Good Beats Evil: What It Means to Me

This article isn’t going to be coherent. I’m just writing thoughts down. Wouldn’t know how to be coherent here if I tried.

Last night, the Chicago Cubs did something amazing. Anyone reading this knows about it by now: They triumphed over bitter rival St. Louis to win the National League Division Series in four games. It was the first playoff series ever to be clinched at the 102-year-old Wrigley Field, and it happened in one of the most glorious ways you could imagine: Against the team that had tormented them for just about all of the last 100 years, but particularly in the last 20. 

Perhaps most fittingly, given the way the two organizations have comported themselves the last 10 years, it came with the teams wearing far different tributes on their jerseys. The Cubs wore the 14 of Ernie Banks, one of the most universally beloved figures in baseball history, who passed away last winter, on their jersey sleeves. Meanwhile, St. Louis, in quintessentially St. Louis fashion, wore on their sleeves the initials of former outfielder Oscar Taveras, whose death in a car accident last winter appeared to be tragic until it was revealed that he was in fact driving plastered, at three times the American legal limit, and had killed his girlfriend in the process.

As if that weren’t enough, the Cubs scored four runs off John Lackey, who left his wife while she was battling breast cancer, in the clinching game. Going against an organization that puts on a veneer of doing things The Right Way, and beating them given these facts, not to mention the fact that they hacked into Houston’s internal database and were caught doing so earlier this year, was all the sweeter.

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The Cubs dong-barraged St. Louis into oblivion in Games 3 and 4, hitting a combined nine home runs, including a playoff-record six in Game 3. Every time something happened that threatened to turn Wrigley into the morgue it was for most of the playoff games in 2007 and 2008, the Cubs responded by doing something awesome nearly immediately. Literally every single stud that Cubs fans have been watching for, hoping for, praying for the last few years hit a home run in the two games except for Addison Russell, who missed Game 4 with an injury (incurred on a near-dong of his own that resulted in a triple). Anthony Rizzo. Kris Bryant. Kyle Schwarber. Javier Baez. Jorge Soler. Starlin Castro. They all went yard, some multiple times. Schwarber hit the longest home run to right field I’ve ever seen at Wrigley in Game 4, one that actually landed on top of the right field scoreboard. It was that dong that essentially cemented the game and the series, moving the Cubs’ lead from 5-4 to 6-4.

Perhaps the most unlikely dong of all came from Javier Baez, who’s been through the wringer professionally and personally in the 14 months since his MLB debut last August. Baez came up, hit three home runs in his first two games, and was nightmarishly bad the rest of the season, so bad that he spent almost all of 2015 in AAA. Well, the AAA stint was due to that and other things: Javy lost his younger sister, his biggest fan, to complications from spina bifida, so he took a lengthy leave to get himself back together. Just when he finally appeared to be putting it together in AAA offensively, he broke a bone in his hand on a slide at second base. He didn’t get called back up until September, more than a year after his MLB debut.

None of it mattered Tuesday. Javy came up with two on and his team down by one in the second and whacked the first pitch by Lackey - a good pitch off the plate, it should be noted, though whiny bitch Lackey didn’t want to do anything that might accidentally result in giving credit to the opponent, facts be damned - out to the opposite field. Just about everything about 2015 since the calendar flipped to August has been cathartic, but that might have been my favorite moment with everything considered.

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Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of this happened almost entirely on the backs of players acquired by Theo Epstein, who took over as team president in November 2011 and stripped the organization down to its roots to rebuild it. It was a plan many, including myself, weren’t enamored with for a while. And while I still don’t like losing games on purpose for any reason, there are two inescapable truths of the matter: 1) MLB created a system that, repugnantly, makes it intelligent to tank. 2) Theo, beyond doubt, 100 percent freaking NAILED the process.

The two draft picks the Cubs got by losing on purpose were Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber, two of the most dangerous hitters in the current Cubs lineup. Jake Effing Arrieta, the hyper-robot-super-ace, was acquired ALONG with mainstay setup man Pedro Strop for nothing more than a half-season of Scott Feldman. Addison Russell, Kyle Hendricks, Justin Grimm, and probably others I’m forgetting were all acquired as part of trades Theo made to make the MLB team, at the time, worse. They weren’t all tank trades — Theo knocked it out of the park to acquire MVP-caliber first baseman Anthony Rizzo and Travis Wood for oft-injured, occasionally-effective pitchers in separate deals.

Those names dotted the 25-man roster of the Cubs’ victorious group, along with those of stud closer Hector Rondon (Rule 5 pickup!), leadoff hitter extraordinaire Dexter Fowler (acquired straight up for Luis Valbuena), and several scrap-heap pickups that the Cubs got for a song, including three different relievers - Clayton Richard, Trevor Cahill and Fernando Rodney - that were DFA’d this year (Richard by the Cubs). None of those three surrendered a run in this series.

Theo got some luck along the way, of course: San Diego trading away Rizzo for Andrew Cashner made little sense at the time and now makes none. Oakland GM Billy Beane probably went insane last July when he shipped Russell (and fairly highly-regarded prospect Billy McKinney) to the Cubs for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel in an unsuccessful effort to finally get his World Series. The Astros passing on Bryant for Mark Appel in the 2013 draft looks dumber by the second. Arrieta morphing into a monster with the Cubs is among the most unlikely things I’ve ever seen in baseball.

That said, it’s nearly impossible to build a good team without some luck, so I can’t really penalize Theo for getting some here. The bottom line is that while I wasn’t the biggest fan of how it happened, there can be no arguing that the Cubs’ rebuilding process looks like an overwhelming success at this juncture.

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We don’t know yet what the rest of October (and, hopefully, early November) 2015 holds for these Cubs. The whole thing could come to a screeching halt in the NLCS against either the Mets or Dodgers, both of which boast tough pitching staffs and solid enough offenses. And if it does, St. Louis fans would probably like for us to be ok with that, that beating them would be enough for this season. The national narrative would be that it was enough, because this is the first year this iteration of the Cubs has been good. But it’s not.

There have been generations on generations of Cubs fans that have lived entire lives and died without seeing a World Series title. We’re getting to the point now that Cubs fans have done so without even seeing a World Series GAME. That drought needs to stop. Fans much older than myself have earned this. Fans younger than myself, too. We’ve hoped, and watched, and bought tickets and merchandise and MLB.TV subscriptions. We’ve devoted entire summers to this team with too little payback. This season has gone a long way to making that all worth it. But it won’t be sealed until we see a title.

And while this is the first year of the Cubs’ resurgence, that doesn’t mean next year’s team is guaranteed to be better. Not to throw water on everything, because I don’t want to do that, but the Washington Nationals acted like that was the case when they intentionally did not pitch Stephen Strasburg in the 2012 playoffs in a misguided attempt to keep him healthy. They lost a five-game NLDS and haven’t been back. Tomorrow is never promised, no matter how good you appear to be or how good the future looks. Every opportunity to win is precious and must be savored.

Maybe this is the team to do it, maybe it isn’t. But it’s the best team left this year. The Cubs personally knocked out the only two teams that had an argument to be considered better. They have one of the top three pitchers in the game, a pretty damn good #2 in Jon Lester (it’s a mark of how amazing this ride has been that I haven’t come close to mentioning him yet despite his success), and unequivocally the most dangerous top-to-bottom offense. They have the most lovable group of players I’ve ever been fortunate enough to witness (Miguel Montero and his broken English tweeting, otherwise useless utilityman Jonathan Herrera and his Buckethead schtick, Rizzo’s increasingly ridiculous list of walk-up music that includes ‘Bad Blood’ by Taylor Swift and 'Good Vibrations' by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, the list goes on), a manager who’s been there before, and a city that’s as behind them as any city could be.

Maybe this is the group, and maybe it isn’t. But if it is...how magical would it be?

The Future is Coming: Javier Baez Makes the Bigs

Twitter followers of mine and readers of this blog have heard a lot from me about how much I dislike the rebuilding plan executed thus far by the Cubs’ front-office team of president Theo Epstein and GM Jed Hoyer. I’m not going back on it - I didn’t like that they essentially sucked on purpose for three years, missed on signing free agents that seemed to fit the profile of what they were looking for (although missing Masahiro Tanaka may have been a blessing in disguise), and whiffed badly on the only semi-major free-agent signing they’ve made, Edwin Jackson.

That being said, we’re about to start seeing the fruits of that labor. Tonight, Javier Baez will make his Cubs’ debut, joining Arismendy Alcantara as highly-touted prospects that are now on the big club. Baez had been playing shortstop for the majority of his minor-league career, but got work at second base over the last few weeks and evidently impressed enough to earn the call-up. He will play second for the MLB Cubs and presumably will continue to as long as he and shortstop Starlin Castro share the infield.

Now, both Baez and Alcantara were actually acquired by former GM Jim Hendry, the latter as an international free agent, in 2008, and the former with Hendry’s last first-round draft pick, in June 2011. So as poor a job as Hendry did with the Cubs at times, he certainly deserves credit for the two of them, as well as the new brain trust deserving credit for helping shepherd the pair of them to the bigs. Theo’s true influence as far as minor leaguers won’t start to be felt until Jorge Soler, the one major Cuban expat who the Cubs were able to bring in (who’s currently decimating AAA), makes his MLB debut, likely next month. Kris Bryant, the top draft pick from 2013 who is putting up video-game numbers in the minors, should join him early next season.

Baez’s arrival is interesting on a number of levels. It speaks, first of all, to the idea that the Cubs may plan to at least try to have a good MLB team in 2015. I say this because Baez has exhibited a propensity to struggle at each new level for the first couple of months after arriving before adjusting and turning into a stud again. (Most recently, Baez was horrific his first 6 weeks at AAA, with a .484 OPS, but since mid-May has compiled a .931 OPS, and even with his early struggles has eclipsed the 20-HR mark for the season - perhaps just as encouraging, Baez's K rate has fallen and his contact rate risen each month of the season so far.) By allowing Baez to get what we assume to be his typical early struggles out of the way now, the front office surely hopes that he will have morphed into Super-Javy again by next spring.

Somewhat related to that, it burns a year of service time for Baez. Most baseball fans are aware of the service-time game played with many prospects, especially in the first half of the season. In layman’s terms, a player’s service-time clock is started when he’s brought up from the minors, with him becoming a free agent six seasons later, but by holding a guy down a certain amount of time after Opening Day, a team can knock that free agency back another year. It’s why projected studs like George Springer, Mike Trout, Gregory Polanco, Anthony Rizzo and several others have come up in May or June in the last few years rather than when they were clearly ready to. It's also why Bryant likely won't be up until next May. (Soler was signed to an MLB contract out of Cuba, so service time is less of a concern with him.) The Cubs could have stashed Baez for a few more months in a similar way and gained an extra year of team control on the back end, but elected not to - more evidence that they may view 2015 as the first year of the climb back up from the bottom. (It's also evidence that they may like their chances of getting Baez to agree to a team-friendly contract extension before too long, as they did with Rizzo and Castro, but that's another blog post.)

On the field, Baez’s arrival should be of further interest because there’s hardly anyone like him in baseball - a middle infielder with legitimate 30+ home run potential. Baez drew a lot of eyeballs in spring training, when he was pounding home runs regularly, and this coming off a year in which he’d led AA in OPS despite also being the youngest player in the entire league. Now he will see the chance for his potential to come to fruition, and fans will get the chance to see a guy whose bat speed is often compared with that of Hall of Fame-caliber bat Gary Sheffield’s.

Baez is not a Jeff Kent type all-hit no-glove man at second base, though. He is reasonably speedy and very athletic in the field and has the potential to be a plus defender. He has been known to make the occasional error, especially with his big arm, so the comparison to his presumed double-play partner Castro, who possesses both the potential and mistake-prone qualities of Baez in the field, is an easy one to make. However, like Castro, who has improved defensively in his 4 years in the bigs, Baez should become a solid defender.

Many will note that Baez’s improvement also coincided roughly with the arrival of Manny Ramirez, who was hired as a player-coach a couple of months ago in the organization and has been at AAA working with the hitters, especially Baez, Bryant and Soler. Bryant in particular has been quoted as being impressed with Ramirez’s acumen at the plate and claims he’s been a huge boon to the Iowa Cubs. If Baez, Bryant and Soler come up and are the power-laden monster hitters Cubs’ fans hope they become, Manny’s involvement in their development may be a neat side story.

For now, though, all that matters is that there’s one more reason to watch Cubs’ games. Unlike last year, when a depressingly underperforming Rizzo and Castro were the only reasons to tune in unless Jeff Samardzija was pitching, there are several players on any given day that should be on the next contending Cubs’ team - the aforementioned Rizzo and Castro, Alcantara and Baez, on top of surprise stud pitcher Jake Arrieta, with a nod to Kyle Hendricks and the handful of decent Cubs’ relievers, each of whom may also end up contributing to the team's resurgence if things pan out.

The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t big, but it’s visible, and that, to this long-suffering Cubs fan at least, is exciting. Go, Javy, go.

Open Letter to Cubs' Front Office: Unless You're Getting a War Chest, Don't Trade Jeff Samardzija

Dear Theo Esptein, Jed Hoyer, Jason McLeod, whoever else in the Cubs’ organization is responsible for these things:

Don’t trade Jeff Samardzija.*

(* - I don’t want to type it out 20 times, so I’m going to knock it out up here: Any mention of not wanting to trade Jeff Samardzija is with the understanding that if some team wants to absolutely pay through the nose in top-tier prospects for him that I would rethink my stance. I don’t suspect any team would.)

There are a myriad of reasons why I don’t want the Cubs to trade their best pitcher. At least one of them, the first reason I’ll mention, is a selfish one.

The Cubs have a key 2015 asset in Jeff Samardzija, and
it should take a lot to give him up.

Samardzija has been a near-daily presence in my sports fan life for about a decade now. He’s atually been part of it far longer, dating back to when he almost single-handedly defeated my high school in a state quarterfinal football game in 2002. From there he went on to Notre Dame, my favorite college football team and far and away my favorite sports team, period. After two seasons of lack of use, “The Shark” exploded onto the scene in 2005 and remained there in 2006, a first team All-American wideout in both seasons as the Irish won 19 games in that time frame. His incredible hands, penchant for making the big catch and his occasionally cocky behavior on the field (skip to 1:15 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAh4MoQXq-g) made him one of my favorites, if not my favorite, player on those teams.

That’s what made me give an audible “WHAT?” when I was watching a Cubs game in the summer of 2006 (I vividly remember the game being at Houston and the camera being in the Cubs’ dugout at the time) and a WGN graphic came up listing Samardzija as the Cubs’ fifth-round pick in the MLB draft, which was going on during the game. I knew Samardzija was an accomplished baseball player and would be selected — it had simply never occurred to me that my team would be the team doing it. (In retrospect, given former GM Jim Hendry’s obsession with athletic ability, often at the expense of actual baseball ability, it probably shouldn’t have.)

After that, I followed, as closely as one can in short-season ball, the exploits of Samardzija as he spent the summer pitching in the Cubs’ organization, never dreaming he would ultimately choose to play for the Cubs. After all, he had an NFL future as a potential first-round pick.

It was a future that would never come to pass, as in January 2007, Samardzija made the stunning move to forgo the NFL and pitch for the Cubs. Hendry made what was at the time a seemingly insane gamble and gave Samardzija piles of money (a five-year, $10 million deal that until recently was the longest commitment ever given a player prior to playing an MLB game) to get him away from football. Of course, now it appears to have been one of Hendry’s very best moves as GM.

From a personal perspective, it was outstanding. No player in the history of sports had ever starred for my favorite sports team, Notre Dame football, and my second-favorite sports team, the Cubs. Samardzija was going to do just that.

“The Shark” made his first MLB appearance not too long after, joining the Cubs’ bullpen in mid-2008. Improbably, Samardzija was terrific in his short stint in the pen, but bounced around between the Cubs and the minors the next couple of years as he tried to make it as an MLB starter.

He exceeded expectations once he arrived as a starter in 2012, posting a solid 3.81 ERA, and was even better for most of 2013 until getting roughed up in some of his later starts, finishing with a 4.34. In 2014, he has been outstanding, notching a 2.83 ERA thus far that would be far less if not for one outlier start where Milwaukee crushed him. He’s not doing it with smoke and mirrors, either — his FIP (fielding independent pitching, purportedly a more ‘true’ indicator of a pitcher’s performance) is not much higher, at 3.06. He strikes out nearly a batter an inning and his walk rate and home run rate are at all-time lows.

Naturally, because the Cubs’ current front office is operating under a current philosophy of losing MLB games essentially on purpose and trading away anyone with any value every deadline to stock the farm system, talk has been that Samardzija will soon be on the move. It’s been reported that the Cubs are making such feeble efforts to re-sign him, barely offering him a bigger contract than the one they pissed away on Edwin Jackson, that you have to wonder why they’re even going through the motions.

My problem with trading Samardzija isn’t because I think the Cubs should pay a premium to re-sign him. There have been several reports that Samardzija wants a monster deal of five or more years at over $100 million, and I can easily understand, given the fact that this is his first season performing as a true premium-talent starter and the fact that he’s approaching 30 years old, why you wouldn’t want to make that move. But if the Cubs want to make any effort to compete in 2015 (and a friend of mine recently outlined a perfectly plausible plan under which they might have a chance to do it which I recommend reading), their best chance is keeping Jeff Samardzija for that season, barring a massive overpay by another team. Samardzija will enter his final year of arbitration next year and is likely to earn in the neighborhood of $10 million. Even if Samardzija regresses and becomes closer to the pitcher he was in 2012 and ‘13, he could easily be worth that. Even if you assume Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson will be better in 2015 than they are now, and even if you assume Jake Arrieta will continue pitching well and remaining healthy, AND even if you assume the Cubs can unearth another short-term gem as they did with Paul Maholm, Scott Feldman and Jason Hammel the last few years, the Cubs will still need at least one more starter to compete, and Samardzija fits the bill.

Again, I reiterate: if the Cubs can get someone to hand over big-time, big league ready pitching prospects, preferably more than one of them, for the services of Jeff Samardzija this July, then go for it. I don’t think that will happen. And in the absence of such an offer, the Cubs’ best chance to succeed in 2015 is to keep him. Unlike prior seasons, there is a road map for the Cubs to not be atrocious next year, and I don’t think it should be abandoned nine months before that season begins in the service of yet more lottery-ticket prospects.

Sick of Tanking

I, and many others in my camp, have received a lot of grief lately for beginning to voice the opinion that this grand "Cubs Way" plan executed by the Cubs' current front office is misguided at best and a joke at worst. As of the end of tonight's most recent loss, the Theo Epstein era has resulted in a .386 MLB winning percentage.

People who claim to have a view of the big picture will tell us that the Cubs have increased their farm system ranking from consensus bottom 10 to consensus top 5 in that time frame. This is indisputably true. The Cubs have more talent in their minor league system than they've had in a while. However, the issue I have is that it's not that difficult to increase the talent in your system when you lose games a lot at the MLB level. It gives you more high draft picks, more international spending money, and more incentive to sell off anyone on your major league team who has the audacity to not suck. Pretty much anyone can increase the talent in a minor league system if they make absolutely no effort to win games at the MLB level.

So why, then, did Tom Ricketts shoot for the moon and go after Theo Epstein, one of MLB's most famous and successful general managers of all time from his time with Boston, to run the Cubs as team president? If the plan could be summed up as "You know that thing where the Astros are tanking seasons? Let's just do that for a while and get more talent," why hire the guy once known as Boy Genius to do it?

The answer to that is unclear, although there's text from an interview running around somewhere (I tried but could not find it) where Theo Epstein gushed about how, when they were both in Boston, he and Jed Hoyer (now the Cubs GM) would muse about the idea of eschewing free agency almost entirely and building a contender with only homegrown talent. For people like me who are sick of losing, this discussion is a little worrisome with the knowledge that through 3 offseasons, Epstein and Co. have made exactly one long-term free-agent signing - pitcher Edwin Jackson (4Y/52M). Jackson outperformed his peripherals most of his career and is now underperforming them (and doing so in spectacular fashion, I might add).

Anyway, one of the pro-tanking crowd's favorite go-to arguments is that the Cubs' farm system was a gaping hell-hole when Theo and Co. arrived to save us with three consecutive 100-loss seasons. (The funny thing is, every year the Cubs suck under Theo, the more terrible the Cubs' system apparently was when he got here.) While it's true the system was in lamentable shape, the school of thought that the only way out of it was to tank is, in my opinion, flat-out wrong.

Don't take my word for it. Check out this selected list of teams who had bad minor-league systems and bad MLB teams in the same season in recent years, only to rebound quickly and have success.

2010: Arizona Diamondbacks. Arizona lost 97 games in 2010. DeepLeagues.com ranked their farm system 28th. The following season, Arizona, despite the fact that they hadn't tanked any seasons, won the NL West. They're terrible now, of course, but that can be largely chalked up to a bevy of stupid deals that new GM Kevin Towers has made, shipping out Justin Upton, Trevor Bauer, Adam Eaton and probably several other good or talented players I'm forgetting.

2011: Oakland Athletics. Oakland lost 88 games in 2011. Baseball America ranked their farm system 28th (12 spots BEHIND the Cubs' system that was supposedly so bereft of talent) going into the season. The A's have won the AL West the 2 seasons since then, and are projected to do so again this year by Fangraphs. They didn't tank any seasons in the interim. They did trade Gio Gonzalez after the '11 season for a collection of talent that's helped set the stage for their run.

2011: Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore lost 93 games and held the 21st-ranked farm system according to Baseball America that year. The O's made it to the playoffs the following year and were a solid team in 2013, with 85 wins. No tanking involved.

2012: Cleveland Indians. Cleveland lost 94 games in 2012. Fangraphs tells us that the Tribe's farm system was third from the bottom in baseball that year. The following year, bolstered by some shrewd moves and new manager Terry Francona, Cleveland made the playoffs without tanking any seasons. Early returns on 2014 are mixed with an 11-13 record, but the AL Central is mediocre enough that Cleveland can still expect to be in the race all year if things don't go south.

That's four examples just from the last four off-seasons of teams, none of whom are big-market squads that can erase mistakes by spending out of them, who had bad years and had bad systems - all worse than the 2011 Cubs' system that was supposedly so empty - and did not tank any seasons, yet got better quickly with smart moves and some luck. (In the case of Arizona, quickly undid that improvement with stupidity.)

And by the way, early returns are pretty good on the 2014 White Sox, who haven't had a decent farm system in a gazillion years and lost 99 games a year ago. It is, of course, only April, so we'll see, but they're threatening to add their names to this list.

Look. I'm not saying that Theo's Tankapalooza plan won't work. It probably will have some success just due to sheer volume. I'm also not saying it's necessarily all his fault. There's been a lot of chatter that the Cubs' frugal ways of the last few years have had a lot to due with a complex (and stupid) debt structure the Ricketts took on as a condition of their purchasing the team.

What I am saying is that I don't think Tankapalooza was necessary, nor do I think it was becoming of a guy who supposedly was Boy Genius (and did a lot of talking about 'dual fronts' and building a winning organization AND a good farm system at the same time). Those who tell you the Cubs had to do this are creating a false choice. The Cubs didn't have to be bad. They chose to be. And while the Cubs might hypothetically be good in 3 or 4 years due to that, it's very not hypothetical that they blow chunks right now. They've blown chunks for years. And there's no clear end in sight right now. And that really, really sucks.

The Return of Everett Golson

It's been 8 months since I posted in this blog. There just hasn't been much to say. The Cubs suck, Notre Dame sports have disappointed, the Bulls tried (and failed) to tank the 2013-14 season. I guess I could have written about Carolina's playoff season, but most of what I had to say ended up on my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

This weekend is the Notre Dame spring game, the first time Everett Golson will be in a game situation in a Notre Dame uniform since Jan. 7, 2013. It seems like forever and no time at all since that day, a thud ending to a magical season that saw Alabama play a masterful game and crush the Irish 42-14 in the national title game. There was an SBNation article before the 2013 season (which I can't find right now, otherwise I'd link to it) that said that, adjusting for opponent, the Tide's performance in that blowout was the single best college football game played by any team in over a decade. Alas.

Since then, ND played a decent but disappointing 2013 season. They won 9 games, handing Michigan State their only loss and Arizona State one of just two regular-season defeats, and yet they crapped the bed in losses to mediocre Pittsburgh and Michigan teams and had to battle into the fourth quarter to edge out a garbage Purdue squad. The 2013 Irish were an enigma, probably because we and they knew they weren't whole.

That changes in 2014, as Golson returns from a year-long absence necessitated by his suspension from the university for reportedly cheating on a final exam. He has not been anointed the starter just yet, as coach Brian Kelly is giving redshirt freshman Malik Zaire a chance to compete for the job, but it seems clear that Golson will be under center when ND plays its first offensive snap against Rice on Aug. 30. After all, he was probably his team's best player in a national championship game (people remember ND getting blown out - few remember that Golson threw for 270 yards on 7.5 yards per attempt, with no help from the running game, and was responsible for both Irish touchdowns, window dressing though they were). Hard for Zaire to compete with that experience.

There will, of course, be jokes made on social media about Golson all season long regardless of what he does. This comes with the territory of what he did, and ND fans, as well as Golson, know that this is inevitable. However, I'm rooting for him.

Outside of the 'rooting for laundry' thing where Irish fans simply don't have much choice but to root for the junior signal-caller, Golson's return shows a maturity that what got him booted from school didn't. It would have been easy after the embarrassment of what happened for the QB to run off with his tail between his legs and pursue a transfer to a less academically rigorous school (SBNation reported that at least one SEC team inquired about him before he reaffirmed his commitment to play at ND) where he could redeem himself on the field. Instead, he chose to return to the scene of his previous failure and try to atone for what he did. It remains to be seen how that turns out, but I give him credit for choosing to stick it out.

So far, Golson has said all the right things regarding his second chance. How he performs on the football field will go a long way towards what his ultimate legacy will be at Notre Dame. But to many Irish fans, myself included, Golson eventually getting his degree will be just as important to that legacy. The school has always been about trying to compete on the highest level athletically and academically. Golson didn't get that the first time around. Maybe, this time, he will.

One Irish Rooter's Fan-ifesto

I'm not sure why I'm writing this post, two weeks out from the college football season, always the best sports season of the year. (I'll defend that argument against anyone, by the way - college football is the only sport I can legitimately enjoy even when my team is trash. I know because I did so, in 2007, when my team went 3-9.)

But we're getting close to the season again, and with that, college football fans know, come the usual avalanche of feces that is thrown at anyone who dares to have aligned themselves with Notre Dame football when they were too young to know how evil that would make them according to some.

Since the idea of ND competing for the title again is pretty much out of the question, and for once through little fault of its own (thanks again for cheating on an exam, Golson), things might be quieter on that front than usual. Nevertheless, I feel the time is right - or maybe it's just because these ideas popped into my head last night right before bed - to examine some of the most common tropes used to attack Irish fans (as well as, at least in my opinion, the most rational rebuttals I can think of). If you're a fan and you haven't seen these used against you, well, you are fortunate.

Let's dive in:

"Notre Dame couldn't compete in the SEC!" - This trope is not, unlike the others we'll look at, unique to Notre Dame. This argument has been used against pretty much every national championship contender that's not from the SEC for about the last half-decade, most annoyingly so when it was lobbed at Boise State's 2010 team that rolled through the WAC schedule before its unbeaten dream was dashed by Nevada. (Never mind that mostly that same Boise team turned around and beat Georgia in the next year's opener, on the road, when Georgia won 10 games that season.)

But it's most loudly been used of late against Notre Dame, and those cries only got louder after Alabama defenestrated the Irish in last year's championship game, a contest that was essentially over after 4 drives.

There are several ways to address this complaint.

1) What SEC schedule is this hypothetical ND team playing? Because most of the top teams in the SEC play a maximum of three actual good teams in conference play. Georgia last year, for instance, played two teams with a pulse in regular-season league play: South Carolina and Florida. They got destroyed by the Gamecocks and needed the Gators to turn the ball over approximately eleventy-gajillion times to beat them. And yet Georgia faced Alabama in December with a shot at the national title. (If you're looking for a team like that this year, I offer Alabama, South Carolina and Texas A&M. Each of those SEC contenders plays the two other good teams in their division — and pretty much nobody else who's projected to be any good in the league.)

If ND faced a schedule like that last year (the third-best team Georgia faced in 2012 was freaking Vanderbilt), they probably don't go 12-0, but it's pretty ridiculous to assume they'd have gone 6-6 or something.

2) How much benefit does ND get from playing in the SEC? This hypothetical scenario never seems to account for the large jump in revenue ND would get if they were to play an SEC schedule. The SEC makes a nice chunk of change more money than the Irish, and one could only imagine how high the league's rights fees would go if ND was playing in the league. In addition, an ND program that was playing in the SEC would draw even more interest than it does now from elite recruits in the South (this is, actually, part of the reason ND agreed to the 5-games-a-year commitment to play the ACC in football - it moves ND's footprint into this fertile recruiting region).

But most importantly:

3) Nick Saban and Urban Meyer. Those two have won five of the seven SEC championships in the league's current title streak. The other two titles were won by LSU in 2007, who needed an apocalyptic turn of events in the top five over the season's final couple of weeks to even get to the title game, and by Auburn in 2010, who was playing a QB who, let's be honest, was probably being paid to be there.

Now, this is hardly a slight to the SEC. The league (or at least Alabama and Florida) deserves credit for bringing in those coaches and investing in them. But the implied argument I hear so often that SEC players are inherently better than everybody else doesn't hold much water. They're better because geniuses like that are coaching them.

Nick Saban in particular seems to have a wizardry for competing in games for which he has ample time to prepare. In recent years, Alabama has handled Clemson, Virginia Tech and Michigan in season openers. (Get ready for round 2 in two weeks, Hokies.) And in national championship games, he's prepared teams to cream Texas, LSU and Notre Dame.

LSU? Wait a second. Aren't they in the almighty SEC? Didn't they beat Alabama that same season? Didn't they almost beat them again last regular season? (Yes, yes and yes.) People were ready to throw dirt on ND as a legitimate team after Bama crushed them without taking a look at what Saban did to LSU the year before. They made LSU look even worse than they made ND look a year later in Miami. (The score was more lopsided, but that is largely because LSU had a better defense in 2011 than ND did last year - or most any team besides Alabama has had in any recent year, for that matter.)

Now, I'll add a disclaimer here - to some extent, I understand why everyone wanted to throw dirt on ND even apart from the whole 'everyone hates them' thing. We as sports fans always assign extra meaning to playoff games, especially in football, and if you come up small in the playoffs, we'll kill you for it (see: Manning, Peyton). So even if I disagree with the "Bama would have destroyed ND 100 times out of 100" narrative, I at least understand where it comes from, because I've made similar pronouncements after postseason football games before.

Moving on:

"ND has stupid/arrogant/classless fans!" - This one is a favorite of the hater crowd. The answer is simple. The answer is "you're damn right they do".

The majority of sports fans in general are kind of stupid and ignorant (at least when it comes to discussing sports). Most people don't care as much about the teams they follow as I do mine or you do yours and don't care to go too in-depth knowing about any issue. You can argue as to the relative merits of said people, but it's just a fact.

As the biggest fan base of any college sports team in the country (I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that), ND by definition is going to have more stupid/arrogant/classless fans than any other fan base, presuming an equal distribution of stupidity.

Is arrogance (or at least 'sports arrogance') an inherent trait of ND fans? Maybe to some extent. The same could be said of New York Yankees fans, University of Michigan fans, Duke University fans, Pittsburgh Steelers fans or the fans of any other historically successful team. It's just part of the beast.

For the record, though, the most common usage of the "ND fans are arrogant" trope that I myself have noticed over my years is generally after said ND fan has taken some unprovoked (and generally unjustified, if not factually inaccurate) potshot regarding the team and responded with their opinion. Maybe that's just me.

"Manti Te'o was in on the hoax!" - This is just one of those things where people are going to believe what they want to believe, which is why ND fans generally think he wasn't in on it and why haters generally think he was.

I really don't care much anymore, since Te'o is gone from ND now, but I've read over and over and over on the Te'o subject (believe me), and other than the fact that he's on record as having lied about aspects of his fake online girlfriend and the spurious "80 percent sure" claim that Deadspin reprehensibly ran with even though they didn't even think enough of it to attribute it to anyone in particular, there really is zero evidence that Te'o was in on this stupid thing.

And that's coming from someone who was at the least leery that Te'o had done something fishy when the story first came out. I didn't change my mind on the matter until AD Jack Swarbrick came out with both barrels in his certainty that Te'o had been hoaxed (because he had nothing to gain from endorsing Te'o so publicly and everything to lose if it had come out that he'd been in on it) and I did some more reading. The conclusion was simply that the idea that the best player on the Notre Dame football team would need to invent a girlfriend and kill her off for more attention was outright ludicrous.

"Notre Dame kills people!" -  Look. There's no way to defend certain aspects of the Declan Sullivan and Lizzy Seeberg cases. I don't want to, because A) they were both horrible tragedies, and B)  there's very little that can be said (particularly re: Sullivan, an extremely black-and-white, "ND was dumb" issue). But at least, go find a factual rundown of the Seeberg events (not one written by Melinda Henneberger - I've read most of her articles on the matter, and she's more than happy to lead you to factually incorrect assumptions in the name of making you more outraged at ND - trust me, there's plenty to hammer them about without lying) and come at me with those, and not some half-ass "she was raped and then forced to kill herself" nonsense. Thank you.

No easy transition, so we'll just jump back to football...

"Notre Dame is greedy!" - This one kind of gets more and more laughable by the year. This one is basically entirely predicated on ND's NBC contract, a historically unprecedented deal that will never again be equaled because college football increasingly is moving away from over-the-air TV.

I say it's laughable because...look at what every conference is doing. Those conferences that everyone says ND should join, but they're too greedy? They all have (or will soon have) cable networks. Cable networks that take money out of your pocket every month regardless of whether you're actually interested in the product.

I pay a buck a month to the Big Ten Network. I don't care one iota about that conference unless my alma mater, Ball State, is playing one of their teams. And yet I have to pay that money to have DirecTV. And if you don't pay it? Guess what - you don't get to watch most of your team's games. And if your conference's (or team's, in Texas' case) can't strike a deal with your favored TV provider, you can't watch your team anyway.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame's home games have never, not once in the history of the NBC deal, taken a penny out of your pocket via cable bills. ND could probably get more money if they bid out their content to Fox or ESPN and put their games on cable. But they don't want to. They get more exposure now.

You can argue that the exposure leads to more money, and you're right. But come on, arguing college sports is laced with greed is kind of like arguing that you need to breathe oxygen to live - everyone knows it. At least ND's greed isn't directly taking money away from you. Last season, all 12 of ND's regular season games were on national, over-the-air television. (Ironically, only the national-title game was on pay cable.) I don't think that's ever happened before in college football. And it probably won't ever happen again.

"Notre Dame wants to play by different rules!" - This is a cousin of the greed thing because both stem from ND's football independence. College football fans are simply irate that Notre Dame doesn't need to join a conference to have a shot to play for the national title, or to be financially viable.

Hey, guys. Here's a tip: Your school doesn't have to be in a conference either. There is absolutely no rule that says an FBS school has to be in a conference to win a title. (You can't join FBS without a conference, apparently, which I didn't know until like a week ago, but current FBS schools don't have this requirement.)

Notre Dame isn't in a conference because they don't have to be. Michigan, Texas, Alabama - they probably don't have to be either. Each of those programs, and several others, could probably leave their league, bid out their football home games, and get similar sweetheart treatment. They won't, because being independent in football makes things more difficult. Maybe not on the field, but certainly in other sports, where you have to find a willing partner for your other teams, and in scheduling, where the conference office doesn't take care of 3/4 of your schedule for you.

Hell, do you really think that if, for some reason, the Big Ten was faced with the choice of either letting Michigan go football-independent and leaving their other sports there or losing its affiliation with the school entirely, that it would say 'sayonara'? Because I don't. But that's not the path Michigan chooses. Same for Texas, or Alabama, or USC, or whoever. And that's fine. Neither I nor any other ND fan begrudges a school that choice. But I missed the part where being in a conference gives you de facto superiority over a school that's not in one. If one of the other brand-name schools wanted to give what ND does a shot, they would. But they don't.

And for crying out loud, please stop complaining about the ACC deal ND got. It's not as favorable as the one they had with the Big East, for one thing (just ask Michigan, who ND shunted off the schedule to make room for all the ACC teams they now have to play), and for another, the ACC wouldn't have agreed to it if they weren't getting significant value out of it (and they are). These leagues are run by big boys. They can make their own decisions.

"ND hypocritically treats their athletes as being above the law!" - This one is relatively recent because Brian Kelly has managed to obtain more latitude with regard to disciplinary measures. It largely stems from Michael Floyd being allowed to play after getting a DUI (his third alcohol-related infraction) the March before his senior season. To a lesser extent, people (at least some I know) have complained that Tommy Rees and Carlo Calabrese got off light after their drinking escapades last spring - missing one game each.

The problem with this argument is that the way ND dealt with these issues before was unnecessarily draconian. Kyle McAlarney, a basketball player, GOT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL for a semester - missing a conference season - because he had a joint in his car. That's really kind of insane when you think about it, especially since opinion on the matter of marijuana has changed so significantly in recent years.

To use another example, Will Yeatman, a reserve tight end during the Weis era, was basically exiled after being caught drinking and walking back to his house one spring. He wasn't even underage!! He ended up transferring to Maryland to play lacrosse, I think.

It was long past time to re-examine the disciplinary measures ND takes, and they finally did when Kelly arrived. Floyd's was the first high-profile instance of the change, as Brian Kelly chose to make Floyd jump through several hoops to get back to the football team rather than simply suspend him. But the haters were out for blood when Floyd ultimately didn't miss any games (again, for a DUI six months prior to the season opener).

The problem with that line of thinking? By pretty much every account, the hoops Kelly made Floyd jump through served him much better as a person than just booting him off the team would have. He hasn't been in any trouble since and was a first-round pick in 2012. And it's not like Kelly hasn't suspended guys since for this stuff. Cierre Wood, ND's most talented running back in 2012, missed the first two games last year on suspension because of marijuana. ND was tied in the final minutes of one of those games at least in part because Wood wasn't playing.

As for Rees and Calabrese...I'm not sure how much I begrudge them, because the South Bend police is pretty infamous locally for viewing ND player arrests as trophies. There's a well-known and possibly (but probably not) apocryphal story about a South Bend cop busting into a party and yelling, "Where's Clausen?" in reference to ex-ND player Jimmy Clausen. (Jimmy wasn't there.) Clausen also got arrested once for driving an of-age friend to a liquor store and sitting in his car outside it, a charge you literally could not make unless the person was well-known enough for you to know how old he was without checking ID.

And at the time of Calabrese's arrest, he was of age too, so there were really no grounds for getting on his case. So if he drunkenly said "My people will get you", an unintentionally hilarious homage to his Italian/Jersey heritage, I'm pretty sure I'm on his side there.

"Notre Dame is overrated by the pollsters!" - This one is stupid, too, because every single name-brand program is overrated by the pollsters. I remember in 2009, when Texas played a very weak schedule by their standards and needed a replay review to put time back on the clock in the Big 12 title game to even get to the national championship. Both Cincinnati and TCU had legitimate arguments at the time to be ranked ahead of Texas given their respective schedules, and all three were unbeaten. Guess which one got to the title game? (Yep.) Guess what Alabama did to them? (Yep.)

And while Notre Dame certainly gets its share of breaks from the guys who make the rankings, I'm pretty sure only one team in the history of college football has dropped in the polls TWICE in one season after winning a game - 2006 Notre Dame. Including a week one drop after beating Georgia Tech in Atlanta. And what did the teams behind them do that week to earn the jump? Beat tomato cans in their home stadium.

And last year, when there were for a short time four major unbeatens (ND, Alabama, K-State and Oregon), guess who every single pundit in the known universe had ranked fourth among them? Yep.

Sure ND gets a helping hand. But it doesn't seem to me to be any bigger than the ones a Michigan or a Texas or an Ohio State get, too.

"Notre Dame was racist for firing Tyrone Willingham!" - Thankfully, these people are all but gone since Willingham ran Washington into the ground and Charlie Weis and Brian Kelly combined to underscore what Willingham was doing to the Irish by picking up ND's recruiting as soon as they arrived. But if you still think they were racist for axing Ty, you can check out the older posts of mine called "Rebutting Jason Whitlock" in the archive on the right.

"You're a homer and you're not rational!" - This one might just be one I get. I don't know. But I assume several people do. This one's not exclusive to Notre Dame either.

Damn right I'm a homer. If you're not a homer at least to some degree, I'm not sure how much I want to talk sports with you regardless of your team because that probably means you don't care as much as I do. (Again, that's fine - I just prefer to talk to people who care, probably too much.) And while I'm extremely irrational during games and usually the rest of the day following, once the dust has settled and I've gotten a chance to look things over, I'd like to think I'm pretty fair.

To use one example, I was roundly excoriated for implying that Oregon might lose to Stanford on Nov. 17 because at the time Oregon appeared unstoppable and the person I was arguing with probably just assumed I was grasping at a straw that Stanford was good because I wanted ND to look good for having beaten them. Well, I noticed that Oregon hadn't played anyone with a half-decent defense and I knew Stanford had a very good one. Turned out, Oregon scored 14 points against Stanford. And lost. I'm not right a whole lot, but I tooted my own horn on that one. And then 6 weeks later, I was loud wrong when Alabama destroyed Notre Dame. It happens. Sometimes - probably more often than not - I'm wrong. Everyone is.

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There are probably more of these that I'll think of later, and maybe I'll add them later - since this is, essentially, my own journal that hardly anyone reads. But I just wanted to get some thoughts on the page. If you still think I'm a horribly biased homer who can't stand when anyone criticizes the blue and gold for any reason, then you're entitled to think that. (I certainly care more about them than any sports team - probably because it's the only one that I had passed on to me by my family rather than just choosing essentially at random myself.)

However, if you happen to agree with me that I'm just a run-of-the-mill homer who tries his best to think reasonably on whatever sports issue that pops up, that's great too. Let me know. We'll confab.

Title-Game Blowout Shows How Far ND Has to Go — But They Can Get There

Alabama showed it's on another level — and now the Irish
know more work is to be done.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to go.

After the dreamlike way that Notre Dame’s 12-0 undefeated regular season played out, the last thing anyone thought was that a cold, hard dose of reality would await in the national title game.

That is, however, exactly what Irish fans got on Jan. 7, when Alabama, for the third time in four years, blasted its BCS championship game foe. The score was 42-14, but Alabama had things put away early in the second quarter.

It was hard to get too angry about anything that happened after it became clear the Tide was on another playing field Monday night. A couple of sketchy officiating decisions — not reviewing what appeared to be a catch by Tyler Eifert on ND’s first drive, followed by a stupid interference call against the Irish when the offender was clipped into interfering — kept ND from gaining their footing, but not nearly as much as the Alabama offensive line did.

44 days off proved lethal to the Notre Dame defense, which just didn’t look like itself. SEC mouth-breathers were quick to chalk it up to superior athletes, and it’s certainly true that the Tide boasted more potent running backs and better line play than the Irish had seen. But those things didn’t explain why Manti Te’o missed several tackles when in position to make them, why Zeke Motta looked like he had no idea where he was supposed to be half the time, or why ND was slower to react to screen passes than they had been during the regular season (when such an offensive play call was tantamount to taking a knee).

It probably didn’t help matters that Brian Kelly was quick to abandon the running game when things got tough. It was hard to blame him too much considering the Tide scored touchdowns on their first three possessions, but even on ND’s early drives, Kelly seemed scared to call a run. What runs he did call were stuffed, but most glaring were back to back calls for Everett Golson to throw deep on 2nd and 3rd downs when just two yards were needed for the first.

I could go on about the things the ND coaches didn’t do well and the things their players didn’t do well, but that would be insulting to Alabama, a terrific football team that played as locked-in as I’ve ever seen a team play. A.J. McCarron, given time by his colossal offensive line, made mincemeat of an ND secondary that had played so well all year it was easy to forget their starting cornerbacks were a true freshman converted running back and a junior in his second year of playing the position. The Tide exposed that fact, and how.

The predictable outcries of Notre Dame not belonging in the title game and SEC superiority were unleashed so quickly once Bama took control that they’d largely died down following the game.

It is easy to watch that game and assume that the SEC is an unstoppable force of college football, that you might as well stage a four-team playoff among that conference to determine a champion in the future. However, it is worth noting that given a six-week layoff last season, Saban’s Alabama team destroyed LSU, an almighty SEC team, similarly. (They didn’t score 42 points, but they were just as dominant as they were against the Irish this week.) This SEC run of titles is less about the conference than about Nick Saban. Saban has taken four teams to the title game, and each time, given the long layoff, he has relentlessly attacked the opponent’s weaknesses and watched his team outclass them on the field.

The SEC has won seven titles in a row less because of the players than because of the coaches. After all, five of those seven were won by Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, ranked 1 and 2 in most any reasonable person’s poll of FBS coaches. The other two were won against probably the most fraudulent BCS title-game participant of all time — 2007’s Ohio State team — and by a guy who by all rights shouldn’t have been eligible — Cam Newton.

Anyway, I digress. The game showed that, while there’s little reason to believe Notre Dame will fade back into obscurity anytime soon, they still have plenty of distance to go. The good news for Irish fans is they’re on the pathway. This 2012 team was never supposed to be this good. 2013 was supposed to be the year ND exploded onto the scene, after Golson had a year under him and when Stephon Tuitt, Louis Nix and company were a year more experienced. While Kelly did not follow the path of every other great Irish coach by winning the national title in year three, he still achieved the pivotal third-year task of proving he’s the right man for the Notre Dame job.

And the 12-0 season paid recruiting dividends. ND has a consensus top-3 recruiting class in the country coming in, one even better than Alabama’s according to most services. Among them are two of the best recruits at their positions that ND’s ever acquired since recruiting rankings became in vogue — Greg Bryant at running back and Max Redfield at safety.

Returning will be the vast majority of the difference-makers on this Notre Dame team. Only Manti Te’o, Theo Riddick, Tyler Eifert, Kapron Lewis-Moore and (likely) Cierre Wood will be departing among the blue-chip level talents, while the Irish bring back their two best defensive linemen, three-fourths of their secondary, their quarterback, an excellent class of freshmen and three guys (Jamoris Slaughter, Lo Wood and Austin Collinsworth) that missed this season with injuries and would’ve otherwise contributed.

So while the Irish got fed a big dish of humble pie at the national championship game, ND haters shouldn’t get used to such defeats. Kelly has set a pathway to success, and his team is taking the fast track on that path.

And while no 12-0 season can ever be called likely, don’t bet against a rematch of this game next year in Pasadena. And if that happens, Kelly and his staff hopefully have a whole book of notes of what not to do in preparation for it.