What's Your Verb - 12/29

The GM and I put together 4 groups of bowl games for the confidence pool. If you don't know what the JO Confidence Pool is, you should and you should be participating. Either the first set of games ended the Central Michigan/Florida Atlantic game.

Being the casual fan that I am of college football I figured out two things from the first set of games.

1. If you are a casual fan you might as well not worry about the first set of games because you know nothing about the teams and will probably get most of the games wrong. In my case, I actually only got 1 right. South Florida. Yea, that was really bad! I am going to bounce back in a big way here coming up.

2. I think there are some serious problems in South Bend.

Here is why I say there may be some serious problems up there.

I know they won the game 49-21 over a team that was playing at home. I know it wasn't your usual home game being that it was in Hawaii and it could have been taken as a vacation. You know what, they did treat it as a vacation and still won by that much. Really? Why is everyone getting so excited about this win?

Hawaii was horrible this year. They only made a bowl game because they played a bunch of horrible teams at home and won because no one could be focused enough to win there. Ok, so Notre Dame was able to focus enough when a lot of other teams couldn't. That's great! THEY SHOULD HAVE! If you think you a legitimate team in college that shouldn't have been a surprise.

I hear a lot of people saying, "this could be a program changing game" or "this is a turning point for Clausen" or "this should really get Charlie Weis on the right track".

If any of these things are true, then all I know is this, Notre Dame was in much worse shape then most of thought they were.

And, I promise all of you Irish fans this, this is not a turning point for anything. This was Hawaii. It wasn't New Year's Day, it wasn't the BCS.

It proved nothing to me except that Weis and the Irish still have plenty of work to do to get anywhere close to back in the National Spotlight and in the conversation with Florida, Oklahoma, Texas and USC.