Championship weekend is come and gone.

Notre Dame was idle and lost.

Alabama played, was bludgeoned on the field and on the scoreboard, but they won.

UYU played similarly to Alabama, paid a Maddie Price, and Duke won, but then sacrificed itself as tribute to the altar of the group of five.

That about covers it for the weekend.

Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider. I'm Tim O'Malley, joined by Tim Priester of Irish Illustrated John

Bryce, a football scoop and Pete Sampson of the Athletic. Pete, I want to start with you regarding

the events of December 7, 2025, a date which will live in head-shaking bewilderment for the Irish fan.

Yeah, I think that everybody, when you saw Alabama pop up at nine, you're like, oh, boy, this is taking a turn for the dark.

And it did.

And as I wrote on The Athletic Today, there is a lot of blame to go around.

Notre Dame is not totally absolved from that, but it has to start with the dog and pony show with the CFP rankings and kind of the disingenuous nature of all that with Hunter Eurocheck being a mouthpiece for it so that

i don't there's no other place to start but there with and i i give kirk herchreck

credit for calling it misleading and a mistake that esbn does these shows because i think after

this round of them, pretty much everyone

would agree with that.

Yeah, you know, I mean, we all, Tuesday night was when we all started to realize that, okay,

something is is not right here.

And the two things were that, you know, Alabama and Notre Dame had flip-flopped.

And in the positioning of BYU between Notre Dame and Miami, it just seemed like this is all

too coincidental and everything is falling into place at this moment in the last vote before

the conference tournaments. And it proved correct. jb and i you know we talked about

...