Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider, brought you by Irish Illustrated.com, Pete Samson, with Tim Preacher and Tim O'Malley.

About 48 hours after Temple at this point, it's a little bit of a blur. We've got four games to go.

I think we all were, I don't know,

overwhelmed by Temple or underestimated. I don't know how to view, I guess, my perspective

on Temple coming out of the game other than to say that they were a lot better than I thought.

And in a rare instance, I felt like you kind of came away impressed with both teams,

which usually I think we kind of come out of these games as a zero-sum game.

Somebody played well, somebody played well.

Notre Dame and Temple played well.

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say that I was more impressed with Temple than I thought,

because I was impressed with Temple with two weeks of film, but I didn't

think that they would be able to execute it as well as they normally do when they play Notre

Dame. And the fact of the matter is, man, that defense, and I saw it against East Carolina, they

swarmed to the football. And they are as good at getting off blocks, I think, as any team that I've seen this year, and obviously some of the bigger, stronger four-and-five-star teams can do that really well. But I thought Temple's defense was great. Nordame didn't take advantage of some opportunities, and thus you had a game that went down to the wire. Yeah, we said if you helped him a little bit, they're going to be in it. Notre Dame helped him a little bit, but not converting in the red zone. And Temple, Temple was better than I thought they would be defensively against Notre Dame. I thought Notre Dame would settle in and handle them. There was no handling of them up front at all. To get back to your point, Pete, about Notre Dame, yes, you do have to be impressed with Notre Dame because the two times that they fell behind,

they scored less than two minutes later.

And that's a team with a sense of urgency.

They knew their season was on the line.

And they did exactly what they had to do to stay in a playoff race.

Yeah, I mean, look, Temple had the same response most times to that game.

I mean, when they fell behind, they came back.

And I was very impressed with sort of, I guess, what Matt Rule has built there.

And it seems, you know, if he stays there, that should be a consistent eight-win team.

...