Brian, let's get into the second part of this defensive conversation here in the Irish

Breakdown podcast brought you by our friends over at Van Duel. And we just got done talking about what we know about this defense. And it's a lot of good. A lot of good. Your margin for error is bigger. You have star power on the defensive side of the ball. Your defensive line is bigger. You're going into year two of your defensive coordinator. But as similar to the offensive side of the ball,

as promising as a lot of those things are, there's still some unknowns. That's why we're excited

to go out to practice tomorrow and see this team for the first time. The first time we get to

see the 2026 version of the Notre Dame football team. But with any offseason, with any team in the

country, there does come some questions. One of the things

that we talked about a lot in the earlier segment was about the linebacking unit and how it's deep

and you got guys like Drake and Kingston and guys that could become stars. But this spring,

what is that linebacker unit going to look like? Because yesterday during the kind of introductory

press conference of spring, Rob Hunt and Lauren Landau and Marcus Freeman all talked about how a linebacker unit's

going to be pretty thin.

Drake's out recovering from a hip surgery, cleaning some stuff up,

Kingston's still out nursing the ACL,

Madan Framo's out, kind of nursing a wrist injury,

and then Kahunuki is still not even going to be full go for a couple of weeks.

So really, that's kind of your four middle linebackers on the roster as of right now.

And so it kind of begs the question of, hey, this spring, what is it going to look like?

Because you're left over with a lot of talent, but it's a lot of wills.

So who starts taking reps where?

Very interested to see how that kind of works itself out. I mean, you talk about what we don't know this spring. Who the heck is going to play linebacker? And like where? You said, who's taking mic reps? Is it going to be Tommy Paulus? Is it going to be like, is it going to be just Thomas Davis Jr. trotting out? Or do they have to kind of cross-trained J. Nawsbury? And then the, the danger is, okay, let's say you're cross-training J. Nawsbury. Now is he losing opportunities to continue to go out there and improve as the will? You know, so it's like you're not prepping for a game.

So you don't necessarily have to put them both on the first team at the same time if,

you know, Jalen Seed and Jaden Osbury. But at the same time, you also want to make sure that

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