Notre Dame To Announce Rehab Stint, Impending Pregnancy To TMZ

White smoke in South Bend!

While Alabama is stoking the fires of a thousand " Dunlap Shouldn't Have Been Suspended" posts, Notre Dame is doing everything it can to make people care after the big sucking silence following its earth-shattering withdrawal from bowl play. Including whispering to the that the Most Important Coaching Change In College Football will be formalized tomorrow with... the signing of Bob Stoops.

Stoops has already said like five times this week that there is no way in hell he's going to ND. (But nice Google bait there, Sun-Times CMS!) Or maybe I misread, and five Stoops this week have expressed the appropriate amount of horror at coaching the college-football equivalent of a really bad college football team? Because there are lots and lots of Stoops, all hailing from my high school rival, Youngstown Cardinal Mooney (cleverly nicknamed the Cardinals).

Two next-generation Stoops are part of a squad that just demolished the entirety of their division en route to an undefeated season; Ron (Brother of Bob) is the team's current defensive coordinator. While I was catching up on trash talk on the Ohio HS bulletin boards, I came across a rumor that "Stoops" might get a call, and I assumed the chatter was about Ron — hey, Notre Dame has famously reached into the pool of parochial high school powerhouses before. I might discount the possibility of hiring not even the head coach of a high school team (as the tenure of Gerry Faust was and one that was widely considered to be a failure), but that was well before the bar had to be recalibrated thanks to the not-so-little name of Charlie Weis.

I was reading the boards because my alma mater, Ursuline High School (cleverly nicknamed the Fighting Irish), was busy dismantling the entirety of itsdivision, beating the most successful program of recent years (Coldwater) yesterday afternoon 55-21 and setting a whole raft of records. It was the team's third straight title game appearance and second consecutive championship.

Still up this evening is the Division I title game, which features the scrappy Glenville. The Cleveland public school team has already dispatched the monster of St. Iggy, and it was nicely profiled in an up-by-the-bootstraps today. Did I just post about Notre Dame as an excuse to worm my way around to giving a shoutout to coach Dan Reardon and his team? You betcha.

This is 99, btw.