Greg McElroy gives take on Notre Dame amid nightmare 0-2 start
Published:
Greg McElroy is familiar with college football success at the highest level, having quarterbacked Alabama to a national title in 2009.
But that doesn’t mean everything was always rosy for the former Crimson Tide star when he was in Tuscaloosa. Now, as an ESPN college football analyst and the host of his own college football podcast, McElroy has a different view of the game and the struggles that teams sometimes go through.
Take the 2025 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, for instance. Notre Dame was a few plays from winning the national championship last season and the Fighting Irish were ranked 6th in the preseason AP Poll, so there were high hopes in South Bend for this fall. But 2 games into the season, it’s been nothing but a nightmare for Marcus Freeman’s team, which has suffered heartbreaking losses to Miami and Texas A&M to fall into an 0-2 hole.
The Irish are barely hanging on in the AP Top 25 at No. 24, but McElroy believes the sky isn’t totally falling in South Bend. On Tuesday morning during his Always College Football podcast, McElroy talked about the state of affairs for the Irish as they try to dig out of that hole over their next 10 games.
“The luck of the Irish, right? Or the bad luck of the Irish. The football gods, the football voodoo, whatever you want to chalk it up to, last year it always felt like the ball bounced Notre Dame’s way. So far, early in the year, just 2 games in, it feels like it’s kind of the exact opposite,” McElroy said.
McElroy still believes Notre Dame’s much-maligned defense, which gave up a late field goal to lose at Miami and allowed 41 points to Texas A&M last Saturday night, isn’t in as rough a shape as some think after just 2 games.
Here is the full clip of McElroy’s Notre Dame take:
Time will tell if McElroy’s belief in Notre Dame after the 0-2 start was a smart take or whether this awful start was a prelude to more losses and more heartache in South Bend.
Notre Dame can begin to prove McElroy right by beating up on Purdue this Saturday afternoon to finally get that first victory of 2025.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
