Pod of Gold: Andy Staples on Notre Dame's talent level and its remaining schedule

Notre Dame pulled away from Virginia in an important 35-20 home victory last weekend. The Irish (3-1) are staying home this week and will be playing an unimpressive Bowling Green (1-3) team on Saturday. The matchup may be boring, but Tyler James and Eric Hansen still had plenty to talk about on the "Pod of Gold."

This week on the podcast, they wanted to take a look at the bigger picture with Notre Dame. So they invited on Andy Staples, a national college football writer for The Athletic, who you can also hear talking college football on Sirius XM and his podcast, the Andy Staples Show.

On the show, Staples shared his thoughts on Notre Dame's start to the season, the play of quarterback Ian Book, the job head coach Brian Kelly has done for the Irish, where Notre Dame's defensive line ranks among the nation's best, the trajectory of the programs at USC and Michigan, his best meal of the football season so far and more (1:44).

Then Tyler and Eric make predictions in the Place Your Bets segment (25:57), bring back Keeping up with the Joneses (32:06), highlight C'Bo Flemister as Punctuation Mark of the Week (35:16), discuss Kurt Hinish in the Junior or Jr. segment (38:13) and answer questions from Twitter (40:32).

"Pod of Gold" can be listened to in a number of different places. The audio file can be found at the end of this story. Hit the share arrow in the top right corner of the player if you'd like to download it directly. The podcast should appear on various platforms soon after being uploaded here.

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