Notre Dame Fighting Irish

The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame are now headed into their 23rd season without a national title, but the program is showing signs of hope and legitimate recovery under the second-year leadership of Brian Kelly. After underachieving for three straight years leading up to 2010, Notre Dame football overcame a mountain of adversity last year and strung together some of the biggest wins in recent team history. Now the Irish are once again receiving a lot of attention as one of the country’s strongest teams.

This excitement and hype comes from the team returning a bevy of players on both sides of the ball, including junior linebacker Manti Te’o and senior wide receiver Michael Floyd. What’s more, the depth across the board is better than it has ever been since our beloved Lou Holtz was in his prime during the early 1990’s.

As usual, the Notre Dame football schedule features plenty of stiff challenges from top opponents, but the Irish seem poised to handle it and win a lot of games in 2011. Coming off the best defensive recruiting class in 20 years or longer, and with 9 starters coming back on that side of the ball, Notre Dame is in odd position for the program has not had a dominant defense that could out play the team’s offense in quite a long time. This year that could very well be the case.

Notre Dame is thin at running back and corner, and needs to figure out the quarterback situation (even though there is proven talent there), but Brian Kelly and the coaching staff have been on a mission to give the program a complete makeover from the days of Charlie Weis. In year two of that rebuilding, we may see the fruits of that labor start to come to fruition with a BCS bowl game appearance and the most successful season of the post-Holtz era.