What would a Notre Dame national title mean to you?
The Irish are on the brink of history. How does that make you feel?
Grandma was an Irish Catholic from the North Side of Chicago. She was a sports nut who, among other things, taught me how to keep score when we’d visit Wrigley Field.
When my brother and I were in high school in New York, she sent us blank checks and told us they were for our applications to Notre Dame. I promptly shared our report cards with her and told her to save her money.
When I ended up at Penn State, covering the football team for the student paper, she called me during a game during my senior year. I couldn’t pick up at the moment, and I figured that she knew that I was “working” at the time, but I was surprised to see a voicemail from her, so I immediately listened.
Bless her octogenarian heart, it turned out to be a minutes-long rant about the recklessness of No. 1 on the Nittany Lions playing every snap as both a quarterback (Rob Bolden) and safety (Nick Suhey).
Google both players, see if you can spot the obvious difference between the two, and then take a moment to laugh as hard as I did that day.
When ESPN hired me in 2011, it was initially to cover Ohio State. I visited Columbus, put down a security deposit on an apartment near campus, then got a call shortly afterward saying the company’s plans to cover the Buckeyes had been put on hold. I was asked if I’d be OK with moving to South Bend to cover Notre Dame instead.