I.B. Nation, welcome back to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast brought to you by Fandul.

It is Wednesday. We are halfway through game week.

Right now, Notre Dame is preparing to take on the Arkansas Razorbacks for the first time in program history Saturday afternoon when they traveled down to Fayetteville for just their second road game of the season.

This is a big one, Brian. Like we talked about yesterday, we walked through what's at stake and we previewed Arkansas.

Big picture. Today, we're talking a little bit more granular and we're diving into the matchup on Notre Dame's offense against Arkansas's defense.

We're going to look at the flip side of the coin, talk Notre Dame defense versus Arkansas

offense, which is really the matchup that I know a lot of people are keeping their eyes on for this

weekend. But first, we are going to be talking about the Notre Dame offense versus Arkansas's

defense. And this is the side of the ball, Brian, that we weren't expecting to have this much

pressure put on them this early in the season. I mean, really a month ago, when we were talking about the expectations for this unit, it was, hey, get CJ comfortable, might have a performance or two where it shows and lets everybody know, hey, he's the guy, rely on Jeremiah. I love Judarian Price. And you have playmakers on the perimeter. But now that narrative has changed a little bit to where, hey, Notre Dame's offense is going to have to be ready to roll every single week. You know, it's funny, Trevor, it was almost kind of like, hey, if you can just get to 24 to 27 every game, you're going to be fine. Now it's like if you scored 26 points in all three of your games, you're o' and three. I mean, you know, like, it's, it's just kind of wild. If you scored 27 in each of your games, you are oh and three, because that means you would have tied Miami at the end of the game, and they would have won and no, gone in overtime, and you didn't score. It's, it's really hard to consider that, like, if they scored 30 points a game, they'd be one in one and another game would have to get decided in overtime. I mean, it's just, it's kind of crazy to think about, Trev, that we thought that the defensive matchup was going to allow this offense to kind of take some time to grow up. And now we're sitting here going into this matchup saying, well, you boys better be ready to handle your business in a shootout because that's

what this game is looking like. Now, hopefully it doesn't play out that way, Trab. Hopefully

the defense figures some things out and gets back to playing Notre Dame football instead of

whatever mess we saw the first three weeks. But, you know, look, the good news is, though, is that

in this matchup, you're an offense that is playing really good football.

And I would say the last really, I mean, really take your last 10 quarters of football offensive,

you've been pretty good.

I mean, even the Miami game,

you scored 17 points in the second half of that game. You scored 33 offensive points against Texas A&M in a game where, honestly, if you would have gotten over a minute left,

and all you needed was a minute against A&M at the end of that game,

and I think they go down and score,

and then they just absolutely eviscerated Purdue last week.

So the good news is this offense is playing at a high level.

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