Daily ND Five - August 12, 2008

The "Back To Drinking The Kool-Aid" Edition.

One: Some thoughts on why Notre Dame will be better this year:

Weis admitted that players were often scared to make mistakes which made the team uptight and drained all the emotion from their play. The payoff of Weis's decision to step back and encourage his team to show emotion was evident in the Blue Gold Game, where it actually looked like the kids were having fun and playing harder because of it. Notre Dame now looks like a team that wants to kick your ass and is going to talk it up and have fun doing it.

Gosh, Kool-Aid tastes great. (The Rock Report)

Two: Yet another preview that isn't so scary:

The first thing I noticed is that Notre Dame isn't facing a single receiver who cracked the thousand yard receiving mark last season. Even more striking, of the 27 starters listed here, only 9 had more receiving yards than John Carlson did on last year's NCAA-worst Irish offense.

More specifics on the wide receivers that Notre Dame will be facing this season here. (The Blue-Gray Sky)

Three: A look at yesterday's practice, which was open to the Notre Dame professors:

Briefly looking at the quarterbacks, it appears Dayne Crist has a higher release point than the rest of the quarterbacks, although it could be more deception since he's 6-4 while Jimmy Clausen is 6-3 and Evan Sharpley is 6-2. Neither Clausen nor Sharpley appear that tall, though.

Ah, the ol' height exaggeration. Nice. (Irish Insights)

Four: Part Three of Subway Domer's pre-season predictions, including some pre-game antics, including this bit about the Washington game:

The start of the game was delayed by over an hour as a chaotic set of events was set off when the newly unemployed Ty Willingham was found driving on the field with a pimped out Rolls Royce golf cart. As security chased him down Ty hit his NOS switch and gunned it towards Irish head coach Charlie Weis.

It just gets better from there. (Subway Domer)

Five: Some ND history - Part II of a look at the 1988 season contains this tidbit about life after the memorable Miami game:

For Pat Terrell, people still stop him on the street to congratulate him on the swatted-down 2-point conversion attempt: “There were fifty-nine thousand at that game that day…and I think every single one of them has told me over the…years…what they did or how they felt when I got that deflection. It gets kind of funny, but it still does mean a lot to me.”

More great thoughts here. (Classic Ground)