Recruiting season is over. Teams have added plenty (like 462 if you’re an SEC team) of potential studs (and duds) added to their respective rosters-in other words, Alabama is a different team now than they were in January.

What does that mean?

New pre-season Top 25’s!

Because in this “world at your fingertips” age where even grade schoolers can sign on for text alerts for winter school closings (those bastards don’t even have to get out of bed, we at least had to put on our uniforms, go through some last minute flashcards, while watching the NewsCenter 7 ticker, waiting anxiously until we would receive the news that we needed), college football junkies need revised Top 25’s at least monthly.

And wouldn’t you know it, Notre Dame is not even sniffing the rankings. Or the “almost good enough to be ranked” rankings. In fact, they’re not ranked in any kind of way, which is sad in a world that will rank the top 10 foods that will give you gas.

Notre Dame has some Rodney Dangerfield-like respect going on right now. (”When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.”) Don’t be mad, if you look at some basic facts, that’s really all they deserve.

Fact 1: Notre Dame could start the season with Tommy Rees at quarterback. Or Derek Roback. Or Luke Massa. Who? Exactly. At the game’s most important position, the Irish don’t have an answer. Even celebrated Jr. quarterback Dayne Crist has only thrown one great pass entering his third year. And that was against Washington State, which is kind of like beating up Richard Simmons.

Fact 2: Notre Dame has only two proven play-makers. Michael Floyd, and Kyle Rudolph. That’s it. Jimmy Clausen is gone. Golden Tate is gone. Even insinuating that the defense has a play-maker might cause the internet to crash and burn-and the web was devised in theory to survive a nuclear war.

Fact 3: Notre Dame has no offensive line. Against any remotely talented defensive line, they cave in against pressure like Nip/Tuck shies away from a good plot line.

Fact 4: The Irish defense is susceptible to giving up yards and points like the Titanic was susceptible to icebergs. And Brian Kelly, for all he has done, hasn’t proven to be able to fix a defense (UC games often finished with a combined score of somewhere around the Toyota recall).

There, the evidence has it. Notre Dame has far too much to change before it is involved in any ranking talk. To think anything else would be insanity.

Oh, Colin Cowherd. The host with the most is at it against Notre Dame fans already this week with his “jab you in the rib style” until you’re white-hot with such a fiery anger that you want to channel your inner Mike Tyson, grab some Montgomery Inn Barbecue sauce, chew off a piece of his ear, and savor it like it was the finest of filets (letting it sit on the tongue and opening up the flavor with a nice Cabernet until every single one of your taste buds starts going at it Tonya Harding-style, and clubbing each others kneecaps to reach it first).

He rehashed a familiar refrain that was heard so often back in 2005-Notre Dame is gonna let that grass grow until it is 4 feet tall to slow down USC’s speed, grow it until you can crouch along the ground the and hunt zebras. Long grass=slower playing field to negate an athletic advantage. “Charlie knows that if Notre Dame is gonna go athlete on athlete against USC, they’re gonna get boat raced.”

Genius! This is a significant thought because clearly a slow playing field only affects USC’s players. It wouldn’t bother the Irish’s athletes one bit. The long grass will make Joe McKnight slower-but not Golden Tate.

Once can only hope that commentators aren’t serious when they make comments like these. Please let it be just a little joshin’. Tell me you don’t make “big boy” money and think that some teams pray for a slower field as their only means of salvation. I remember the 2005 game-and the grass didn’t slow Reggie Bush down one bit. When you can play, you can play-and it doesn’t matter where. Alabama’s defense is better than anyone else’s and it is better on grass, on turf, on field turf, on concrete, in the snow, and on the moon. Micheal Jordan could slam it from the foul line on polished parquet, or on a hard brick alley.

To put it another way, do you feel better when your team is stocked full of Bill Gates-caliber athletes versus Usain Bolt-caliber athletes in sloppy conditions rather than Florida sunshine? My guess would be no. And my guess that is that Pete Carroll is confident in his team’s playing ability anywhere.

Look, Cowherd is right in his assertion that Notre Dame should be concerned with USC’s athletes. (Though ND has more athletes than he thinks.) The Irish defense is chopped liver (based on the evidence), which means USC is gonna rack up yards and points with McKnight, Damian Williams, and an improving Matt Barkley. Notre Dame presents USC a challenge offensively with the way Clausen is playing, but will it be enough to negate the damage that will be wrought on ND’s defense? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know if the Irish have the athletes to measure up or not.

But I do know that the game will be decided by who has the better players, and not how long the grass is.

Having Manti Te’o isn’t all good for Notre Dame. That’s right, I said it. And I see your responses. Utter shock. Gasps. The drilling a screw into your hand with your 18v Li-ion Rigid, instead of the new primed swimming pool deck board. Blasphemy, you say.

There is a reason I say this, so let me explain.

Sure, the Flyin’ Hawaiian looks to be a “once every 10 year” type of player. He looks like Andy Katzenmoyer. He looks like Jevon Kearse. He looks like Julius Peppers. Or Lawrence Taylor (without the zeal for Coke-and not the same kind that Mean Joe Greene liked). He looks like he can forget his helmet on the bench, get fooled by the play-action fake, chase down the running back who indeed does not have the ball, toss him to the side like he was Bridget Moynahan after he realizes this, do a 180 and reverse field, and then steam engine into the quarterback that thought he was safe after the masterful fake, then sack him for a 10 yard loss, killing the threat of USC. In other words, he is a difference maker.

He proved this when he maxed out the stat line with 10 tackles in his first real action against Washington. When he got to the ball carrier so fast, the ball wasn’t even in his hands. When he opened up the field for everybody else (like Brian Smith), and the Irish front 7 played its best game yet.

But, with the good comes the bad. And that bad (if you like to get a dose of Irish news occasionally) is going to be a whole lot of overkill when writers try to get us a closer look at “Manti Te’o the person” by throwing in lines about how cold he gets in the Indiana weather.

You see, Te’o is from Hawaii, the land of beaches and pineapple. Notre Dame is in the midwest-and in case you didn’t know, midwest winters are cold. Obviously, the move from a warm-weather place to a cold-weather is an adjustment. Who wants to live in freezing weather? And writers just can’t seem to resist using this lead-in when talking about Te’o. It will get old quick (it already has for me). And it will never die, even though the market will continue to be saturated with “Manti is cold” stories.

Some samples ( warning: may include sarcasm):

-For most freshman football players, adjusting from the speed of the high school to college game is a major concern.
And so are classes.
While those may be on the radar for standout Irish freshman linebacker Manti Te’o, they are no where near his top concern.
For the Hawaii native, concern number one is the South Bend weather.
“It’s been hard, it’s been very hard,” Te’o said this week with a laugh. “I haven’t really gotten used to seeing the temperatures in the 40s so often in my life.”
40s?
You may want to get ready Manti. It’s going to get worse.

-In the aftermath of Notre Dame’s 37-30 overtime extinguishing of Washington, Te’o was not thinking about how his young career had just turned its first corner, was not fast-forwarding to the Oct. 17 matchup with USC, was not preoccupied about how much his body ached and his mind felt lighter
“For me it was just a big relief to get out of the cold,” said the 6-foot-2, 244-pound linebacker from Laie, Hawaii. “That’s the main thing. That’s all that was on my mind.”

-Manti’s gift from his parents for his birthday? 36 pairs of gloves for South Bend winters.

-What class does Manti wish was on his schedule? “How To Use A Windshield Scraper”

- Manti’s one vice? “Hot Chocolate to soothe the cold.”

-Manti showed the heart of a champion like this once before when the odds were stacked against him. In a snowball fight.

Maddening.

Okay, we get it, South Bend is cold. And if Notre Dame wants to be relevant in today’s college football, there better be a whole bunch of warm-weather elite recruits who are like Manti and don’t care.