Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast, brought to you by our friends over at Fandall. Happy Wednesday. You guys know what that means. It is time for the Notre Dame football midweek rundown, and we're covering a lot of different topics today. Brian was at practice earlier this morning, so we're going to kick off today's show by going over a practice recap. He got to see a lot of awesome things on there. His practice report is already up. You've known that if you're a premium message board subscriber

or boards at irishbreakdown.com. And then afterwards, we're going to dive into a couple of different

Notre Dame topics. First one being the transfer portal class. And once again, you can kind of put

underlooked or overlooked and Notre Dame in the same sentence pretty

consistently and that doesn't stop with the transfer portal class. So we're going to talk about

why that is and in the impact of what the transfer portal class is going to have in 2026. And then

we're going to talk about some potential additions to Notre Dame schedule. This isn't

Intel. It's just talking about who we would like to see on Notre Dame schedule. We're going to kind of talk about two different buckets. First one being just traditional rivals and then second one being kind of new rivalries that Notre Dame should have on their schedule regularly. And then as you guys already have done in the chat so far, we're wrapping everything up today with a daily mailbag. So make sure you get get those questions in throughout the show mb for mailbag or a mailbox emoji lets us know to set that question aside but brian we have a loaded slate today man very much looking forward to talking about what we got on the docket today yeah it's going to be fun man we were we were kind of sitting here I mean just to give you guys a little bit of insight into sometimes how this gets put together. Sometimes we have these really well thought out plans and the weeks mapped out and Sunday night, Trevor and I know what we're going to talk about. Today it was kind of like, I really don't know what we're going to discuss today other than the practice. I was hoping to get some recruiting stuff talked about, but I haven't gotten enough confirmation yet.

You know, final confirmation of who's going to be on campus this weekend, and there was a couple of things. But this didn't seem like they were the perfect time for it. And then off of a couple topics just kind of hit us. And we're like, ooh, that'll be a real fun topic to talk about. So that's where the topics came from today, Trev. but obviously and then of course we'll have a mailbag on there there's already a lot of

questions that have been put in there already salty's put in about 45 questions already and so we have a few of those but look forward to answer some of those at the end as part of a daily mailbag but this format's really fun you know these are going to be kind of somewhat rapid fire topics not rapid fire like what sean does at night you know where it's like a minute or two per answer. I mean, more like, you know, 30 minutes or so per topic and just get through a lot of different topics. And then there was one topic we thought about talking about today because I kind of had a rant I wanted to do a little bit today. Not that I like the plan rants, but just something I know I'm going to get

fired up about. But we had somebody asked that question in the mailbag. I kind of asked someone

to ask that question. Like somebody please ask about this. And so we'll have a little rant at the

beginning of the mailbag today as well where I'm going to go off a little bit on some of the

whiners in the SEC. Boohoo. Committee only gave us five teams. You know, so, yeah, I'll have a little fun to talk about that. But hey, Trev, let's first start about talking a little bit of practice. Yeah, Notre Dame just wrapped up their seventh practice. So they're really inching up on the halfway point of spring. What do they get like 15 practices? Just finished practice number seven. So almost at that halfway point. Brian, you were there this morning. There's a lot that stuck out to you overall. We're going to kind of break this down by position group and just some of the takeaways that he had. Of course, with Notre Dame, you kind of have to start with the quarterback position. And I know you put some interesting things in your intel report that's up currently on the premium message board. So let's start there, Brian. What did you see from the quarterbacks today? Well, you know, didn't see a ton from CJ and Nolan Grubbs today. Nolan had a freshman day today. You know, just footwork and timing wasn't, wasn't right. CJ wasn't his typical super sharp self. Don't care. Everybody has those

days. And for all we know, CJ tore up when they got the team and seven on seven and one-on-ones.

He just wasn't super sharp during the RVA. But this is the best I've seen Blake Heabert look.

And it wasn't just like the ball always comes out of his hand impressively, Trave. We've talked about that. Like the kid can spin it. And if he, I made this joke with some of the other day. If he throws and there's like no receiver, if he just drops back and throws it and there's no receiver, you're like, dude, that's pretty. But then when there's like a receiver he's got to throw to, you're like, that was pretty until we saw it was like seven feet over the head of the intended target. Like he'll just miss badly or he'll drive it. And a big reason why is there's a lack of timing, a lack of continuity in his throwing mechanics. His feet and arm don't work together and he rushes things a lot.

I've said before, I think his arm speed is too fast. He gets through the throwing zone too

quickly with his arm and his feet kind of get in some trouble. But what I saw today was a much

cleaner looking Blake Hebert. It seemed to me like that Coach Goodduly's been really working with him,

like maybe slowing things down a little bit physically.

His feet weren't as rushed.

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