Game week here.. A recap

Anyone who knows me well knows how big of a Notre Dame football fan I am. That means I consume essentially every piece of Notre Dame football media available between games. Between the various blogs and videos, I spend much free time on reliving and looking ahead to each weeks games.

This past week, Notre Dame hosted and beat Michigan State 17-13. Like most weeks WatchND, Notre Dame's official Youtube channel, posted a highlight video of the game.

The video above is clearly Notre Dame propaganda produced by the university. It serves a purpose to create a positive image of both the football team and its players.

For example TJ Jones' 2nd quarter TD catch, (beginning at the 2:09 mark) is replayed 4 different times. There are many reasons for doing this. Firstly, it was an important play in the game, the Irish's first touchdown of the game. Secondly, it was tremendous footwork by TJ to keep his feet in bounds. This is illustrated greatly in takes two through four as the camera angle changes to focus on the back of the end zone.

Another thing that is apparent while watching the video is who made it and who controls the narrative. Michigan State is shown making good or positive plays three times. All three times it was a single clip of the Spartan scoring play, two field goals and a touchdown.

A good play must be defined in order to discuss it. For my purpose, it means either a positive gaining passing or rushing on offense, a scoring play or return of either a punt or kick off of more than 20 yards, and either a negative play or forced turnover on defense. 

Besides the aforementioned three MSU scoring plays, every other play on the highlight video is a positive or good Notre Dame play. The plays that are shown multiple times are plays that the football program and video editors decided was especially important and notable. Plays shown more than once include a first down catch to the 2 yard line by Corey Robinson, a touchdown catch by TJ Jones, a 7 yard touchdown run by Cam McDaniel, and the game sealing first down run up the middle McDaniel late in the 4th quarter. 

By focusing solely on the Notre Dame plays, the Irish players are highlighted and focused on. The entire media clamor around Notre Dame football can certainly be a positive thing for the team especially in a format such as this video where the team holds the narrative. In recruiting, videos like these can be tools to help convince high school players to play at ND. Players get more exposure and notoriety from these highlight videos and a school like Notre Dame presents many opportunities like these to get your name and face out to the general public.

NBC also gets a lift from these videos. All footage that is used in the highlight reel is from NBC cameras and their logo is prominently featured throughout the film. As the main tv partner with Notre Dame, NBC telecasts all Notre Dame home games. Any advertising, especially cheap or even likely free advertising like this is certainly beneficially for them.

Notre Dame gets a lot out of these videos, but so do I. I had an easy access to replays of important plays of a game that I attended.

Go Irish! Beat Sooners!

A piece of me...

Every person has a unique identity. Each identity is molded and sculpted by a variety of different influences and experiences. Through their own identity, each person speaks in certain discourses. A prominent author, James Paul Gee, defines discourses as "a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thing and acting that can be used to identify oneself."

Discourses changes the way people view the world. There are a number of discourses that I am a part of each day. Each of these mold who I am.

Among my discourses: (some of these even have subcategories)

-American
         -Southeastern
                  -Tennessee
                            -Bristol
-Male
-White
         -Polish, Scottish, English, Irish, etc.
-Catholic
-Student
         -University of Notre Dame
Fan
         -Basketball
         -Football
                  -Fantasy Football
-Golfer
         -Golf course architecture
-World Traveler



While many of the first mentioned discourse communities are arguably the most important, today I am going to break down and take a deeper look that is really special to me, golf.

Golf has been a hobby for me since I was a small child. I have been able to share this love with my dad my entire life. Spending this time with my dad has been incredible. Some of my dearest and most special memories have been on a golf course somewhere with my dad. In fact, the background of this very blog is my dad and me strolling along the fairway of one of the world's great golf courses. (A prize will be given to anyone who correctly guesses the name of the golf course)

(My dad and I when I was 5 teaching me to play at the Virginian)

The game of golf has taught me many valuable lessons that I take with me off the golf course that have helped shaped my identity. Golf is certainly a gentlemanly game, a game of high moral standing where each individual player must uphold the rules. It promotes integrity, responsibility and honesty. The golf course was one of the first places I had to practice the moral teachings that my parents gave me and continue to instill in me.

These ideals seem to be the universal code of parenting. They wanted to guide me and teach me so that I grew into a man of high character. I know I want to uphold these aforementioned qualities of honesty, integrity and responsibility.

As a high school golfer, I went through the worst drought I have every experienced in any athletic endeavor. My nine hole scoring average from sophomore year to junior went up six strokes. That is an astronomical change in score. It sucked. I couldn't understand it and neither could my coach. I was the brunt of jokes from other golf teammates. The entire season was a humiliating experience.

Through this bad stretch, I learned resilience and toughness. It taught me how to persevere through struggles in my life. It was also reaffirmed that hard work is rewarded. I had a much better and more enjoyable senior year. Golf in this sense has made me a tougher, stronger person.

(16th Hole-Cypress Point Club)

Golf is engrained in me, it has become a part of my identity. It is not just chasing a little white ball around a field. It has become the foundation of my character as a person in all walks of life, far off the golf course. But most of all, it is fun.

Twitter and why no one should care.

I have a twitter. I feel like that it is a fairly normal thing for people my age to have. I have had a small idea that the some of my tweets are absolutely meaningless, well at least that is what I thought, so I decided to take a closer look. Turns out that they are almost exclusively meaningless.

Since July 1st, I have tweeted (or re-tweeted) 176 times:

Of those 176:

42 were about football.
30 were me complaining, even though I have an amazing life.
22 were about golf.
22 were about soccer.
19 were conversations with my friends.
16 were on other miscellaneous topics (quotes, tv, music, etc.)
15 were about college life or attending Notre Dame.
8 were me being thankful or expressing happiness in my current mood.
2 were actually meaningful, seemingly thought out actually pensive true expressions of me that might be relevant to the outside world.

TWO. (One of those can be seen below)

OUT of 176. In case there is an online box score keeping track of my twitter batting average that means I am "hitting" a lowly .011. Exactly 1.13% of my tweets I termed meaningful. Roger Clemens, a now disgraced but former great pitcher, hit .173 in his entire major league career.

Meaningful can mean many different things for many different people. For the purpose of this discussion, I will tightly define meaningful for my use. To be deemed meaningful, my tweet has to have been original content, so no quotes. It also has to be personal to me, something that I think or believe in. So, not just a plain factual statement, there must be some personalization in the tweet. Finally, it must be at least marginally relevant to the outside world. From someone else's perspective, the tweet could be looked at as wise knowledge, a piece of advice or even just something to agree or disagree with.

Twitter was intentionally created for meaningless tid-bits. The 140 character limit discourages long, thought-provoking messages and instead focuses and promotes messages that are quick and shallow. These superficial messages have become part of the twitter culture. Rarely do people ever throw time and thoughts into their twitter, it has become increasingly discouraged.

Time to go inside the numbers of my twitter statistics.

I tend to tweet large barrages, especially of current events and sporting events that I am watching on TV.

These events have taken place since July 1st:

-PGA Championship
-Solheim Cup (this is the women's Ryder Cup)
-Notre Dame football's season began
-United States Men's Soccer team won the Gold Cup.
-I started college and began attending the University of Notre Dame
-I had multiple delays and cancellations in air travel, the wrath at which most of my whining was directed.


Another thing that is blatantly obvious in my Twitter feed is that I have no real actual problems. The whiny-ness, especially about missing flights, is all incredible petty and can exclusively be classified as 1st world problems. I never get into any true struggles of life. I don't tweet about gang violence or lack of food. I am blessed in my life; I do not have these most basic issues. I don't have to worry about drug wars or domestic disputes. Essentially, I should be smacked.

I also tweet about more or less about American life. However, I also tend to talk about white collar life; for example, golf is a white collar sport played by businessmen and upper class individuals across the country. It is the quintessential white collar game, a gentlemanly game of character and class. Soccer is also somewhat of a typical "white collar" game. The largest most recognized domestic league in the world is the Barclays Premier League in England. English are seen as distinguished and well refined from an American perspective, a white collar people.


The reality is that I probably am not going to change. I am perfectly content tweeting perfectly worthless blabber. If I enlighten or educate someone with my musings, that is great. If not, oh well. The people who "follow me" should know what to expect. I like what I post, there is no harm in it. Generally, the things that I post on twitter even amuse me.

A new beginning

I am Matt Bradley, I am a freshman at the University of Notre Dame. The Rock, The Warren and the JAC will be a blog that will be express my views and extremely biased opinions. Mostly it will be on a variety of subjects, especially the ones that I hold most dear: golf, football and basketball. Knowingly, I spend entirely too much time on the three aforementioned subjects and hope to pass a little of my knowledge, or if you will, craziness, on to you. I hope to enlighten or illustrate ideas or notions that have been ignored on these topics and bring them to light.

Enjoy!