All right, Brian, on part three of today's show here on the Irish Breakdown podcast,

we're getting ready to talk about defensive grades.

And same format here.

We're talking situational football.

We're going, you know, run game, past game, situational overall.

But now we're looking at it from a defense's perspective.

How do you think so far through this?

Because the defense has been an interesting topic of conversation so far this season.

I'm interested to see where your grades fall on this one.

It has.

I mean, this is the side of the ball that we thought was going to be the best part of the football

team so far.

And again, to remind people, this isn't, this isn't like, okay, but they rank really

well here. They rank really well there. There's no doubt that Notre Dame is a better team and

more talented than the teams that they've played. It's more so, but are they playing to their

standard? So you could say, well, man, they beat NC State in Boise State and back-to-back

games by a combined score of what was it like 64 to 14. Yeah, like, yeah, that's great. But,

but again, you know how I've always worked. It's not about are you doing

better than your opponent? Are you playing to a certain standard? And to me, when I look at this

defensive football team, the standard is here. And while they've played better lately,

the overall performances, if you take it in its entirety, has been very disappointing.

Having said that, I have more optimism than what my grades would otherwise show because of the direction they're going and because I do believe the talent is still there.

...