All right, Brian, in the final part of today's show here in the Irish Breakdown podcast brought to you by our friends over at Fanduil,

we're going to be talking about the Pittsburgh Panthers, Notre Dame's, what, 10th opponent of the regular season,

and likely their final ranked opponent of the regular season.

Pitt enters this matchup at 7 and 2.

For jumping in the top.

No.

No, I was being a little nice of likely this will be their final reponent of the regular

season.

But this is a team, Brian, that you and I were both pretty high on coming into the season

because of what they did last year.

The biggest question with this team was, what is this pit team going to be? In 2024, they started out 7 and 0. They were undefeated. And then after some injuries, the wheels fell off. They lost six straight games. They ended 7 and 6. You fast forward to this season, and it's kind of the opposite. You know, they start out 2 and two, Eli Holstein, the quarterback that I was really high on, just he didn't end up panning out. His stats didn't look as bad, but you see how it was in games, and it was just really inconsistent. They make the quarterback switch to Mason Heinzsche, and they're now on a five-game win streak. They're looking to extend that to six, despite some comments from their head coach.

This is a really big matchup that's going to be happening inside of Accrescher Stadium.

So, Brian, when you look at this pit team, like I said, the expectations of that, especially from us,

like we were higher on them.

We said that this was probably going to be their toughest opponent in the home stretch,

especially in November.

What is your overall outlook on this team?

How have they kind of met the expectations up to this point of what you thought this team would be?

They've been a little banged up this year, too.

But this year, they're overcoming it.

Desmond Reed, who we both had on our all opponent team, has been banged up all year.

He hasn't had the consistent impact that we thought he would have.

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