Right on. Well, let's dive into part two of the Irish Breakdown podcast brought to by our friends over at Fanduil.

It's the Friday Free For All Mailbag covered some breaking news, not necessarily so much breaking because it happened last night.

But, Brian, let's dive into kind of the meat and potatoes of the rest of this Friday Free For All Mailbag.

Yeah, and we'll get started off with kind of similar things.

Obviously, there will be a lot more questions about the coaching staff, but we knocked out some of

the main ones.

But let's go and get rocking and rolling here.

From Notre Dame, it just means more true or false.

If Notre Dame's

defense takes a semi-significant step back next year, the bulk of the blame should be placed

on Coach Marcus Freeman, not Chris Ash. A hundred percent. I mean, you're the head football

coach. You're a defensive coordinator. You're a defensive guy. The one thing that you expect

the defensive head coach to do is make sure the defense is on point. I mean, I don't know what else

is more important than making sure your coordinators are doing a good job, making sure your assistant

coaches are developing young people on and off the field. There is no donor's hand you need to shake, no conference you need to speak at, no media appearance, more important than making sure that is happening in your program.

Now, Chris Ash will also deserve a good chunk of that, too.

So I don't know actually that I'd say bulk, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with the head football coach. Now, that doesn't mean every time Chris Ash makes a bad call, we're going to be like, freaking Freeman, you know what I mean? Like we'll be critical of the job Ash does when it's required. We'll praise the job that Chris Ash does when it's, when it's, you know, when it, the situation calls for it and call it down the middle. Hopefully we're doing a lot more praising of Chris Ash next year than we are criticizing. But hence the title, Irish breakdown will break down the good and the bad. And, uh, but at the end of the day when a team falls short, it's, it's on to Marcus Freeman to ensure that like, look, Chris Ashton, I thought a terrible job the first two weeks, first two games of season.

But at the same time, it's like, well, did the head coach not know that this is what they were going to do? Was he not aware that they were not going to be blue? was there any point in the time in the games where he was like, hey, man, we might actually want to heat this guy up a little bit. We may want to make this adjustment. Hey, this player is getting torched out there. Let's give so-and-so a try. That's what a head coach should do. And he didn't do that. And hopefully that won't be the case. But, you know, when he did finally get involved, I think we saw things continue in a very impressive rate, and hopefully that continues in 2026.

Absolutely. I mean, we're going to see two completely different sample sizes in back-to-back

years. In 2025, they were without a defensive coordinator at the start of the year,

but they had every single assistant coming back. This year, they have a returning defensive coordinator at the start of the year, but they had every single

assistant coming back. This year, they have a returning defensive coordinator, and all the

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