Welcome to the 175th Thursday edition of Irish Illustrated Insider, brought to you by Irish Illustrated.com.

It is Notre Dame, Georgia Tech Week, number 8 versus number 14.

I'm Tim Priester with Pete Sampson.

And Tim O'Malley, to talk about the big matchup between top-rated teams,

undefeated teams, the Georgia Tech running game juggernaut that is so difficult for everybody to stop,

especially on third down.

You don't get three-in-outs against them either.

So it's going to be a real challenge.

Let's jump into talking about some of the news of the week first.

Yet another injury to the Notre Dame offense,

and Durham Smythe is out for the season.

Yeah, we didn't really get a chance to see the injury occur on Saturday against Virginia, but on the replay, you can see like Quentin Nelson trying to crash down to somebody who kind of gets out of the way, and it looks like there's just kind of... You can see Smythe blocking in front of him, and then he's going to get rolled up by Nelson, and then he hobbles off from there. But also had a shoulder injury, I mean, I was sort of told, talking to people close to the situation, they hurt his shoulder against Texas, and then came back against Virginia, basically gutted it out, and then ends up hurting his knee at the end of that one as well. So then, you know, broke that story Monday down on Tuesday, Notre Dame releases that, yeah that he's out for the year of two surgeries.

Everything that I've been told is that he'll be back for spring practice. These aren't

overly serious. The shoulder is not in the Barati-Randolph realm in terms of severity.

It's much more of a cleaner operation.

So it should be back in spring, but until then, Notre Dame is down their best tight end.

I think we all feel that Alizei Jones has a chance to be great here, but now it has to be great right now.

Well, when they're running double tight end, it's Smyth and Luatua, so that person has to be replaced. And Tim Well, when they're running double-tight-in, it's Smyth and Lua-Tua, too.

So that person has to be replaced.

And Tim, we were talking about it. Maybe that replacement in double-tight-in situations is Chase Hounshel. It is. And I think it would be if you're that confident in your running game. But the problem with losing Smyth, I think, they have a lot of good depth. You have Jones and Wisher.

Might have better balls.

We don't know for a fact, but might have better ball skills than Smyth.

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