Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast, brought to you by our friends over at Fandul. Happy Thursday, everybody.

You guys know what that means. We got spring football tomorrow, Brian.

And I will be up at Notre Dame. I'll be seeing you in person. We'll be getting out to practice.

And we're going to have our first look at the 2026 Notre Dame football team. And I'm beyond excited to be up

there. And it's our first look of what we hope to be a championship caliber football team.

And it kind of brings us to the topic of today's show, man. There's a lot of things that we

know about this team. And then there's some things that we don't know. And the questions that we pose that we don't necessarily know, as much as I would love to, we're not going to find out tomorrow and get everything answered top to bottom just tomorrow or else I'd be a lot less stressed about this upcoming season. But it's going to be an ongoing evaluation. So that's kind of what we're breaking down in today's show.

And the first couple parts of the show, we're talking about the Notre Dame offense. We're breaking down to what we know versus what we don't know. And then we're going to do the same thing on the defensive side of the ball, talk about what we know about this defense and still what we don't know. And then we're going to wrap everything up today by talking about some of the most intriguing position battles that are going to start the spring.

Some will likely carry over into the summer.

New additions

might play a factor that come in in the summer. So there's a lot of fun things to talk about today,

man, but I'm just excited that we're going to be up at Notre Dame watching practice tomorrow

morning. Yeah, I mean, I love this time of year because they've been at work since January as a team.

But this is our first glance at what this team is going to look like.

And in the past, it was, yeah, this is our first glance at what this team is going to look like.

But there's 15, 18 kids that are going to show up this summer.

And it was always like, you know, half of the recruiting class would enroll early. The other half would show up in the summer. And then like, you know, two thirds of the transfer portal class would show up in the spring. And then the other half shows up in the summer. I mean, if you think about it, both Collins and Malachi Fields the last two years, for example, were two very important receiver pickups for

Notre Dame, but they didn't start practicing until the summer. They weren't here in the spring

both times. Now, Bo was around, but he couldn't participate in practice. Ty Washington couldn't do

that last year. And that's somewhat true this year. Obviously, Ian Primer's not going to be here

this spring, Ben Nichols, Gregory

Patrick, Teddy Gerard, and then, of course, in the transfer portal, DJ McKinney. But basically,

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