Notre Dame receiver
Golden Tate captured two first-place votes in Heisman Trophy balloting and finished 10th overall with 21 points. Tate also got three second-place votes and nine votes for third.
The complete breakdown (1st-2nd-3rd—Total; voting on a 3-2-1 basis):
Mark Ingram, Alabama 227-236-151—1304
Toby Gerhart, Stanford 222-225-160—1276
Colt McCoy, Texas 203-188-160—1145
Ndamukong Suh, Nebraska 161-105-122—815
Tim Tebow, Florida 43-70-121—390
C.J. Spiller, Clemson 26-31-83—223
Kellen Moore, Boise State 10-20-30—100
Case Keenum, Houston 2-9-13—37
Mardy Gilyard, Cincinnati 2-2-13—23
Golden Tate, Notre Dame 2-3-9—21
Jarred DuBois hit a 3-pointer from the left wing with 8 seconds to go to give Loyola Marymount a surprising 87-85 win over Notre Dame.
I'd say it was a shocking loss for the Irish, but no team that plays defense like Notre Dame did Saturday night should be shocked when it loses. LMU shot 52 percent from the field and was able to get to the basket time and time again.
Notre Dame had a chance to go ahead when Tory Jackson drove the lane in the final seconds, but Jackson's shot was off and the rebound came down to the Lions' Drew Viney, who fired it downcourt as the clock expired.
Shades of the December loss to Central Michigan in 2003, a game which might've kept the Irish out of the NCAA tournament that season. We'll see what happens this March.
More in my full story later.
It's halftime at Purcell Pavilion, where Notre Dame leads Loyola Marymount 45-44 in a fast-paced game, the second of the day here. (The Irish women's team trounced Valparaiso 88-47 earlier in the day.)
The Irish bolted to leads of 7-0 and 16-6, but LMU came back to take a 24-20 lead, its largest of the game so far. The teams were tied at 33-33 when Luke Harangody was called for a foul he disagreed with on the defensive end of the floor and then came back to throw down a one-handed slam on the other with 4:23 left in the half to give the Irish the lead, and they haven't given it up since. The Lions closed within one point on a floater in the lane by Vernon Teel that just beat the buzzer.
Harangody has 17 points and Tim Abromaitis 10 for the Irish, who are shooting 53 percent. Ashley Hamilton has 10 off the bench for the Lions, who are shooting 52 percent. LMU is out-rebounding Notre Dame 19-13.
A couple other notes:
• One of LMU's three wins this season came over Academy of Art University.
Check out their cool logo — what you'd expect from a school with a design program.
• And our halftime entertainment tonight was a
66-year old man shooting 3-pointers. He made 39 out of 50 (!), including nine of his last 10.
Golden Tate has been named to another All-America team, this one selected by the Football Writers Association of America.
The other receiver on the team was Bowling Green's Freddie Barnes.
To see the complete team,
click here.
The story of the day at Notre Dame, obviously, was the hiring of
Brian Kelly as football coach. (Just making sure everyone had heard the news.) But athletic director
Jack Swarbrick took some general questions as well. Here are some of his comments:
• On the subject of the referees who work Notre Dame games, it didn’t sound as if changes were in the works.
“Administratively, you have to affiliate with some conference officiating group,” Swarbrick said. “You can’t be a la carte. You can’t go to the Big 12 one week and say, ‘Hey, can we have a crew?’ or the Big East the next week, because they can’t staff and schedule.
“You have to know a year in advance, so you have to make a conference decision. So that’s the first decision you’re making. You wind up with circumstances where it ought to work, but the problem is it’s never your conference officials. It’s the reality of it. We can’t form a Notre Dame crew that we take around, or no one will play us. It just is what it is. It’s not an obstacle to being successful.
The officiating situation was not a point of discussion when Notre Dame recently renewed its contract with Purdue, Swarbrick said.
“We have this anomaly with the Michigan contract, but with every other contract you do, the visiting team, they designate the officials,” Swarbrick said. “That the basic structure. Sometimes, you’ll deal with a team that won’t feel particularly strongly about that and they’ll give you an opportunity to have your guys do a home game. But generally speaking, the industry standard is the visiting team designates the officials.”
• Former coach
Charlie Weis said Residence Life was the “biggest negative issue” on the Notre Dame campus, but Swarbrick said “No,” decisively, when asked if Res Life was a problem.
“I’m not commenting on Charlie’s perspective,” Swarbrick said. “He has his own perspective, but that was never a focus of any of this.”
• Swarbrick didn’t completely rule out junior-college transfers being accepted at Notre Dame, but he didn’t sound terribly receptive to the idea, either.
“I don’t know,” Swarbrick said. “It’s never a question that’s come up. I haven’t had to deal with it. It’s certainly not our model.”
The training table is making a comeback at Notre Dame.
Athletic director
Jack Swarbrick said Friday that proper nutrition for Irish players is “at the top of the list” of changes that must be made for the betterment of the program.
“We have to get that right,” Swarbrick said. “We track weight, and our weight loss on the defensive side of the ball during the year was, frankly, a little shocking. So we have to fix that.”
Swarbrick said defensive players lost, on average, 13 pounds during the course of the season.
“You can’t play football that way,” Swarbrick said.
Notre Dame asked dining halls to track football players' eating habits for a week, and found that only 42 percent of them ate dinner on a nightly basis.
"It doesn't mean they're not eating, but you get a real nutritional concern," Swarbrick said. "Are they getting enough, are they eating the right stuff? And a lot of that is scheduling. We have to schedule a little smarter."
Training table, which existed when Swarbrick was a student at Notre Dame but was eventually discontinued when the dining halls extended their service hours, was brought up by the Student-Athlete Advisory Council as a key issue about six months ago, Swarbrick said. In response, Notre Dame did a survey of other schools’ programs and tracked how Irish athletes ate. The program will be started up again when Notre Dame decides on “the right model,” Swarbrick said.
“Is it a segregated time, is it a designated space?” Swarbrick said. “It’s just how do you make it work?”