Welcome to another edition of Irish Illustrated Insider, brought to you by Irish Illustrated.com.

I'm Tim Priester with Pete Samson and Tim O'Malley in the wake of Nordheim's big win at Duke on Saturday.

And of course, news of Jalen Smith declaring for the NFL draft.

No surprise there, and of course plenty of recruiting to talk about.

Let's start with basketball, though, because I don't think any of us expected under the circumstances for Nordium to go to Duke and come away with a win.

But we really shouldn't be surprised.

Mike Bray does this quite frequently, and it's not quite the same Duke basketball team that won a national title. I'm still surprised, though, because this is the best. Pete had just mentioned it. I mean, I said it's a stunning win. They've never won at Duke. You did a great story on all his road wins, and certainly last year going to Tobacco Road in North Carolina winning that game, winning at Louisville. This is remarkable. To go beat Duke at Duke. And they're not the national championship. Duke team. They're a number, they're a top ten team. No doubt about it. All their guys. Not deep either, of course. No, but four other guys would start for every team of the country.

There's nothing wrong with Duke.

And to win that, to win that game, not to just go play well, but to win that game

after losing them by 30 last year with a better team is remarkable. Yeah, Bray's had bigger wins. There's no question. I mean, he had a handful of them last year, especially, you know, in the NCAA tournament.

He had one against Duke last year that was bigger.

He has not had more shocking wins than this one.

I mean, this is just, you know, we the NCAA tournament. He had one against Duke last year. Yeah, he has not had more shocking wins than this one.

I mean, this is just, you know, we can talk about, oh, they're good on the road, and, you know, he can mix and match, and they figure out a way to win a game. They never figure out a way to win this game. I mean, this win never happens for him, so. Literally, it has never happened to do that with this roster.

I mean, okay, Duke doesn't play a whole lot of guys. Notre Dame doesn't either. They played some new guys. I mean, Rex Fluger is somebody we really haven't heard much from all year. And I think in recruiting and watching his son me, you're like, this is a guy who can come in and help you, you know, get you eight points here, get you ten points there, get you, you know, a couple threes, you know, in this game. But, you know, to do that at Duke over the weekend when I absolutely had to do it. Because on the broadcast, they made a good point. Notre Dame was not going to win that game with defense because Notre Dame doesn't play good defense. but they can, if they can score in the 90s, they're going to beat a whole lot of teams, including Duke. But you didn't expect them to score in the 90s in this game, you know. But, you know, when I look at this Nordame team, I think I said it last week. I mean, individually you see, there are a lot of good individual parts, but it hadn't come together as a team.

And even going into Duke, after defeating Georgia Tech at home earlier in a week, it was like,

okay, you can lose this game. You're going to come home and play Virginia Tech and Boston College at home. You can come out of that four and three, and then you move on. But Nortem went in there

and played so courageously, and there's no doubt that

their experience last year helped guys like Vestoria and Jackson and Colson, not so much

August, who we've seen many times shrinks up a little bit when he gets into those situations.

But when he had to rebound, he did, when he had to get a funny rebound off the rim on a poor free throw

attempt by Jackson. He came up with a rebound and then miraculously made two free throws to

...