Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider, brought you by Irish Illustrated.com. It's a website.

Some might call it a blog. I'm Pete Samson, joined by Tim Priester and Tim O'Malley. It is Stanford

Week, which in the summer seemed exciting.

And now the luster is completely off really for both teams.

The good news is that it's going to be 72 degrees and sunny on Saturday,

so it should be good conditions for this game for the first time in a while.

But you guys, I'm not really sure where Notre Dame goes from here, but I also feel like Stanford is in the same position. I don't know where they go from here either. So it's just

from the Notre Dame perspective, what do they really need to clean up the most? What do you think

has to happen Saturday night for Notre Dame to sort of turn this around?

They have to run the football.

Well, forget about that because they're going to throw the heck of it, which they do anyway.

But this is an opponent that you're going to throw the football against.

You know, I mean, whether Christian McCaffrey plays or not, and he is definitely banged up,

Stanford's going to load the offensive line, they'll fan out those eight guys up front,

and they'll have a fullback in front of Bryce Love, the backup running back who only has 21 carries,

and they're going to run the football, and if Norden can stop that, they're going to win.

If it's like Michigan State, they're not going to win.

Yeah, you know, it comes down to, I just think that Stanford has the identity that you explained. They're going to go into a road game plan with an identity. They're going to stick with it. They have a coach that has never lost three in a row. He's lost two in a row. and he's going to the worst thing that happened

in Notre Dame

was the Stanford lost two in a row

here coming into this game

and I don't just mean because of the number

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