I think you undersell the Irish

There is a lot of recency bias around the Pitt game. It is likely to be the aberration compared to Stanford and Va. Tech.

That said, it would have been nice to dominate as expected, but Narduzzi can coach defense, and it showed. They put a lot of things on the field that Book had not seen before, and it took time to adapt, but they did.

When you look at schedules, ND has played a much tougher schedule than Alabama. Other than Texas A&M, they have not played a team with a winning record yet (unless Missouri has one). Louisville is an historically bad dumpster fire with BVG in charge of the defense. Their other nonconference game to date is a buy game, and their last nonconference game is Citadel. They can't even schedule a top military school.

Yes, they will play Auburn (now a three loss team and fading- sounds like Stanford), LSU (pretty good, on a par with Michigan), Miss State (probably Va. Tech of the west -both are borderline Top 25 teams)and then Georgia or Florida in the SEC Championship game.

Alabama looks great, but they are dominating teams that they should be dominating. Nothing more than that. Pitt was the first game, post-QB switch, where the offense did not dominate the way it should have.

I want to get back to dominating. We have to play some games against teams that will be better than people give credit for, with the exception of USC who will be playing for the PAC12 championship, given the weakness of their division. With a win over Wisconsin, NW could play for the Big10 Championship.

If we win out and play Alabama in the play-off, we will do better than people think. We might even win.