Oct 18, 2025; South Bend, Indiana, USA; Notre Dame Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman reacts to the play against the Southern California Trojans during the second half at Notre Dame Stadium. Michael Caterina-Imagn Images

College Football Analyst Gives Incredible Apology to Notre Dame Fans

Originally posted on Notre Dame Fighting Irish on SI
By Nick Shepkowski | Last updated Oct 30, 2025 1:58 PM ET

The end of the 2021 regular season was one Notre Dame fans won't ever forget. The Irish finished an 11-1 regular season with a drubbing of rival Stanford on the west coast, when part of the coaching staff remained out west to recruit that week.

As it would turn out, head coach Brian Kelly would be eating burnt ends at wide receiver recruit Tobias Merriweather's house when everything with him leaving for LSU would emerge.

Notre Dame fans were understandably distrought, although plenty wondered if better days were ahead after the dust settled. There was also this underlying concern that Kelly would go crush it at LSU and prove all the Notre Dame naysayers right.

Josh Pate Offers Apology for Former Words About Notre Dame

College football analyst Josh Pate has seen his career take off in recent years and took to the airwaves earlier this week to discuss his thoughts from the night Kelly took the LSU job. Pate was huge on the hire for LSU, but equally as big on how much trouble Notre Dame would be in following Kelly's exit.

Pate revisited those comments and offered an apology to Notre Dame fans this week that is well worth the couple of minutes. Check it out below.

From me to the Notre Dame family pic.twitter.com/zWszysabCJ
— Josh Pate (@JoshPateCFB) October 29, 2025

Nick Shepkowski's Quick Takeaway:

There are a couple of takeaways here, and they're somewhat unrelated. Let's get started...

Pate's comments from 2021 serve as a reminder to how much goes on in a football program that none of us are actually privy to. Those close to Notre Dame knew he wasn't well liked, that he preferred the fairway to recruiting trail, and that the only thing that saved him following the 2016 disaster was a run of outstanding assistants. He had taken Notre Dame as far as he was going to take them, and the fear was Notre Dame taking a step back with an inexperienced head coach, not that it would again fall off to irrelevance like it did following Lou Holtz's departure 25 years earlier.

The other takeaway I have is about Pate in general. Why is popular and successful? He does what so few others in the college football media landscape, and sports media landscape for that matter, do today.

He admits when he was wrong, acknowledges it by making a fun segment of it on his show, and carries on, not seeming to hold anything against those who called him out for his bad thought online.

If you cover a sport or team long enough, you're going to have a laundry list of bad takes. If you go pull up old articles from me here or on the sites I've previously worked, Lord knows you'll find plenty of them.

How one handles being called out for a sports take will then tell you a lot about them, which it certainly does here in Pate's case (for the good).

This article first appeared on Notre Dame Fighting Irish on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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