Welcome to Irish Illustrated Insider, brought to you by Irish Illustrated.com.

I'm back with our full crew of Tim O'Malley and Tim Priester.

We've run our 40-yard dashes.

We've done our broad jumps.

And we're going to talk a little basketball, too, as we're just hours away from March.

Notre Dame's coming off of, frankly, its worst performance of the year, probably by a wide margin at Florida State over the weekend.

Scabbling a little bit on this three-game road trip.

But they sort of come out of it, no worse for where in terms of their ACC tournament standings, but probably worse for

where in terms of where the season might go in the next month.

And Mike Bray commented pretty bluntly about it after the game, that if their offense

doesn't get better, it's going to be a really quick march.

I'm really surprised with the way, and I realize it was a three-game road trip to Georgia Tech

Wake Forest and Florida State, but really surprised with the way they played.

And he's, Mike Bray's absolutely right.

I mean, the offensive efficiency has gone down the drain here.

And that was on the heels of probably their three best games of the year, certainly

consecutively in North Carolina at Clemson and Louisville.

They just played like a team that was worn out, and they really shouldn't have been because their schedule stretched out a little bit.

Instead of coming home from Wake Forest and then flying back to Tallahassee for the weekend, they stayed out on the road and went to Tallahassee. But that, you know, under the circumstances, and I know they were prepping for midterms, right? Or in the midst of, yeah, I mean, that would be. Unless they're doing it during timeouts. That would be, I make you remember during the Lou Holtz years, how that would impact the football team during the season.

But, I mean, they just played really, really poorly.

Their defense is rarely very good, and it wasn't again.

But then you expect that offensive efficiency to be there, and it wasn't even close on Saturday.

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