Bagpipe Monday: Is Notre Dame starting the football season over

Welcome to another Bagpipe Monday on One Foot Down! Friends, I usually want to get these things out in the mornings, but with the new media schedule for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, it’s been getting later and later. If you were unaware, I try to use this as a chance to ask you one of the more pressing questions on my mind — or something like that.

It’s a weird feeling. As a website manager that covers Notre Dame football, the way the schedule has unfolded since August has been incredibly out of sorts. It’s hard to find a rhythm and be able to dive completely into the coverage of the Irish. So, I have wondered just how in the hell the Notre Dame football program is getting along with weirdness that no one has ever seen — it’s got to be just ridiculously strange.

Notre Dame has been off for two weeks, so when someone asked Brian Kelly about this game having a “season-opener” kind of feel, I was all ears.

“Yeah, a good question. Not sure that I feel like this is an opener as much as it is, you know, understanding that it’s really hard to take two weeks off and think that you can just pick it up without a lot of work and a lot of attention to detail. I think we can go out and play well. But it’s going to require everybody to a man to really be purposeful in their work this week. We’ve played a couple games, we’ve had a lot of practices leading into this. But two weeks off definitely is something that you can’t just think we’re going to roll it back out there and all things are good. It’s not. It’s going to require, as I mentioned, really leaning on an attention to detail that maybe they’ve never had before. So making them aware of that.”

A lot of Irish fans and media members expect Notre Dame to roll a struggling Florida State team on Saturday, but because of everything that has happened over the past few weeks — I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Notre Dame came out slow and off-balance. Even most season-openers have a lot better prep during the 2 week lead up than what the Irish have had for FSU. It’s a little concerning.

Do you think this feels more like a season opener?

Alright, since last week’s “pipes” went so well, let’s stay on that path — get the message.