Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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murphy's Law dan murphy Watch List Overload I By Dan Murphy t's almost here. The most overanticipated time of the year is just around the corner. The first rays of another college football season are peeking above the horizon. Almost exactly half of the year passes between National Signing Day in February and the first crack of pads cutting through the muggy morning August air, a sonic dove above flooded waters signaling that land is near. We spend as much time not so patiently waiting for football as we do watching it. Those days — all 185 of them this year — have spawned as many rituals as the autumn months that follow. Each one is sillier than the last. By the time Aug. 31 mercifully arrives, there is no nook or cranny of the season that follows left unpredicted, unanalyzed or uncategorized. The sporting calendar is Senior cornerback Bennett Jackson is one of the 870 scheduled to make the home names — including 12 Irish players — that appear on the stretch of the offseason as painful watch lists for the nation's top 15 awards this season. photo by Bill Panzica as possible, the final days almost completely void of athletic distractions their exhaustive ballots of possible to fill the space. If August is a dawn of candidates. Unfortunately, in an effort sorts, watch list week is our darkest to generate as much conversation on as many college campuses as possible, the hour. Watch list week — so tedious it list makers have turned their "players actually takes two weeks to finish — to watch" honors into the equivalent of comes each July when the committees a participation ribbon. There are 870 names on the watch that decide individual awards at the end of each season release lists for the nation's top 15 awards