National Signing Day is next week on Wednesday February 1st.

As this is a very important day for every college football program, One Foot Down will be running an open thread all day to cover the incoming 2012 class.

Next week, head over to und.com to follow all of the coverage from the Guglielmino Complex.

It all starts at 7 AM ET and will run into the afternoon.

Brian Kelly's press conference is scheduled for 1 PM ET.

We will be here for the entire duration of the coverage, so stop by and join us.

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Welcome to this installment of TWIN. You all know what this is about so I will get right to it. Starting elsewhere and ending in South Bend.

For a few hours on Sunday Night it looked like Oregon's Chip Kelly was headed to Tampa Bay to coach the Buccaneers. Then less than 12 hours later he wasn't. Instead the Bucs ended up hiring Greg Schiano away from Rutgers. That all makes perfect sense.

Shortly after the Schiano announcement yesterday Tom Dienhart Tweeted that Bob Diaco might be a candidate to replace Schiano at Rutgers. Ummmm no thanks. In all fairness Bobby D was the 9th potential "name to watch" that Dienhart threw out there. You have to throw the obligatory ND guy in there to get some hits right?

More after the jump.

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Reviewing the Redshirts is back with yet another installment. Yesterday Burgs' covered another offensive linemen while I get to have all the fun covering more playmakers and tacklers.

So far we've talked about the following players who sat out 2011:

WR DaVaris Daniels

LB Werewolf

LB Ben Councell

OT Jordan Prestwood

CB Jalen Brown

OL Nick Martin

QB Everett Golson

OG Conor Hanratty

OL Brad Carrico

Next up is a player that definitely qualifies for sleeper status in the 2011 class.

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Notre Dame travels to Newark to take on Seton Hall tonight in a Big East middle of the pack showdown. Seton Hall is led by forward Herb Pope (16.7 ppg 10.5 rpg) and are looking to bounce back from a slide in which they've suffered two consecutive close losses to South Florida and Villanova. The Irish, meanwhile will be looking to not come up flat after notching one of the best regular season wins in the history of its program.

Tip off is scheduled for 8:00pm and the game can be seen on the Big East Network or online at ESPN3.com

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick sat down with the Observer over Christmas break and discussed various and sundry Notre-Dame-sports-related topics. Swarbrick professed his confidence in the Big East, talked Notre Dame football in China, and discussed what the Notre Dame football program can learn from the "non-revenue" sports and basketball; hint: it rhymes with "winning."

You can find the entire article here. But why read it for yourself when you can just let the good folks at One Foot Down tell you what to think? Here is the first part of our two-part write up.

Notre Dame Is Dealing With Recent And Impending Changes To College Football

Swarbrick discussed how potential changes to college football's offseason might affect Notre Dame:

[S]o much of this is motivated by postseason football issues like automatic qualification status. I think there's a likelihood that something about the format of postseason will change in the next year. And depending on what form that takes, it may produce change. Absent that piece of information, it's hard to predict what might happen. But setting that aside, I think with the Big East having solidified itself through these recent moves I think among the BCS conferences it'll be pretty stable.

Notre Dame is "really happy that the Big East, which has been a great home to us, was able to make the moves it made...," moves that were "good for the Big East" and its continued viability.

Translation: The Big East just about imploded last season. We are happy that the clowns that run the Big East saw this coming and took appropriate measures to prevent its own demise took the deer-in-the-headlights approach and froze in the path of the 40-ton semi that was conference realignment hurtling through the southern night at 70 m.p.h. We are glad to have a place for basketball and all of our other sports. We are also glad that the Big East took on some new football schools, although it makes no sense that four of them are from the Southwest and West Coast. Now that the Big East includes football up-and-comers like Southern Methodist and Houston, we can boost our strength-of-schedule and keep the Big East happy without really risking much.

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We're coming up on the home stretch in our Reviewing the Redshirts series. Here's who we've looked at so far:

WR DaVaris Daniels

LB Werewolf

LB Ben Councell

OT Jordan Prestwood

CB Jalen Brown

OL Nick Martin

QB Everett Golson

OG Conor Hanratty

As always, I'm here to highlight one of the big guys on the offensive line. Unlike the last two players I profiled, this one doesn't have outstanding genes, but he did attend the same high school as another Notre Dame player that turned out to be pretty good.

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One Foot Down has focused on covering Fighting Irish football and men's basketball almost exclusively since moving over to SBNation. As these are the two most popular sports for the Notre Dame community it's been a no-brainer to devote so much attention towards the pigskin and men's hoops.

However, we felt it is doing Notre Dame and the rest of the university athletes a disservice by not covering the rest of the sports on campus, particularly since many of the teams and individuals are playing at an elite level.

So the time has come to cover the other 14 Irish sports from both the men's and women's side of the aisle.

Welcome to This Week in Notre Dame Athletics!

Due to the sheer number of sports being covered we will not be able to devote an incredible amount of attention and detail to each team, but it is our hope that this weekly post allows Fighting Irish fans everywhere a greater understanding of the hard work and success the rest of the athletes in South Bend achieve while mostly out of the spotlight.

This feature might not be very popular, but there are actually things called "championships" and "national titles" in some of the the 14 other sports, so it is kind of important.

Dive right in after the jump. I hope you enjoy this.

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