Notre Dame football has been down a long time. A really long time. The last time Notre Dame football was Notre Dame football, Bill Clinton was in office, and America was soon to find out you could do more with cigars than smoke’em. That’s just too long.

The theories to why ND has been are many, and I won’t get into most of them here. We simply don’t know for sure whether they have credence or not. However, there is one theory, that I will go into, and it is one that I believe to be 100% true.

Notre Dame (contrary to what Beano Cook would say) simply was not getting the material. Well, not elite material anyway. Not a guy that came in from day 1, and made a coach say, “Holy hell, we need to get him on the field…like yesterday.”

You can talk about player development, and leadership, and this and that, but the fact is, Notre Dame was getting solid to very good players. That’s it. Not players that would make a coach smirk to himself because the raw material was so great. Not the best of the best.

Nobody like Marcus Lattimore.

Nobody like Gerald McCoy.

Nobody like Adrian Peterson.

Or Reggie Bush.

Or Andy Katzenmoyer.

When Cedric Benson came to play for Texas, it cause Mack Brown to quip “Joe Paterno used to say that you lose a game for every freshman you start, so maybe we’ll wait until the second play to put Cedric in.”

John Cooper was similar in his assessment of Katzenmoyer (paraphrasing from an old SI): “So Andy comes in as a freshman (chuckling), and he’s bigger than any of our other linebackers (more chuckling), he’s stronger than any of ‘em (even more chuckling), and he’s faster than any of ‘em (rolling on the ground laughing). So, with all due respect to the other guys, we had to find a spot for Andy Katzenmoyer.”

Do either of those sound like the assessment of a Notre Dame player? Maybe Mike Floyd, but that’s it.

And therein was the problem.

Now it’s Brian Kelly’s turn to revive the program. We all know what he did in recruiting this past year. And looky looky (from Irish Illustrated) what a coach is saying about one of those recruits (Aaron Lynch):

“He was faster than everybody, he was bigger than everybody, so he was obviously running around them attacking the quarterback,” said Elston of Lynch’s high school career. “He did the same thing on run plays. He just ran around people. He didn’t know how to defeat the block. He just went out and made plays.”

“He’s going to be able to do it all,” said Elston of Lynch, who lined up with the No. 2 unit Wednesday during the early portion of practice. “We’re very encouraged by Aaron, and he will definitely be able to defeat a block and stop the run.”

Hmmm. At the coaching clinic this past weekend, Urban Meyer looked at Lynch, Ishaq Williams, and Lous Nix, and said “we would have loved to have had them at Florida”. (Note that all the players mentioned were young guns, guys that ND hasn’t been able to get until recently.)

So, coach Kelly, the evidence is there, the writing is on the wall. You want to turn this thing around? Keep getting guys that can play from day 1.

If you read any of the Irish blogs, there is a good chance you know some of the work that the guys over at Her Loyal Sons do. I check to see what their thoughts are on occasion, and I believe they have one message that stands clear above any other. They HATE Urban Meyer. If you want to learn about any shady thing the man named after a pope has done, Her Loyal Sons is a good place to start. And finish. (They really love talking about his shadiness. As much as Tony the Tiger loves talking about Frosted Flakes.) A lot of the talk is deserved, Meyer has misled recruits, suspended stars for questionable amounts of time (trying to remove someone’s eyeball gets you a half game, DUI gets you a one full game), allowed kids back on the team after being arrested for brandishing an AK-47, and threatening the life of a former girlfriend, etc. Basically, he didn’t let anything get in the way of winning (I can’t even write the word “winning” without hearing Charlie Sheen in my head). Fot that, he is guilty as charged. For that, you can form whatever opinion you want about the man.

Anyway, Meyer was a guest of honor at Notre Dame’s Coaching Clinic this past weekend-speaker and all. Knowing this, I couldn’t help but think of some scenarios the “Sons” would rather deal with than allow Urban Meyer to be part of their coaching clinic if they were coaches at Notre Dame.

Here’s what I came up with:

1.) Being mistaken for taking a “wide stance” while in a stall next to Larry Craig.

2.) Having the task of translating anything Charles Barkley is saying during basketball telecasts to English.

3.) Reading the book “The Situation” wrote.

4.) Refrain from calling Pete Carroll “Poodle”.

5.) Sending their children to Michigan.

I don’t know the guys at HLS, but I have a feeling they would do just about anything to stop Urban Meyer from being around.

It’s Spring practice time for the Irish, and #1 on the agenda for Brian Kelly is getting his quarterback ready to play. One of either Dayne Crist, Tommy Rees, or Andrew Hendrix is going to make this offense go, and they need to illustrate that they know what is happening on the field in order to do so.

So, since these sessions are for teaching time, Brian Kelly is using some innovation to learn how his quarterbacks are processing what’s happening on the field. Helmet cameras.

Here’s what Lou Somogyi had to write about the development:

A main topic of conversation after the initial practice was the small, portable “helmet cam” senior quarterback Dayne Crist had attached. He was the lone quarterback to wear it today, but it will be rotated among the four scholarship signalcallers throughout the spring.

Helmet camera’s, because you always want to know what your guy is looking at. Well, almost always.