Welcome back to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast brought to you by Fandul.

Happy Monday, everybody.

It is Notre Dame's second bye week of the season, which means a couple of things.

One, after a lot of travel, after a lot of busy weekends, Brian and I also get a little bit of a bye week.

Not to worry, we're still coming at you with a lot of content.

But we needed a little bit of a rejuvenating, a little bit of a rejuvenating week here, Brian, and I'm excited to talk some Notre Dame off-season or Notre Dame bi-week content with you this week, breaking down, you know, some things that Notre Dame has to fix and diving into their remaining opponents. There's a lot of good topics that we're going to cover today,

and I'm excited to jump in.

Well, depending on how you look at it, we're either past the halfway point of the season or we're almost to the halfway point of the season, depending on how far you think Notre Dame is going to go in the postseason this year, and that'll be something that we talk about today, Tref. but we're kind of treating this like sort of this biweek like the midterms, right?

I mean, that's kind of how we're going to look at this. Yes, they've played seven games. They've got five left. But we anticipate Notre Dame being a team that's going to play at least two more games in the postseason. And so I kind of look at to say look let's let's evaluate who this team is. Let's evaluate the schedule. Let's look at what this team can be, what needs to happen for them to get there. So like today, we're going to talk about the USC game, what it meant for Notre Dame. We said last week, look, we're not going to worry about the playoffs until after the USC game. Well, Notreardame won that game, won it by double digits.

And so we're going to talk about that this week and what that game means. We're going to look at the schedule, the final five games of the schedule, see what's left on it. And then at the end of this segment, this show, we're going to talk about the five players on offense and the one coach on offense. and then the five players on defense and then the one

coach on defense that we both think, and we have different lists, are most important to

this team achieving its full potential, not just down the stretch, but then also in the postseason.

That'll be today's show. Tomorrow we're going to talk about grades. We're going to hand out grades

for the first half. We'll do some overall offensive grades. We'll grade position groups. We we're going to talk about grades. We're going to hand out grades for the first half.

We'll do some overall offensive grades.

We'll grade position groups.

We'll do the same thing for defense.

And then we'll break down some improvements that we want to see this team make down the stretch. What are some areas where Notre Dame can get better? that could mean things

are good at but need to be great at,

things that they're not good at that they need to get good at

and have some fun with that.

Do offensive defense Wednesday. It is a buy week,

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