This is the sixth consecutive

Saturday that Notre Dame

has played. I also think that, you know, USC's a little banged up in their offensive line.

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