John Walters

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -

What is the opposite of a sophomore jinx?

When Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen takes his first snap of the season on Saturday, he will not do so with the Fighting Irish trailing by 30 points, as he did last year. He will not be playing just one day after the USA Today ran a front-page (not of the red section, but of the blue section) story on him. His first pass attempt will almost certainly not be to a player who will later transfer (D.J. Hord) due to a sober realization of his place on the depth chart.

And he will be healthy.

Last year Clausen may have had the rudest introduction to higher education since Booger and the rest of the nerds were forced to sleep in the Adams College gymnasium. He went from a high school, Oaks Christian in Westlake Village, Calif., that went 42-0 in his four years as a starter to a university in which he went 3-6 as a starter. He went from being arguably the top-rated prep player in the nation to a college quarterback unable to crack the nation's top 100 list in terms of passing efficiency. He went from catching rays in the Golden State to learning plays with Golden Tate.

Good riddance to all that misery.

In 2007 Clausen was sacked more famously than Carthage. He was sacked six times in his first collegiate start at Penn State which, by his estimation, is a greater sum than the number of sacks he absorbed in his entire high school career. In the month of September, when most true freshman quarterbacks are deciding whether or not to wear a baseball cap on the sidelines, Clausen was the unwitting star of ESPN sack montage features. How better to illustrate Notre Dame's precipitous decline than to show its golden-boy QB being gang-banged in Happy Valley and Ann Arbor?

It was a humbling '07 for Notre Dame's No. 7.

Had Clausen, whose two older brothers, Rick and Casey, both played against the Irish as Tennessee quarterbacks, had wanted to enumerate a list of excuses, he might have mentioned that ...

... he was inheriting an offense that had seven new starters besides himself, including a trio of tailbacks (let's forget the Travis Thomas experiment; it lasted about as long as the George O'Leary era) that had never scored a touchdown and a wide receiving corps that had caught a total of two.

... he was still recovering from surgery to have bone spurs removed from his throwing elbow and, in most any other situation, would not have been playing. Not only was his arm not as strong as it had been, but he had been able to lift weights for a prolonged period of time. His overall strength and size had diminished.

... he was just a true freshman. Unlike the other J.C. of renown on Notre Dame's campus, he is not a miracle worker.

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