UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Lots of similarities between these two teams, but the outlook certainly differs.

Both teams have young coaches who show hints of being quite promising. Both coaches are off to excellent starts when it comes to recruiting top tier talent.

Both teams entered the season with high hopes. I honestly believed that we would be a 2 loss team going to a NY6 bowl, but that's more of a pipe dream at this point.

Both of us are 2-2, both of us have lost to a ranked team, as well as a bottom feeder team.

Both of us have had our star quarterbacks underperform, and benched due to bad play or shelved due to injury against the bottom feeder teams. Van Dyke has probably lost his starting QB job to Jake Garcia.

Yet the attitudes and fortunes on both campuses are quite different. We seem to be on the upswing, that what was horribly plaguing us (offensive line) has started solidifying, and fixing a lot of what went wrong early on in the season.

Miami has lost its last two, and the loss to Middle Tennessee State University wasn't anywhere nearly as close as the final two TD loss would indicate. Right now, the Miami boards are lit with people grumbling about Cristobal's competence, and are wondering why they're paying Gattis 2 million a year.

I get it... Nobody here wants to see a 2-2 start, but at least our 2-2 start is a lot more promising, and I still think we can make it to a decent bowl to salvage the season and build momentum for the next year.