Discover defensive breakout stars, offensive line buzz, top-ranked defensive lines, and answers to your burning Notre Dame questions.
Another week of the 2026 offseason has come and gone; we are now only 198 days away from Notre Dame kicking off against Wisconsin. We've covered a lot of great topics this week including some defensive breakout predictions, some buzz around the first team offensive line, the top ten defensive line units in the country in 2026 and new defensive line coach Charlie Partridge. Like we do every week, we ended with our Friday Free-For-All Mailbag and the questions did not disappoint on today's episode of the Irish Breakdown Podcast.
You can watch the entire show here:
Here are some of the questions we answered in today's mailbag:
On If Larger Roster Sizes Increase Chances Of Players Going Unnoticed...
"The biggest thing is working cohesively as a staff. If Rob Delaney is seeing Cam Herron take off at center and he's doing really good work with the third team or scout team, he has to do a good job of communicating with Joe Rudolph around what's happening. At the end of the day, Rudolph is only one guy who is in charge or a 20-man position group. He just simply doesn't have enough time, or eyes, to watch every individual player's development live at practice. As long as the staff works together and communicates well, I don't think many players will go unnoticed."
On How Well Navy Would Do If They Made The Playoffs...
"Let's just say that Navy made it in last year's playoff instead one James Madison or Tulane. I don't know if any team, outside of Indiana from a coaching standpoint, I think they would most resemble what Notre Dame has done to Navy over the last couple of seasons. I think they would beat James Madison or Tulane. You start working your way up from there, and people down in Tuscaloosa won't like this, but Navy would play Alabama significantly closer than what Alabama played Indiana. I don't think they win that game, but they score more than three points and take the game into the 4th."
On The Number Of Bowl Eligible Teams That Will Be On Notre Dame's Schedule...
"I'm going to take the over set at 5.5; off the bat, I'm sure there's four teams on their schedule that we feel pretty good about. BYU, Navy, Miami and SMU will all be bowl eligible teams. Between Wisconsin, Michigan State, North Carolina and Syracuse, I think two of those teams become bowl eligible teams. I'm going to take the over, not by a ton, but I'm going to take the over."
On What Offensive Position Group Needs To Take The Biggest Jump...
"It's the offensive line. If I had to rank them, I'd go offensive line number one, quarterback number two, wide receiver number three, tight end number four and running back number five. You're not making a jump at running back and I don't need you to take a jump at running back."
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