Hopefully, he'll be rooting for us. We'd rather have him on our side.

I guess that sort of put a stamp on my decision.

I noticed it a little bit. If the roles were reversed, we might have done the same thing.

It's incredible. This is the reason players pick a school like Notre Dame: Because we get the opportunity to play these kinds of teams.

That kind of posed a little bit of a problem as far as the running game was concerned.

We feel we can play with anyone. We try not to base too much ... on the luck of the Irish. We just try to go out there and get it for ourselves.

You can tell the get-nasty attitude in the way you walk, the way you talk, how you feel about yourself. Maybe it's a little bit of a New Jersey-type deal with Coach Weis being from New Jersey.

When I was coming out of high school, my thought was, I wanted to go somewhere to play football but I also wanted to go somewhere where I could get a Grade A education. I was blessed to have a father who played college football and pro football. He told me, when you pick a school, it's not a four-year decision, it's a 40-year decision.

We were not surprised with what happened tonight because we were very well prepared.

We in turn have to make sure that we're up for that challenge, because there's going to be a lot of contact - hard contact - all the time.