Welcome back to another edition of Irish Illustrated Insider.

I am Tim O'Malley joined today by Tim Priester and Drew Mentock of Irish Illustrated.

And because of the natural disaster in my home, it has only been 48 hours, guys, since our last podcast.

And I think the plan here was somebody had to enter the portal.

But, you know, as we discussed on Tuesday,

no news was the news.

This is the only time, I think, Priester and Drew, we can come on here and say, we are not surprised that there were no portal entries at that, at that deadline.

And that might make this a portal-free podcast for the first time in, well, I don't know,

I guess after the national championship game, right? well, I don't know, I guess after the

National Championship game, right? Yeah. But, you know, I mean, look, all of this is new to us,

and so you don't know how it's all going to unfold. And I, you know, we still go back. We

talked about it extensively on Tuesday, you know, just about the culture at Notre Dame and reasons why they would stay. Yeah, I was surprised.

Tim, as you mentioned, there could still be some movement on the back end due to injuries or

etc. But yeah, it's surprising. But again, I think it speaks very highly of Marcus Freeman and in the atmosphere that

he's created. Yeah, and I think it does help too. I mean, we talked about the decision about

potentially grandfathering and, you know, to make it not have to go down to 105 right away. And I think

that coming out towards the end of this process before Freeman was even communicating to the

guys like you have till Thursday or Friday to make this decision and then around that time

we found out she was like saying I'm not going to agree to this unless you add this grandfather

clause in so I think that probably even made it a little quieter because I'm sure if had that

not come down or they just signed it then some people would have have had to go, but that kind of delayed it too.

And I misspoke. I looked at the questions and there is a question about the portal, but there's also one about Notre Dame fighting silverback gorilla. So we will eventually get to that in segment two.

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