I.B.Nation. Welcome back to another edition of the Irish Breakdown podcast. It's Monday. And that means for now, that means RTCF time. We're going to have a scheduling change when we get to the season where Sean and I are going to be doing RTCF through the season. In the past, we have kind of stopped doing RTCF during the season, but Sean and I were like, you know what? Let's keep this thing rolling through the season. There's a lot of cool things we can do with this during the season. So we are actually going to keep RTCF rolling through the season. It will not be on Monday, but we will have it later in the week. I'm excited about that. I know Sean and I had a conversation

about it last week, figured it out. I'm excited about it. I know he's excited about it because

but this is going to be a fun, fun season, Sean, and we're going to talk a little bit about

that today. RTCF, for those who don't know, R stands for recruiting. T stands for a team topic, a Notre Dame team topic,

and then CF stands for a college football topic. So recruiting-wise today, we're going to kind

of talk about the state of recruiting at the tight end position, past, present, future. We're going to then,

during our team topic, Sean brought this topic up to me a couple weeks ago,

and we've been waiting to get to it.

And it was a great idea, a great topic.

And it's what makes you think that this team is going to be different than what we've seen in the past?

Meaning, we've seen Notre Dame make runs to the semifinals or the championship game in the last 15 years.

In 2012, they did it.

In 2018, they did it.

In 2020, they did it.

In every single season that followed, Notre Dame took a step back to some degree.

Record didn't always reflect it, but the team was never as good the following year.

Will this team be any different? That's question

number one. And then if it is different, what makes you think it'll be different? And so we're

going to dive into that today. And then the third topic is going to look at. We're going to

break down who we think, Sean and I think, are the top title contenders in each conference, not conference

championship title contenders, but the teams that we think in each league have the best shot

or the legitimate shot, who are kind of the tier one teams of the 2025 season, not tier one

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