Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider.

I'm Tim Priester with Tim O'Malley here today.

Two days before the start of spring drills,

so on Friday we will have an opportunity to speak with with Brian Kelly.

We've been looking forward to this, the start of this, Tim,

two months of speculation about where the 2019

Nordian football team is headed with eight guys at the Combine and a ninth, Sam

Mustifer, gone from last year's team. There's a lot to replace. But a lot of good football

players coming back as well. Seems like I started some spring previews about a month ago. We have to recalibrate that next year because this one, it's the earliest start. I can remember March 1st, technically March 2nd, I guess. Well, you know, a lot of times the spring game has been on the last weekend of April. Now it's been pushed up to April 13th. What they want to do is, I mean, they basically have spring practice starts and it ends

six weeks later approximately. They get a good break for real spring break. They get a break for spring break.

It also gives them an opportunity to spread the practices out and get all that meeting time in between.

I get it why they do it. It used to be, I wrote about it this morning and Thursday thoughts.

There used to be 25 spring practices all open to the media, which was a pretty incredible

opportunity. It's no wonder that we had such great insight, and then I'm still in contact

with a lot of the players I used to cover, because you were around so much that they had an

opportunity to get to know you a little bit.

The nine open practices, though, including the Blue Gold game, is great for us this year.

It's great for subscribers because you get practice reports, and eight of them are full, full viewing.

That's really important.

And I want to commend Notre Dame, thank Notre Dame for that opportunity.

I don't know what went into that decision, but we will take it.

The one we don't need to be full is the first one, because we're not in pads anyway.

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