Welcome back to another edition of Irish Illustrated Insider. I'm Tim O'Malley, joined today by Pete

Samson of the Athletic and John Bryce of Football Scoop and Irish Illustrated. And I was considering, again,

starting with basketball guys, but the basketball team, the men's basketball team, did not start

with basketball last night en route to a 24 point loss to SMU.

It looked like perhaps one of the best teams in ACC history, but I think that might

have been the matchup comparison instead.

And we're going to rotate quickly into something important off the field.

And, J.B., I think this happened right after our Monday podcast where we don't normally

read much into player tweets, but when a coach tweets

something along the lines of, there's another ride coming. It should be good news for Mike

Mickens and the window is getting tighter for him to find an upward mobility job, such as

defensive coordinator, which we have kind of positive this entire time. Yeah, and Pete and I have

both noted this in recent weeks. The expectation

has been that Mickens would return. Now, he was in the mix at Texas, and Texas obviously

pays extremely well, and he interviewed for the Georgia Tech defensive coordinator job, but I know

that Notre Dame had put forth the contract extension offer with

a raise to Mickens, and I think he's invested in returning. I would expect him to be back there

for Notre Dame as they open camp next month, and it'll probably be back there with a significant

raise, and probably that co-defensive coordinator title or something along those lines.

Yeah, I don't read too much into Instagram posts, but it's better than the alternative.

And, you know, Malley, like you said, like it's late.

At this point, there's just not anything else out there that I'm aware of that would even make sense for him.

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