I.

I.B. Nation, welcome back to another edition of the Irish Breakdown podcast, to you by our friends of Fanduil. And that is Sean Davis. You all remember him. You all know him. I'm Brian Driscoll. And here, we are here ready to talk football today. Sean and I were having a conversation the other day and thought it would be a great topic to have for a podcast. And you guys know how Sean and I often do shows together. We are having conversations. We're like, you know what, man? Let's talk to the people about this. And let's kind of take this public. And I think that the conversation today, Sean, is, you know, obviously there's a lot of frustration as you watch these

playoff games. You're thinking like, Notre Dame could beat that team, their name could beat that team, their name could beat that team. And we can talk all we want till we're blue in the face about how Notre Dame got screwed out of the playoffs. And while I believe the Nurtain did get screwed out of the playoffs, the other thing we've also said is you put yourself in that situation by losing two football games.

And as we said, all offseason, all you got to do is The other thing we've also said is you put yourself in that situation by losing two football games.

And as we said, all off season, all you got to do is go one and one coming out of the break and you're good to go.

And they weren't able to do that.

So this is the committee has some blame, but also Notre Dame's football program has areas where they need to continue to grow.

And we saw Notre Dame make a run at the title game last year and then played a game that wasn't relatively, wasn't overly competitive. And you look at teams this year and there's a lot of questions about could they bid Indiana? Could they not beat Indiana? And there's a threat on their board. A good buddy of mine was like, I don't know that they could beat Indiana because I don't trust this

offensive line right now to play at a level that could beat Indiana.

You know, we could have that debate.

We don't necessarily know because they didn't play.

All I know is, no name is the last team to beat Indiana, but both of those teams look

different.

And one of the starting offensive linemen that played on

that offensive line to beat Indiana last year, it's now starting for Indiana. And so we got to talk

and it started with being line-driven and then kind of went out kind of bigger picture. And we said,

you know, what are sort of the things that we're seeing that are themes of teams that are making runs in the playoff, Sean? And so we really came down to like five things that we're seeing that are themes of teams that are making runs in the playoff,

Sean. And so we really came down to like five things that we think are at the top of the

list of if you want to win three to four games and win a championship, you've got to do these

things. And so we're going to talk about those things. We're going to talk about is Notre

name there? Do they need to get there?

And not every team has all five of these, but we're seeing something,

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