Hours ahead of the Orange Bowl, a college football game built to honor nature’s gift to human immunity, gastrointestinal mayhem is reportedly sweeping through the Notre Dame and Penn State locker rooms.
Here’s what we know.
On the Notre Dame side, we do have one legitimate-ish report. Tyler Horka of On3 writes:
According to Blue & Gold sources, a bug has been going around the Fighting Irish locker room. It’s mainly affected backups and special teams, but Blue & Gold can confirm at least one starter, not to be named, is feeling seriously ill on game day. Another starter from the same side of the ball came down with the sickness sometime between the Sugar Bowl last week and now, but he’s “on the mend” now.
Why does this read like a gossip column? I’ll leave it to you to decide. All I’ll offer is that established Notre Dame beat writers aren’t reporting anything about this, and that one time this fall, Horka asked if an 0–2 stretch and Bryce Underwood’s decommitment constituted the worst two or three weeks in Brian Kelly’s history as a head coach. I, for one, would vote for the involuntary manslaughter incident as the worst two or three weeks. Brian Kelly once lost to Navy, killed a student manager, then lost to Tulsa, all in the span of eight days.
So, you know, grain of salt and whatnot.
On the Penn State side, we have nothing resembling real reporting. We’ve got tweets and message board posts. Those started last night. They started for Notre Dame last night as well. A narrative is forming that Penn State is pooping its pants and Notre Dame is throwing up, but that’s suspect. The media loves to push us into these binary us vs. them narratives. We are all poopers. We are all pukers. Usually when we can’t control one, we also can’t control the other. Don’t let them divide us.
In short:
- I don’t think you can trace the wildfires exclusively back to Climate Change or Lib Mayors.
- On3 should hire an editor.
- Everybody poops.
