Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider, brought to you by Catanzarite Financial Services.

With Tim O'Malley and Pete Sampson, I'm Tim Priester.

It's about 36 hours after Notre Dame's 24 to 17 victory over Michigan, top to bottom,

a real quality performance for Nordham

offensively and defensively. Special teams obviously need a little bit of work, but I don't

think you could, I mean, you can't really ask for anything more than what Nordham got on Saturday

night. No, I mean, they played a game against bitter rival, prime time, opening weekend weekend it was a fairly clean performance in terms

of discipline and then they took the game outside the margin for error until basically the last

five minutes which i thought was really impressive i mean they i don't want to say they had no game

pressure on because even when you're up 10 against michigan it's still like game pressure, but it didn't feel tight.

It didn't feel that way.

Until Michigan had the ball with a minute 35 to go after an Nardayman, that's stop at the end.

That's impressive at its own right that you're able to have that control of the game against a good

team not a great team but certainly a good Michigan team. Yeah they handled them for 50 minutes and then

they held them off and yeah if you said that was what nor Dave was going to do when they play top

10 teams and top 20 teams this year. There's there's four others that are right along that line

for various reasons in terms of preseason rankings. You know the the special teams touchdown, I have kind of two views of it. One, the non-excused, but Brian Poling on Media Day said, I asked him, it's like, how do you practice full speed for special teams these days? He goes, you don't. It's unfortunate. We get one or two live reps near the end of camp because we're not trying to get down there and hurt people. You can't use your starters on both sides or hurt each other running on special teams. And he said, so the first game is always tough on special teams. Well, that's not an excuse because not every team of the country gives up a touchdown in these situations either. No, and Nordheim had a return and it was 20 yards. Right. Exactly. The issue I have is when people say, if they're breaking down a game,

and I think this comes from media and fans, well, if not for the special teams touchdown,

you know what? Special teams are a pretty big part of the game, and Lou Holtz made his

entire career on special teams. So if not for the special teams touchdown, Notre Dame loses in Michigan when Rocket Ishmal returns two kicks protection. Well, that would be like, that would be like saying that for the last 53 minutes, Michigan played Notre Dame even. I mean, the first eight count. Right, exactly. And Nordame really made them count. Nor Dame was up double digits. It's just shy of 50 minutes. So, you know, I never really felt like there was a ton of game pressure. You know, at the end of the game, obviously, it's all on the line. Michigan's 75 yards away. But Bernie played great. And I really think that, you know, I mean, if you didn't know that Clark Lee was a first-time defensive coordinator, there was certainly nothing that you saw from the Nordiumium defense that would indicate that they were they were aggressive, they were

unpredictable, they were creative, they were prepared. I didn't see anything that

would indicate he was a first-time coordinator and I don't I don't think any of

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