Tag: North Carolina

Pressure is on for Some Notre Dame Rivals in 2020

Which teams have the most pressure on them entering 2020? A few Notre Dame regulars made a recent list on 247Sports that we discuss here.

Notre Dame is a place where there always has been and always will be pressure to win a lot of football games on an annual basis.  Expectations are high again for the 2020 season for Notre Dame but coming off of three-straight ten-plus win seasons at least takes away some of the pressure for the Irish as the 2020 campaign approaches.

That’s not the case for a few Notre Dame rivals however who have coaches that need to win big and soon.

247Sports recently listed their ten college football teams under the most pressure to win in 2020 and although Notre Dame was not listed, some regulars on the Fighting Irish schedule were.  The following are what 247Sports National Analyst Bud Elliot had to say about each of the schools that semi-regularly show up on Notre Dame’s schedule.

The Four Teams:

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Jordan was named co-Most Outstanding …

Jordan was named co-Most Outstanding Player at Pittsburgh 2 with John Flowers, a 6-9 center who wrote “Chocolate Thunder 2” all over his T-shirts. Jordan also was named MVP of the Orange-White Classic, the Five-Star All-Star Camp. “The next week he was there but he hurt his ankle and he only played in half the games,” Konchalski said of the Pittsburgh 3 session.

U.S. 117 IS the mother road of Michael …

U.S. 117 IS the mother road of Michael Jordan’s past. It runs from Wilmington to Wilson. There have been Jordans living along that corridor since the Civil War. Al Edgerton, a longtime engineer in the North Carolina Department of Transportation and a grade school classmate of Jordan’s, was part of a crew that resurfaced 117 less than a decade ago. The highway cuts through fields and little towns. “A lot of agricultural type equipment is running up and down that road,” Edgerton says. “When you get around Wallace, where Mike’s dad was from, that’s an ag-type county. You have a lot of farm trucks and tractors, pulling trailers of tobacco.”

Normally Jordan travels in the back …

Normally Jordan travels in the back seat of chauffeured cars. Except in North Carolina, his friends told me. In North Carolina, he drives. “He knows his way to all the Hardee’s,” Whitfield said, laughing. His faithful driver, George Koehler, grinned. “It’s good to come home.” The sun was going down. “My parents used to live here,” Jordan said as he watched people cross the street in front of him.

“Gothic” is the adjective Martin …

“Gothic” is the adjective Martin Scorsese used with his director of photography when they wanted to re-create the Wilmington coast for the film “Cape Fear.” The movie is composed so that the actual light degrades over time, to reflect the inner turmoil of the characters and to mirror the way the humidity and weird ocean currents can make the tidewater air shimmer sometimes. Black bears still hunt through these swamps. Vast woods of longleaf pine and 800-year-old cypress-tupelo trees tower over this landscape. Songbirds fill the air with sweet noise. Big whitetail deer, heads crowned with enormous medieval-looking racks, still move like shadows in and out of the forest. This is where five generations of Jordan men lived and died. “The kind of mystical ways that people have described Jordan over the years can be frankly connected to what it is like to be on ancestral land,” Zandria Robinson says. “They are living on Southern ancestral land. It’s rare that it’s physical in this kind of way — these multiple generations lived in this same area. Our ancestors walked their land, they buried s— out here, worked out here, died out here, buried each other out here. … This is ancestral land.”

If you’re still feeling nostalgic about …

If you’re still feeling nostalgic about Michael Jordan while watching “The Last Dance” (Episodes 9 and 10 begin at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN), there’s a new hotel you might want to visit. Graduate Hotels is opening a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, location this fall, and it will feature a detailed reconstruction of Jordan’s University of North Carolina dorm room, as featured in a 1983 Sports Illustrated photo shoot. “The room is an identical replica,” said Graduate Hotels CEO Ben Weprin. “From the ceiling, to the brick wall, to the record player and records, the posters, the pennants — every single piece in that room, we have it.”

Watch: Notre Dame’s Top Ten Men’s Basketball Buzzer-Beaters

Notre Dame has had some classic basketball finishes over the years. Relive the 10 best buzzer-beaters in program history by watching here.

Nothing in basketball is better than a game that comes down to a last second shot.  Sometimes it goes in, sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes Pat Connaughton leaps out of a gym and stuffs it before it ever has a chance to find the bottom of the net.

In their latest edition of #NDTop10, Notre Dame released their ten best men’s basketball buzzer beaters in program history.  Take the next three minutes and enjoy a couple hand-fulls of epic Fighting Irish basketball finishes.

I love that Rex Pflueger averaged 5.4 points per game during his Notre Dame career but managed to make the list twice, including the top spot.  I still don’t know how the Irish got by Stephen F. Austin that day but I’m not complaining.

Glad to see Torin Francis on the list on what was to me, Chris Thomas’s most-memorable play/assist at Notre Dame.

I still contest that stuffing someone at the buzzer should count for this though.

After spending two years with the …

After spending two years with the Bullets and then another two with the San Antonio Spurs, Corzine came to the Bulls and started 285 out of 556 games he played for the team. But the direction of the organization changed in 1984 when the Bulls selected a kid from North Carolina University with the third overall pick in the NBA Draft — Jordan. “The team was going through a transition period, they had some great teams in the 1970s with [Jerry] Sloan, [Norm] Van Leer, [Bob] Love,” Corzine said. “I got there two years before Michael was drafted, and kind of searching for answers at that point, with people coming in and out. Then, we drafted Michael with the third pick and as he was coming in we knew we were getting a good player.”

Ian Book Gets Very High Ranking on Top 25 Quarterback List

Notre Dame got good news when Ian Book decided to return for another season, but did they get another year of a top-five college quarterback

There is no question that the importance of having a very good, if not great quarterback in college football has only grown in recent years.  Look at the likes of Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence, Tua Tagovailoa and DeShaun Watson who have won the last four national championships.

There is also no question in regards to the significance of Ian Book choosing to return to Notre Dame for his final year of eligibility in 2020 as the Irish return a two-year starter to lead them at quarterback as they hope to return to a second College Football Playoff appearance in three seasons.

Bill Bender of The Sporting News released his top 25 college quarterback rankings ahead of the 2020 season today and Book checks in with a very generous ranking of fifth overall.

Bender says of Book:

Book opted to return for his senior season, and he will add to his total of 57 career touchdowns with the Irish. Book is 20-3 as a starter, a record that is underappreciated given the pressure of playing that position at Notre Dame under Brian Kelly.

Only Trevor Lawrence (Clemson), Justin Fields (Ohio State), Sam Howell (North Carolina) and Sam Ehlinger (Texas) rank above Book while last year’s freshman sensation at USC, Kedon Solvis, checks in sixth.

I like Book and Notre Dame is fortunate to have him back for a fifth season.  That said, I’m not sold on him being the fifth-best quarterback in college football right now.  The young man competes each week which is the best compliment you can give a player but still has a good amount of issues with pre-snap reads (see Michigan game), being too quick to tuck and run and overall arm strength, although I do think that particular trait gets over-analyzed too often.

If Book can improve even slightly in all three of those I think you’re looking at someone who is close to that top five, but I wouldn’t have him there just yet.

And if he does perform as a top five quarterback this season, chances are great that you’re looking at an 11-plus win team this regular season.

If he doesn’t?

You’re still looking at a team that could likely muster up nine or 10 regular season wins but one that still has an obvious gap at the quarterback position between themselves and the truly elite programs.