I can't believe the news today
I can't close my eyes and make it go away...
And the battle's just begun...
Dateline: Flint Lake, IN
Unhinged or untethered? Or unhinged AND untethered? It was difficult for Jerrence to determine what state of mind he was in this past week. A lot of mental processing going on. It made his head hurt.
When he thought of what transpired last Sunday, several cinematic analogies almost instantly came flooding into to his mind:
- Batman, The Dark Knight. Notre Dame has always been the good guys, the guys that play by the rules, even when it's not in their best interests. Yet, one now reads almost any article on college football (pre-Sherrone Moore) and Notre Dame is the sport's Big Bad Guy. Even after being BOHICA'd by The Committee's collective conference bias, we're now the petty ones. Spoiled. Self-interested. Huh.
- The Godfather. There's a lot of great quotes in history on the subject of betrayal. One of the most apt comes from Martin Luther who said, "Every betrayal begins with trust." And that's 400 years before the SEC even existed...
- Citizen Kane. In the oft chance that a few -- perhaps many -- of this blog's audience have never seen the Orson Welles' magnum opus, allow me to summarize: it tells the life story of a media magnet, one of the world's richest men, as told on his deathbed, where he cryptically mutters the word
"SEC""Rosebud" before shuffling off this mortal coil.
The flashbacks are not flattering: He's a man of immense power, wealth, and ego, who builds a vast newspaper empire, attempts to control politics, lives in a sprawling castle... stop me when you feel like you're seeing any parallels to college football's media partners.
 |
| "Roll Tide!" |
- Caddyshack. Finally, we all know the scene in the movie where Carl, the greenskeeper speaks of caddying in the Himalayas for the 12th son of the Lama, the Dalai himself ("big hitter")... and post-round, fearing he's going to get stiffed, inquires about receiving 'a little something, you know, for the effort' -- whereby he is told "there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness."
Complete clarity. And that's where I'm at now.
Understand this, Notre Dame: we now know no one in college football is your friend. Most dislike you, more than a few probably fear you. But every relationship in which you're involved is driven by a survival fueled self interest, first for themselves and secondly, their conferences.
ND, you probably know all of this already but still, act accordingly.
Quote of the Week
Not a great week for ND or its fanbase. Depending on which topic you choose -- CFP snub or bowl game abdication -- we're now either the poster child for legacy blue blood program entitlement or the Grinch That Stole Christmas.
One can debate whether or not the school's communications strategy, before or after last Sunday, was appropriate. Time will tell. But Churchill's correct: there is only one path at this point and that's an aggressive 'all gas, no brakes' forward.
Godspeed, Notre Dame.
Word of the Week
He was not immune to the flaws in Notre Dame's case -- head-to-head games should matter, albeit victories achieved three months earlier surely must be discounted somewhat, yes? Teams are entirely different entities from Game 1 to 12.
Plus, there was the Committee chairman Hunter Yurachek saying that the Irish were clearly valued higher than Miami, that the real razor thin comparison was between ND and Alabama... that certainly had to be the North Star for evaluation?
Ouch, Jerrence thought. Even by Shakespearean standards (the playwright who once wrote "Lord, how this world is given to lying"), Yurachek was one perfidious mofo.
Jerrence knew there'd been some pretty great liars in history. He quickly thought about people like Anna Anderson, the woman who gained a measure of fame for claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna -- the lost Russian Romanov princess (later the subject of a terrific Disney movie that his granddaughter loves).
Jerrence loved a scrappy con artist!
On the flip side, morally, he recalled R. J. Reynolds who famously testified that nicotine wasn't addictive, contradicting internal company knowledge.
Nothing 'scrappy' about that level of deceit.
Then, of course, there's history's #1 betrayer, the GOAT, Judas Iscariot.
I took the money, I spiked your drink
You miss too much these days if you stop to think.
You lead me on with those innocent eyes
You know I love the element of surpirse...
Yurachek wasn't in that league. Yet. But there was still a lot of ball game left.
December Thoughts
Someone told me long ago
There's a calm before the storm
I know -- it's been coming for some time...
We've all got strong opinions about what shook out last Sunday and what lies ahead. Here's what is now abundantly clear to Jerrence:
1. The SEC. Make no mistake, it's an SEC (ESPN) World and we're just living in it.
Imagine a 10-2 Mississippi State getting splattered 28-7 in the SEC championship, rushing for negative yardage while already bearing a 31-17 loss to a 5-7 team.
Do you think this hypothetical MSU would then be the extremely rare team to remain ranked exactly where it was beforehand?
Do you think there's anyone besides Alabama, the SEC's #1 seed, that would've taken zero damage from such a faceplant?
But we've won the last two natty's!
Do you think the Committee would've fallen on the sword over a 5th Big 10 team, USC or Michigan? Child, please.
Speaking of the latter school, the only organization having a worse week than your 'iconic' Wolverines is the Venezuelan fishing industry.
3. The ACC. Your little anti-Notre Dame PR campaign was just embarrassing. Sophomoric. But you're probably feeling pretty good about yourself ("it's not stupid if it works" -- yeah, it actually still is).
But pissing off your biggest revenue engine? That doesn't seem too clever. And it wouldn't seem to bode well for the conference's long term sustainability.
One man's opinion: you're an endangered species. You just don't know it yet.
4. The Big 12. You're the Forrest Gump of conferences. And now your commissioner, Brett Yormark, is taking shots at Bevacqua, using fancy multi-syllabic words?
The whole clip was probably AI-generated. n fact, Yormark may be AI-generated.
5. People are upset about ND declining a bowl bid?
Enlighten me: who are they hurting, exactly? The players -- the same ones who voted not to go? The "consumer audience" who's not getting the opportunity to see a motivated BYU team, The Fighting Joseph Smiths, play a Notre Dame team whose squad would likely be akin to their JV unit?
Oh yeah, ESPN. That's the aggrieved party. Cha-ching. Who, these days, has everyone asking, "How high?" when they say, "Jump!" I can't recall where I found the following quote but it sums up this blog's POV nicely:
Declining that invitation doesn’t punish BYU, and it doesn’t sabotage the roster’s development in any meaningful way, no matter how many crocodile tears and moral lectures the corporate media brainwashes the masses with.
It simply says: If our role in your ecosystem is to be leverage in September and ballast in December while you lecture us about gratitude on television, you can do it without our logo in your ad deck.
Buddy's Buddy
If Pete Bevacqua didn't know it before he probably kows now that ND Nation's 2nd favorite activity after cheering their team is criticizing their Athletic Director.
So with all due respect to our esteemed AD who is in the middle of not only a ton of awkward-to-difficult conversations with probably every senior football program leadership in the country...
...the ND football program representative who made me the most proud last week was Brady Quinn.
The guy immediately waded into the sesspool that is Social Media, prepped to go to war with all the haters (and they are Legion)...
...and didn't back down. Not even a little bit.
That's a true Bud.
RE-PETE (A shameless, illegal lift of Pete Sampson's weekly mail-bag)
With all the vitriol directed at Notre Dame these days, the million dollar question inevitably becomes, what -- if anything -- can they do about it?
What recourse do they even have?
I believe that much of the ND fanbase's anger has been mis-directed. Hate Miami all you want, for a variety of reasons, but they're the only player in the past month whose self-interest was open and entirely logical.
No, I'd be looking straight in the direction of Birmingham, AL -- SEC headquarters. Which is not to say that I'd be letting the ACC off the hook. At all. The wound opened by their clumsy politicking for 'one of their own' looks like it now has more to do with scheduling: shining a light on how ND consistently gets served the dregs of the conference as opponents.
Fine for when Brian Kelly was maybe in program-rebuilding mode (and I'm probably being kind here) but not so great for coach Freeman's aspirations where ND's meh strength-of-schedule did the Irish zero favors this year.
-----------------------------
Sayeth Mr. Sampson...
When Bevacqua goes out of his way to praise Miami’s season, referencing his relationship with Hurricanes athletic director Dan Radakovich, it’s not an idle compliment. The Irish take no issue with the schools at the top of the league’s food chain. Notre Dame’s maneuvering feels like a program trying to make sure the ACC’s best brands are allies, a divide-and-conquer approach to perhaps either force change in the league or hasten its end.
It’s not exactly clear what leverage Notre Dame has — its Olympic sports are bound to the ACC by the same grant of rights keeping the rest of the league together into the 2030s — but schools with their own television deals have some. Could Notre Dame remove its Olympic sports from the league and return to the Big East? Tie-ins with the league’s minor bowl bids clearly don’t carry much weight after this season’s opt-out. The NBC contract pays the bills in a way the ACC revenues don’t. That leaves football scheduling as the main benefit of league affiliation, but Notre Dame has already plucked the Clemson series from the league’s control.
Could Notre Dame make a CFP-contending schedule out of Clemson, Florida State, Miami, USC, Michigan and some mix of other programs spread across college football? It would probably be more compelling than the school’s current arrangement, a schedule so weak that going 10-2 wasn’t enough to return a team to the Playoff one year after it played for a national title.
Yes, Notre Dame has its own problems. Bevacqua didn’t talk much about those on Tuesday, focused more on the process of the CFP snub and mapping out his case against the ACC. When Notre Dame’s athletic director talks about permanent damage, take him at his word.
It’s not an observation. It’s a warning.
“Are we looking for an apology?” Bevacqua wondered. “To be quite frank, I don’t think an apology does anything or unwinds what has happened.”
It’s not clear Notre Dame wants one anyway.
Source: The Athletic
December 10, 2025
Cocktail of the Week
Even the Accounting and Engineering majors should be able to figure out this week's cocktail / literature's relevance...
The Pre-Professional majors, I'm not so sure.
As for the story's revenge ending, 'dare to dream', ND Nation...
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTAL
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
Alexandre Dumas's tale of Edmond Dantès's transformation from scorned sailor into the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo will make you question who your real friends are, and also make you wish you had used that one phone call at the police station to call your lawyer.
Tracking down his betrayers and serving them a taste of their own medicine is monumental for Edmond, definitely worth popping a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.
Let's pay homage to the Italian homeland of this "count" with an effervescent take on a classic Negroni to lift your spirits and deter you from carrying out your own revenge fantasy.
Yield: 1 serving
-- 1 oz. gin
-- 1 oz. sweet vermouth
-- 1 oz. Campari
-- 1 oz. freshly squeezed grapefruit juice
-- ~2 oz. champagne or prosecco
-- Orange twist or grapefruit slice, for garnish
-----------------------------
1. Fill a mixing glass with ice cubes.
2. Pour the gin, sweet vermouth, Campari, and grapefruit juice into the mixing glass.
3. Stir the ingredients well for 30 seconds in order to chill the mixture.
4. Strain the mixture from the mixing glass into an ice-filled rocks glass.
5. Pour the champagne or prosecco into the glass, allowing it to mix with the other ingredients.
6. Garnish with the orange twist or grapefruit slice.
Source: The Turn of the Screwdriver
50 Dark & Twisted Literary Cocktails
By Iphigenia Jones
Schedule 2025
August
31 @Miami L
September
13 Texas A&M L
20 Purdue W Corrigan brother reunion!
27 @Arkansas W Soooiiieeee!
October
4 Boise St. W Alumni Hall Reunion weekend, Union Pier MI
11 NC State W
18 USC W "Lincoln, We Hardly Knew Ye" (wussy)
November
1 @BC W
9 Navy W
16 @Pitt W
23 Syracuse W Final 2025 regular season tailgate
29 @Stanford W
December
Wager 2025
Team 10, here's the final tie-breaker... just a March Madness-like bracket challenge.
Pick the winners, with points being awarded as follows:
- Round 1: 1 pt. for each correct win
- Quarterfinals: 2 pts. " " "
- Semi-finals: 3 pts. " " "
- Championship: 4 pts. " " "
- Final tie-breaker: predict the Championship game total points.
Personally, I doubt I'm even going to watch much if any of the games.
Wins | ND Equivalence | Domer |
12  The Joker | "Do I really look like a guy with a plan?" ----- Ledger's Joker is mercurial, charismatic and a complete psychopath. Utterly unforgettable. Just as a Notre Dame undefeated, on-their-way-to-a-national championship-season would be. |
|
11  Otto | "Don't call me stupid!" ----- Ex-CIA operative Otto lives at the intersection of dangerous and moronic. An 'Otto season' for ND would be a rollercoaster -- a lot of fun with youth at some key positions, and likely more than it's fair share of 'that wasn't very clever' moments. | Gutsch , Sloane Daryl Jim S. Peter Tim TedBill Jim B Pat B George Alex, Feif Garrett Spit the Elder |
10  | "That's a bingo!" ----- Jew hunter Landa -- equal parts chillingly pathological and pragmatic, this character would probably represent a 10-win regular season that might make you sick to your stomach but ultimately pretty satisfied. | Jerrence, Mike C, Tim C. Mark U. Jerry P. Jerry C. Mike B. Brian W. Jim T. Mike G, Bose Jerry W Lini, Randy Greg Kyle W. Kevin M. |
9  RP McMurphy | "I'm a goddamn marvel of modern science." ----- What's the residual emotion from Cuckoo's Nest? Sadness. RP, a guy who sees things clearly but can't get out of his own way. When it doesn't end well, one is left thinking what could've been. Like a 9-win season.
|
|
8  | "I don't know who I am. Or where I'm going. None of it." ------ An apt summary of an 8-win ND season. A lot of difficult questions ultimately unanswered. Still, the Bourne trilogy rocks and JB is The Man. | |
7  | "I'm thinking I'm back..." ----- For many, ND winning only 7 games would be akin to someone shooting their dog -- and requiring appropriate payback. And like with John Wick, rationale requiring very few words of explanation. | |
6  | "Are you not entertained!" ------Probably not, if ND only won six games... but that's not the point here: it probably says a lot about me that the final ranked character is the most moral, selfless one of the bunch. | |
Sports Imitating Art
Marsyas, by Balthasar Permoser, 1680-85
Schadenfreude of the Week
Looking ahead, personally I hope:
-- A&M buries Miami
-- Oklahoma bores Alabama to death, then gets curb stomped
-- Oklahoma bores Alabama to death, then gets curb stomped
-- Oregon crushes Texas Tech
It'd also be nice to see Ohio State fall short but after that, I'm not sure I care that much.
-----------------------------------------------
Terry's Tools
As alluded earlier -- and it bears repeating that this is surely counter-intuitive, if not wholly 'off brand' -- but within the context of recent events, the University of Miami is not Enemy #1. Reasonable minds should be able to agree that they should be allowed to campaign for their playoff bona fides, however spurious one might find their rationale.
And neither is Ivan Maisel, for that matter. The guy wrote an apparently awesome book about Frank Leahy and given the time he spent with ND, Freeman & Co. and as a playoff committee member, opted to recuse himself from weighing in on ND's playoff qualifications.
The wisdom of that decision can be debated -- and who knows whether his advocacy would've changed a thing (doubtful). The better question would be why other committee members with far more obvious conflicts of interest didn't do the same... actually, THE COLLEGE PLAYOFF COMMITTEE IS ONE BIG CONFLICT OF INTEREST.
But I digress.
That's not to say there aren't more than a few villains to go around. Perhaps you've seen this t-shirt concepts floating around this week:
Catholics vs. Committee
And it's subsequent counterpart...
Catholics vs. Everybody
-------------------------------------------------
Which leads us to...
1) Greg Sankey. Here's all you need to know about the SEC Commissioner: Darth Sankey controls ESPN.
In true ACC Network fashion, the network caved and moved the show to the evening. But according to the source, Sankey also didn't like how nice the show looked, as one of the hosts had a unique ACC-driven homemade set.
ESPN then showed up at the man's house, moved his stuff, and replaced it with a generic set, all because the SEC commish didn't like what happened on an ACC Network show.
All this is to say, if Sankey is that petty, imagine what he would do to keep an undeserving Alabama team in the College Football Playoff.
In the last three years, there have been 16 conference championship game losers that were ranked in the CFP Top 25 entering the game. 15 of the 16 losers dropped in the next poll.
The lone exception: the 2025 Alabama Crimson Tide.
It's like they say, "Tradition before talent..."
As puerile as the ACC's all out smear campaign against ND was, Matt Fortuna related a the story on his The Independent podcast of how, when ACC leadership was organizing the assault, they sent out a conference-wide email which INCLUDED NOTRE DAME ON THE DISTRIBUTION LIST.
Oops.
Not exactly taking a page out of Sun Tzu's "Art of War."
3) Sherrone Moore. There are degrees of stupidity, right? Poor decisions we make on a day-to-day basis ("Oh, you wanted me to buy stewed tomatoes")...
Then there is the other end of the spectrum.
The scorch-the-earth, kill the golden goose, what-the-eff-were-you-thinking type mistakes that, typically, can ruin lives and/or end them... i.e., your Darwin Award candidates.
 |
| Lane Kiffin on Line 1... |
And yet, allow me to present Exhibit I of the latter, ex-coach Moore.
Morality aside -- you're married with three children -- you had arguably one of the 10 best college coaching jobs in America land in your lap two years ago, one you probably shouldn't have had to begin with, and you throw it away -- and a ~$30M+ revenue stream -- for what?
A, um, dalliance with a 30-something assistant?
Insert your own "Michigan Man" joke here.
Name of the Week
I like names that prompt interesting origin stories.
Like, how did they arrive at calling the lad that?!
In today's example, we have a youngster that was born roughly 20+ years after the black South African anti-apartheid activist, Steven Biko's death...
...and after Peter Gabriel's song.
Both would have been solid inspiration in my mind.
I give you: Biko Johnson
Which is exactly how we like it: great name, great effort, loser to Notre Dame.
And the eyes of the world are watching now...
Trivia
Q. Only two songs with 5/4 beats have made the Billboard Top 100. One is Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. The other is:
1) Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (Traffic)
2) Mercy Mercy Me (Marvin Gaye)
3) Living in the Past (Jethro Tull)
4) Lido Shuffle (Boz Scaggs)
------
(Last blog's answer: "The Dock of the Bay" was recorded a mere three days before Otis Redding died in a plane crash, December 10, 1967.
Final Thoughts
May I suggest reading... and waiting for the next Gruley thriller.
While I know nothing about Bryan's latest story, one can only hope it involves...
An SEC commissioner who while vacationing in northern Michigan stumbles into a bar only to be confronted by a bi-polar former Zamboni driver on a bender who after nearly going to prison for a crime he didn't commit tries to find Jesus but instead discovers on-line gambling leading to him losing his life savings after betting Notre Dame to win the national championship only to find out they didn't even make the playoffs due to some southern shenanigans that his hot female attorney friend uncovered involving a plot to ensure a team south of the Mason-Dixon line wins it all...
And he wants answers from the Commish....
Like I said, I don't know what the book is about. But a girl can dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment