Notre Dame <t>Looks like WF will be without their best WR for the game next sat. Greg Dortch is out for the season after abdominal surgery yesterday eve. He had 10 catches for 167yds and 4 TDs against Louisville yesterday. He had 1290 all purpose yds this season so far.</t>
True and we learned last year that head to head doesn't really mean much. PSU beat OSU on the field and yet when it came to the playoffs it didn't mean much and the committee gave the slot to Ohio State over B1G Champion PSU.
But PSU lost to Pitt and was routed by Michigan while OSU only sustained a narrow loss on the road to PSU. Plus, the Buckeyes had a tougher non conference schedule. The interesting thing is that the reverse could happen this year. The Buckeyes still have to travel to Iowa and Michigan and play Sparty at home. They might lose one of those games. PSU has to go to East Laning next Saturday but if they beat MSU, they likely will run the table but not play in the B10 championship since they would lose the head-to-head tiebreaker with OSU. One fly in the ointment is that the B10 performed very poorly in its last two playoff games. That might come to haunt them this year if a 1 loss Big 10 team is measured alongside others although OSU and Urban are pretty prominent brand names.
Miami is like your drunk uncle still somehow able to walk but wobbly and on the verge of falling down in a glorious manner. As happy as I am with their improvement this season they are one year away from actually being considered for competing in the championship. Since our strength is in our young defense Notre Dame needs to pound the ball and wear them out as our offense is so slow in getting their rhythm going. Notre Dame is playing some good ball at the moment. Wins and losses will put everything into perspective soon enough.
Good ICON video on the NCState game. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fGSua6MeUZ8" frameborder="0" gesture="media"></iframe> Also it would sure be nice if NCState went out and beat Clemson. Would help our cause. USC went out and beat the crap out of Az. State helped us a lot as well and naturally we'd like to see all of our opponents win all their games except against us! MSU loss to Northwestern wasn't helpful.
Notre Dame <r>The Irish are #3 in the first playoff rankings. I have to admit, starting out unranked I was going to be happy with finding a way to win 9 games and showing some improvement all around. Seeing ND in the spot they are right now is hard to believe. Still a long way to go and who knows what will happen. Gotta be happy at this point though. <E></E> Hopefully they finish strong.</r>
All of our remaining opponents have good records. If we win out, it's difficult to see anyone jumping us. And then the two teams in front of us will almost certainly play each other.
Gipper, either Alabama or Georgia will have at least one loss and they could have more at the end of the year.
Corey, the Auburn game is always a big question mark, but 3 of our last 4 games are against ranked SEC West teams. I will take a W and move on to the SEC Championship game right now. Finishing undefeated almost always requires a lucky win. We'll see.