Old time football made it’s appearance in Notre Dame stadium on senior day. Bitterly cold, snow swirling and a nice cold wind blowing all over. Freezing temps – all this reminded me of the old days – November weather and bitterly cold Thanksgiving Day games played on frozen sloppy ground. I think it’s over for our stadiums natural grass field – time to move on to some type of field turf. It is just too easy to get injured on a field in this bad condition. With that said, Kelly continues to try a lateral running game, when even if a lane was there the running back slipped on the cut.

It really seems to me that opponents know our play calls even before Kelly makes them – position groups or whatever this has been a bad year on Chuck Martin’s part – small time football – ok for Grand Valley but not in the big leagues.

On what, if I remember is the first game against Temple ND actually scored on the first possession on a beautiful pass for a 61 yd TD – Rees to Daniels. As usual Tommy, God love him, also threw a pick in the 4th quarter but with one TD pass and one pick he actually matched the talented BYU QB who is quite heralded. ND sealed this game with some hard rushing by McDaniel (117 yds) Folston about 70 yds for an evenly balanced attack – 235 yds pass/rush. Hero of the game, FG kicker Brindza – he hit 3 with a 51 yarder to put the game away.

Finally, we saw a team that was jacked up to play – what would have been nice in the preceding games. ILB’s Fox and Calabrese played their best games – seems Diaco cut them loose to just play football instead of having them play in a straight jacket all year. The depleted DL was superb with Jarron Jones playing a truly great game – big stops, blocked FG that crushed BYU’s hopes – kid is going to be good. Tuitt stepped up again and I believe BYU QB Hill never wants to see him again. Only enigma is Mathias Farley – he just can’t tackle – what happened to him? he played outstanding last year.

So kudos to this team, now at 8-3 and really do have a chance against Stanford – if only the coaches got out of the way.

Tommy Rees – 7000 yards and 59 TD passes sorta makes up for all his travails of the last 4 years. Needs 2 more to pass Jimmy Clausen and land at #2 behind all time leader Brady Quinn – who the hell would have ever thought that 4 years ago. Make no mistake, he still has a few picks left in him but kid can hold his head high. Not many can say “I was a ND QB and threw 60+ TD passes” not even in their wildest dreams. Whatever he does in the future I will always be grateful for what he did for ND football, period!!!