My impetus to begin writing about Irish football was pretty simple. What pushed me over the edge was wondering, “Why did 2007 happen?”

The 2010 Michigan game doesn’t get talked about enough for how weird it was, maybe not the weirdest of the Kelly era (2011 USF take a bow) but super strange in so many ways. Nate Montana, a player who would transfer 6 times over his career, played significant snaps at quarterback!

My least favorite series we ever participated in was the long-dead Irish Blogger Gathering. Does anyone remember those? We had several different websites answering the same questions, it was a pain to coordinate and not all that interesting.

I’ve long thought about a gun-to-your-head hypothetical: You either have to re-name Notre Dame Stadium to a corporate sponsor or put a non-retractable roof on the stadium, which do you choose? My gut instinct is to choose the roof. Either way you’re kind of selling out but football in crappy weather really does suck for fans–it’s 2018 and it’s okay to admit that.

For a period of time, weeks perhaps, some guy was wholesale copying and pasting my articles under his name at Bleacher Report. That’s a weird form of flattery.

I actually got my ‘start’ during the wild west days of Bleacher Report. For quite a while they promised the lead community writers (or whatever term they used) would get paid. Long after I left I was still on their email distribution list with their leaders promising, “No, seriously we’re going to start paying writers very soon.” I think they eventually just got rid of writers.

I wouldn’t call these the best wins of the Kelly era but I’ve probably never been more satisfied than with the victories over USC in 2010 and 2012. I don’t care if neither Trojan team was ranked. We’ve only won 3 times in the Coliseum in over a quarter century!

My first article after joining up with Whiskey at the original OFD was on whether Notre Dame could rush for 2,000 yards in a season. The team just rushed for 3,501 yards and 35 touchdowns, for reference.

I joined Twitter (holla at ya boy @EMMurtaugh) in January 2011 which is weird because I can’t remember writing about the Irish without Twitter. The migration of sports folks to whatever becomes the new Twitter in the future is going to be very hard.

I was looking back at the 2008-09 schedules and I’m pretty sure the average Kelly team would’ve won 22 or 23 of those games. I say that not as a compliment to any Kelly teams but rather how easy those schedules were, just 4 ranked (and entirely beatable) teams! It’s amazing that Weis lost 12 of those games.

Strange emails happen from time to time. The strangest of all are from parents of recruits or current players telling you that, in fact, their son is going to be awesome.

This from fishoutofwater is my favorite underappreciated work.

I remain convinced that Notre Dame wearing the “Under the Lights” throwbacks in 2011 and switching to mustard pants were a result of my uniform history articles. Just let me believe it, damn it.

The most random recruit that I can remember was Derek Roback. Remember him? He transferred to Ohio University a week into his first season and is now a franchise business consultant for Domino’s Pizza.

We knew we’d be leaving SB Nation the day we signed a contract with them, it was a matter of when, not if. At first they agreed to leave us alone. Then it was try to write something every day. Then it was write something on the weekends. Then, just get something anything up right away for breaking news. Then, how about two articles every day? Following the 2015 football season the ask was too much and we were tired of pushing back.

I am more certain a decade later that culture for a football program is super important and I’m more certain than ever that it’s hard to define, describe, or replicate. What works for Jim Harbaugh at Stanford may not be working at Michigan.

Officially, I’ve covered 128 Notre Dame games and the 2009 Michigan contest stands alone on a mountaintop as the absolute worst officiated game of the bunch.

I still chuckle that Tyler Stockton was the No. 96 overall recruit in the country and after a year or so in the program the consensus was, “Yeah, he’s not that good at football.” Imagine Darnell Ewell coming in 50 spots higher in the national rankings and never playing throughout his career.

I was looking back at some old recruiting grades and I gave Anthony Rabasa a 91 overall. For someone who spent 4 years on campus and transferred to Western Michigan (he left before football season) for a graduate year that’s a huge whiff and really poor projection on my part.

No one can convince me this was a fumble.

My personal favorite players since 2008: Golden Tate, Robert Blanton, Cierre Wood, Ben Councell, Everett Golson, Louis Nix, Jaylon Smith, Quenton Nelson, Asmar Bilal, and Josh Adams. In the least favorite category: Brian Smith.

Something scrambled in my brain the day Deontay Greenberry left Notre Dame at the altar for Houston. That’s one of the early days of Twitter events that I’ll always remember. I’ve never looked at recruiting the same and I’ve been much healthier for that. Thank you, Deontay.

I still find the Kelly choking incident on David Grimes really, really funny on so many levels.

The best version of The Shirt over my time is unquestionably 2011.  The worst is clearly 2009.

It’s funny looking in the archives at old articles, I found strange ones that later made no sense such as “Prosise Bolsters Secondary, Verbals to Irish.”

During one off-season we worked with SB Nation on a digital magazine, did anyone read it? I think we made $0.02 per copy or something ridiculous. I don’t think anyone read it.

An interesting “what if” that I’ve pondered lately was Ohio State messing up their late 2011 coaching hire. Not in the sense of having Urban Meyer available but just in the sense of maybe having a Buckeyes program floundering right as (it seemed) Notre Dame was about to become a Midwestern power again. Instead, OSU went undefeated, won a title a couple years later, followed that up with a bowl win over Notre Dame, and have been on a tear ever since Meyer arrived. The stability in Columbus has been ridiculous, they legitimately haven’t had a truly bad stretch for the program since the early 1960’s.

Roughly 5 years ago or so SBN totally freaked out about the use of unauthorized images so we deleted years worth of pictures from articles. You can imagine how arduous and frustrating that process was for us. To this day, hundreds of articles are without pictures which is kind of funny when a picture is necessary for the article to make sense.

As a group we were always most comfortable with publishing one article per day which was a huge pace in the early days of sports blogging. In the lead up to the 2011 season we officially began to increase towards 2 articles per day during football season. Half a decade later we were approaching 30 writers, if you included some of our semi-retired writers.

I’ve done a lot of ridiculous things over the years, none more crazy than a 7-part semi-fiction story on Notre Dame’s 1924 National Championship season. Bless your heart if you read more than 70% of those 20,000+ words.

Aww, remember our old, old logo?

Brian Kelly has made a lot of mistakes, none more obvious than attempting to rotate the No. 1 jersey prior to the 2016 season. Just a bad idea from the beginning, scrapped during the middle of the horrendous 4-8 season.

I really ruffled some feathers back in November 2014 first with “Why the SEC Earns More Hype than Other Leagues” and then a couple days later with my review of the Navy game. First, the original article title “A Win That Felt Like a Loss” bothered folks as did the (apparent) too much negativity therein. That’s a pretty fun re-read through the comment section knowing the Irish would lose the next 4 games.

The name and logo for 18 Stripes came to me in that half-sleep state before actually falling fully asleep. Other names we were debating prior to that were “The Rambler”, “The Indepenendent”, or “The Irish Independent.”

Looking back almost a couple years later I still get a chuckle out of the strange and absurd recruitment of Demetris Robertson. I’d love for his recruitment to play out with the new early signing period.