Christmas has come early for Duke basketball and head coach Mike Krzyzewski: Jabari Parker—the No. 2 overall player in the class of 2013 will be a Blue Devil.

Parker announced his decision Thursday afternoon in the gym at his high school, Simeon Career Academy.

“In the fall of 2013, I will be attending Duke University,” Parker said. ”[Krzyzewski] knows a lot. He comes from a real prestigious background.”

Parker said staying close to home, Duke’s academics and Krzyzewski were the primary reasons he chose Duke.

In a long, back-and-forth recruiting battle—primarily between Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Krzyzewski—Duke finally prevailed over the Spartans, as well as BYU, Florida and Stanford, to win the 6-foot-8, 220-pound small forward’s services.

“I think Jabari Parker is about as big of a priority as I’ve seen Mike Krzyzewski put on a kid in a long, long time,” ESPN Senior Recruiting Analyst Dave Telep said just weeks after the Duke coaching staff arrived to Parker’s open gym in a limo last fall.

Krzyzewski’s persistent efforts have paid off. A truly unique prospect and prodigious talent, Parker can do it all on the hardwood. With a silky smooth jump shot, NBA size and a remarkably polished offensive repertoire, the Chicago prep basketball prodigy has game and body that bears an eerie resemblance to a young Carmelo Anthony.

Perhaps even more special is his character and work ethic. His devout Mormon faith differentiates him from his peers. Unlike many young superstars, Parker shies away from the spotlight and puts the team above himself at all costs.

His father, Sonny Parker—who played in the NBA—and his caring mother, Lola, have played invaluable roles in keeping Jabari on the right path while navigating through an incredibly hyped high school basketball career and recruiting process.

The hype, however, is warranted. Playing in one of the most fierce high school basketball hotbeds in the nation, Parker has led Simeon Career Academy to three-straight state championships. As a junior, he was named the Gatorade National Player of the Year, and last spring he graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, being described as “the best high school basketball player since LeBron James.”

With his senior campaign now underway, Parker will try to lead his squad to an unprecedented fourth-straight title, a feat that’s never been accomplished in big-school Illinois basketball.

Parker, however, is not in top form. While playing for the U.S. U-18 National Team over the summer, he sustained a foot injury, which required surgery. Consequently, the setback put him on the shelf for several months, forcing him to miss much of his final summer on the AAU circuit. Recently, Parker returned to the court and is slowly working his way back into game shape.

While recovering through the fall, Parker’s recruitment escalated. He took official visits to Michigan State, Duke, Florida and BYU, before December.

Following the official visit to Durham, rumblings began to surface that the official visit went very well for Duke, and a renewed sense of optimism spread amongst the fan base, who until that point had predominately felt Michigan State might have the slight lead.

Since setting the announcement date, the Spartan and Blue Devil fan bases have been on pins and needless knowing that the fate of a championship run could hinge on Parker’s announcement.

Ultimately, Duke won Parker over in a nail bitter. This, however, is not the first time Krzyzewski—a Chicago native himself— has experienced recruiting success at his old stomping grounds. The all-time winningest coach in college basketball has secured commitments from Windy City products Jon Scheyer, current assistant coach Chris Collins, Corey Maggette, Sean Dockery and Shaun Livingston.

Parker’s pledge, however, gives Krzyzewski one of his most talented players to ever come to Durham. Many recruiting experts feel that Parker is one of the best high school basketball players to come along in the last decade.

“He’s up there with Jason Williams, Dwight Howard, LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Greg Oden,” Telep said in an interview earlier this fall.

As talented and impressive as Krzyzewski’s current squad is—currently ranked No. 1—next year’s bunch could have an even higher ceiling.

Similar to the makeup of his U.S. National Team this summer, Krzyzewski will have one of his most versatile, athletic and deep lineups of the past decade at his disposal. Duke will likely return starters Quinn Cook and Rasheed Sulaimon, as well as reserves Amile Jefferson, Tyler Thornton, Josh Hairston, Marshall Plumlee and Alex Murphy. Redshirt senior Andre Dawkins should be back on the court. The Blue Devils will then add talented Mississippi State transfer Rodney Hood, as well as promising incoming freshmen Semi Ojeleye, Matt Jones and the likely centerpiece of the team—Jabari Parker.

And as his career draws nearer to an end, Krzyzewski’s blueprint for the 2013-14 Duke team has finally come to fruition, and it’s a squad that promises to make another serious run at a national championship.

On Monday, the free photo-sharing service Instagram released an update to their terms of service and privacy policy that allowed them to use users’ photos for its advertising purposes without consent from or compensation for the picture-taker. The wording of the document gave Instagram license to use these photos without indicating that they were advertising.

The update also allowed the service to share user information with Facebook and other entities, including advertisers. The changes gave users no way to opt out of the new terms, short of deleting their account.

Many users responded to the new terms by threatening to boycott, including a number of celebrities who use the service such as Kate Walsh and Audrina Patridge — both of whom tweeted about the service. The hacktivist group Anonymous also responded with a threat of boycott.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, responded to the backlash in a blog post on Tuesday, stating it is not Instagram’s intention to sell user photos, and the terms of service would be updated to be made more clear.  The blog post also mentions that the new terms of service was an effort to experiment with different advertising models. Furthermore, user photos that are set to private will remain as such and won’t be used for advertising.

The changes are set to go into effect on Jan. 16, with photos taken before that date ineligible for use in advertising.

I don’t know much about Columbine, Col, or Aurora, Col., or Oak Creek, Wisc., or Tuscon, Ariz., or even the Virginia Tech community. All I know about these places are the images and the numbers: the 12 students in that high school, the 12 people in the movie theater, the six members of the Sikh temple in their place of worship, the six constituents and their miraculously recovered congresswoman in a Safeway parking lot and the 32 college students on their beloved campus. I saw the images of horror, of panic from mothers, fathers, friends and loved ones. I saw the pictures of the vigils and the intensified police and media responses. I heard the extended news stories from CNN and Fox. And when I hear the names of these communities, that is what I see. I see these tragedies and I think of the victims.

But I know Newtown, Conn. It’s my home. It’s where I grew up and attended elementary and middle school. It’s where I’ll be going home to by the end of the week. And I know that it’s more than this tragedy. It’s more than the images you’re going to see on TV and on the front page of The Washington Post or The New York Times. Newtown is more than the aerial views of Sandy Hook Elementary School you’ll continue to see. It’s more than the SWAT teams that lined our streets on Friday. It’s more than what Brian Williams will tell you on NBC Nightly News. Newtown is more than the ultra-politicized and sensationalized news stories you’ll continue to hear.

Newtown is a place where Fr. Bob would surprise every class in my grade school with a trip across the street to The Ice Cream Shop. It’s a place where Eunice from Bagel Man would tell you not to worry about that last 50 cents or dollar you were missing on your order of bagels. It’s a place where the Paproski family would spend months designing and creating a gigantic corn maze at their family’s farm so that, every fall, children could come and get lost for hours with their friends. Newtown is a place where, every Halloween, the historic homes on Main Street decorate their porches with cob webs and scarecrows for the trick-or-treaters. Newtown is a place where, every summer, St. Rose of Lima Parish pulls together an entire community effort to host the Summer Carnival in the parking lot and field. And Newtown is a place where our parents, teachers, priests, ministers and rabbis love our children so passionately that there would be no keeping them from the sidelines of our soccer or lacrosse games or from being our volunteer coaches or field trip leaders.

If I could meet anyone from Columbine, Aurora, Oak Creek, Tuscon or Virginia Tech, I’d ask them about their communities. I’d want to hear stories like this. I’d want to know what they love most about home. Because we are more than this.

It saddens me so deeply to know that my family, my best friends from grade school and my whole community are not the only ones who know this grief. Within the past 10 years, we’ve watched as this epidemic of violence has spread through our country. We’ve watched as young kids of my own generation have become subjected to a culture where plastic guns are acceptable toys and you only win video games if you’ve killed enough of “the enemy.” And we’ve watched as mental and social disorders have left people so isolated they are essentially alone.

The problem is deep. It’s cultural, it’s social and it will take generations to fix. But the change needs to start right now. And while beginning this change will make our schools, malls, temples and movie theaters safer places for my generation’s, or the next generation’s, children to be, it will not save the town that this may happen in tomorrow, or next week, or next month. We need to take action right now. Our “right to bear arms” was something given to us by a generation who fought revolutions in their backyards. We don’t have that war anymore. We have a different kind of war now, a war where arming ourselves will only spread the fear and the violence. It hurts me to know that these pleas and demands for change get slowed down by lobbyists, politics and legislation because this isn’t about what party is dominant in the House or Senate: This is about our lives and our children’s lives. To me, there is an easy solution in front of us. We take away the violence and we take away the guns. But Washington won’t hear these pleas until we can all put our politics — or who we voted for in November — aside and realize that, every day, we are losing children, mothers and fathers. We are losing our communities.

When you hear “Newtown, Connecticut,” please do think of those 20 children and seven adults who lost their lives on Friday. Please do remember the images you saw on the news and the pictures of grief that spread across the country. Don’t forget about what happened on Friday. But please, also remember that Newtown is a home that will not stop growing.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – If there was any doubt about the fight in the Wildcats after a 21-point first quarter deficit, quarterback Matt Scott answered the bell with 19 seconds left.

With his final pass of his collegiate career, the Wildcats scored their second touchdown in the final 49 seconds.

Scott found receiver Tyler Slavin in the end zone, which brought the Wildcats back from not only the 21-point deficit to start the game, but a 45-28 third quarter deficit. The Wildcats were wholly unable to stop Nevada the entire afternoon, but when it came down to it, as Scott put it, “We just executed. We just fought and battled.”

“I’m glad they put me in,” Slavin said. “That meant a lot for me. I wanted to do it for [Scott] and for the seniors and for everybody that’s been working hard. It’s a great way to do it for the seniors and Matt Scott.”

Arizona fought back despite a stellar performance from Nevada quarterback Cody Fajardo, who broke a New Mexico Bowl record with 396 total yards and four total touchdowns. Fajardo was voted the MVP of the game until Scott’s final touchdown pass.

The play that set up Arizona’s opportunity to win the game was Scott’s touchdown pass to receiver Austin Hill, who had a game-high 175 yards.

Nevada was called for two pass interference penalties in the final four minutes, which set up the Wildcats at the Wolf Pack two-yard-line. Scott hit Hill in the end zone, but at the time, Nevada still held a 48-42 lead.

After the extra point, kicker John Bonano kicked “the most perfect onside kick you can ever ask for,” according to center Kyle Quinn. “Unbelievable kick by Bonano.”

Because of a recent rule change in college football, attempting an onside kick became much more difficult. Players on the receiving team are allowed to fair catch the ball if it bounces high into the air after bouncing once.

“I’ve had to work on it all year to get two bounces, or to get it to bounce off of a guy,” Bonano said. “I saw a guy sitting right there, so that’s the guy I aimed at. The way I set it up, it popped right into his chest.”

After Bonano kicked it, it hit a Nevada player in the facemask before falling on the ground in front of linebacker Marquis Flowers, the game’s defensive MVP. Flowers sealed the game with an interception after Slavin’s score.

“We practice it all the time, but when it actually hit him, it was like slow motion,” Flowers said. “I look on the ground, and the ball is rolling right down, and I was like ‘My team needs me.’ So I just jumped on it and secured it. I just made sure I jumped on it to give our offense a chance.”

“It was hard,” Scott said. “It’s not easy to come back from that situation. We went out there and took care of business.”

It wasn’t always so crystal clear.

The Wildcats struggled on offense at the start of the game, garnering just six first downs and one score at the end of the first quarter. That was before sophomore running back Ka’Deem Carey scored two second quarter touchdowns and added 145 yards, which helped bring the Wildcats back to a 31-28 halftime deficit.

One major storyline heading into the game was the battle at running back, where Carey and Nevada’s Stefphon Jefferon were first and second on the national rushing leaderboard, respectively.

Jefferson finished with eight more yards in the game, with 180 on 34 carries, but Carey maintained his lead in the battle for the rushing title, finishing the season with 1,929 yards and a school record 23 touchdowns.

“That dude is a great player,” Carey said of Jefferson. “I’m happy I got to see him play. It was a great season. I had teammates that pushed me through. Without them I couldn’t have placed this far.”

Arizona finished the season with an 8-5 overall record in head coach Rich Rodriguez’s first season as head coach. Rodriguez has coached at major-conference programs across the country, but the New Mexico Bowl win ranks among his favorite.

“It’s the latest and the greatest so far,” Rodriguez said. “Certainly, I’ve had some games come down to that end. But to have everything, the defense making the stop, to the field goal, Matt leading the quick drive down there, getting the on-side kick, and then Matt leading down again. It just doesn’t happen very often.

“But the guys never quit. We hung in there just enough to win it.”

With the help of a full-court press and a 3-pointer from freshman guard Kevin “Yogi” Ferrell, the Indiana men’s basketball team was able to overcome a seven-point deficit in the final two minutes to push the game against Butler into overtime.

Unfortunately for the Hoosiers, though, they didn’t make the comeback that mattered most.

Down 84-80 with less than two minutes remaining in overtime, the Bulldogs hit two-straight 3-pointers to take the lead for good, as they knocked off the No. 1 Hoosiers 88-86 Saturday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in the Close the Gap Crossroads Classic.

Butler jumped out to an early lead in the first half, ahead 9-5, but the Hoosiers stormed back on the heels of junior guard Victor Oladipo.

A run that began with two free throws from Oladipo, he would go on to dish in two layups along with one of his signature fastbreak dunks that brought the crowd to its feet. The junior scored eight of IU’s 10 points in a run that put the Hoosiers ahead 15-12 with 11:04 left in the half.

With that run, Oladipo finished the half with 10 points to lead IU with 4-of-6 shooting from the field as the Hoosiers went into the locker room up 37-33.

And early in the second half, it looked as though the Hoosiers would have ample opportunity to stretch that lead after Butler committed six fouls in the first 4:03 to put the Hoosiers in the bonus for the remainder of the game.

But from there, the tables turned.

IU went cold from the field, going 5:18 without a bucket as the Bulldogs pulled ahead with the help of a 16-2 run to take the lead 66-59.

During this span, the Hoosiers allowed Butler to hit three 3-pointers, and IU Coach Tom Crean said his team’s poor perimeter defense allowed Butler to creep its way back.

“We cost ourselves at the end of the game defensively, and they made the plays and, they get the credit for that,” Crean said. “But we made the mistakes that got them there.”

Sophomore guard Remy Abell ended the drought with 3:42 left in the game to pull the Hoosiers back within four, but with four-straight points from Butler’s two big men Roosevelt Jones and Andrew Smith, the Bulldogs were ahead by seven and seemingly in control.

The pair, though would both foul out in the next minute, and from there on, Crean put his players into a full court press that he said helped reenergize the Hoosiers to work themselves back into the game.

“We didn’t waiver, and we felt like we could get up and pressure these guys,” Crean said. “We saw things that we felt we could really pressure them on, and it put us in the position and made us very aggressive.”

But even as the Hoosiers clawed their way back, freshman guard Kevin “Yogi” Ferrell fell victim to the fast pace and urgency of IU’s offense. With 49 seconds left off a 3-point miss from senior guard Jordan Hulls, the ball bounced towards Ferell, but he fumbled it off his feet out of bounds.

Crean said, though, that he wasn’t worried about the mentality of his starting freshman guard, saying he’s always been a “next play guy.”

So Crean drew up IU’s final possession with Ferrell as an option to take the final shot, and with just six seconds left, Ferrell’s 3-pointer fell through the net and pushed the game into overtime to cap IU’s comeback.

The momentum seemed to follow the Hoosiers into the extra period, as they took a four-point lead with just over two minutes left, but Butler pulled off a few late threes of their own to steal the win from the top-ranked team in the country.

Oladipo and sophomore forward Cody Zeller led the five Hoosiers in double-figures with 18 points each as Oladipo excelled from the floor, shooting 7-of-10. Zeller was Butler’s most popular target to foul, shooting 14 shots from the line, and after missing three early, he finished 10-of-14 from the charity stripe.

Ferrell grabbed eight rebounds to lead the team to go along with his late 3-pointer, but his six turnovers highlighted one of Crean’s main points after the game.

He said his squad just didn’t have what it took to beat a determined Butler team.

“We just didn’t play well enough to win, we just didn’t,” Crean said.

Marquette officially decided to leave the Big East Conference Saturday, according to an email sent Saturday afternoon to the entire student body by University President the Rev. Scott Pilarz and Director of Athletics Larry Williams.

“We are writing to inform you today that Marquette University, along with six other colleges and universities, has made a decision to end our association with the Big East Conference,” the pair wrote.

Joining Marquette in the split, about which rumors had been swirling for weeks, are the six other Catholic schools in the Big East that don’t play Division I FBS football. Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul will leave with Marquette in the hopes of forming “a premier athletics conference centered on elite-level basketball,” according to the email

“This move will allow us to enhance the elite status of our men’s basketball program, which we were not willing to compromise amid the shifting landscape of intercollegiate athletics,” the email read. “It also allows us to develop new opportunities for student athletes in all 16 of our competitive athletic programs.”

Pilarz and Williams also provided insight into the university’s decision-making process.

“Over the past 15 months, the seven presidents and athletic directors of the universities previously named have been in a thoughtful dialogue to ensure we jointly solidify our vision and commitment to compete at the absolute highest levels of athletic excellence for many years to come,” they wrote.

According to the email, the conversations about a move “became more urgent and gained momentum” after Louisville and Rutgers announced their departures a few weeks ago.

The strategic locations of the six other schools joining the Golden Eagles contributed to the decision as well. In addition to Milwaukee, the Washington (Georgetown), New York (St. John’s) and Philadelphia (Villanova) markets “will provide an infrastructure needed to obtain the highest levels of success,” Pilarz and Williams wrote.

Last Sunday, representatives from the seven departing schools met with Big East commissioner Mike Aresco to discuss their long term future in the conference. On Thursday, the seven schools voted to leave the conference, according to several reports.

Director of athletics Larry Williams addressed the media following Marquette men’s basketball’s 71-51 victory over Savannah State Saturday, which marked win No. 1500 for the program.

“We couldn’t be more excited as administrators about the future of Marquette,” Williams said.

A new study authored in part by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health claims that while people worldwide are living longer, they are living more of those years in poor health.

This week, contributors to the Global Burden of Disease project published new findings in the medical journal The Lancet that they say reveal key changes in the way people worldwide are living with and treating major health problems.

Joshua Salomon, a professor of global health at HSPH who contributed to the study, said that he and other project researchers found that short lifespans are more frequently a product of chronic diseases than of infectious diseases or nutritional deficiencies.

“People are dying from adult diseases more than they are from diseases that kill children,” Salomon said.

According to Salomon, the study is the most comprehensive survey that has been conducted on current trends in global health. As part of the project, researchers distributed a survey that asked questions about the severity of 291 different diseases and injuries. The survey, developed with input from researchers from over 50 countries and distributed mainly online, received responses from over 160 countries and over 30,000 people worldwide.

After collecting their data, project researchers sought to develop tools to measure the impact of certain diseases on quality of life and life expectancy. Mohsen Naghavi, an associate professor of global health at the University of Washington, has worked on improving the quality, distribution, and presentation of the data that has been collected. Naghavi emphasized the importance of taking new approaches to studying diseases over time.

He said that much has changed about the field since 1990, when the first Global Burden of Disease results were released, to the next updated release of statistics in 2004, and again this year with data gathered in 2010.

Although life expectancy in most regions has increased by an average of about ten years since 1990, Salomon said he thinks that countries will have to consider the economic strain created by their rapidly aging populations. According to Salomon, the health issues most threatening today are not nutrition deficiency or infectious diseases, but non-communicable diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer.

While Salomon said it is important to raise awareness of these issues, he warned against taking coordinated political action in response to the global trends identified in the report. He said that policymakers in every country will have to consider the areas of disease that are most serious to develop viable and affordable regional solutions.

“The results are not a direct prescription for policy,” Salomon said.

Up. Down. Bumpy. Smooth. Wins. Losses.

Irish coach Brian Kelly has seen it all at Notre Dame since he was hired almost exactly three years ago. But through it all, he’s stuck with one thing: The Process.

The Process has taken Notre Dame from the depths of mediocrity to the pinnacle of college football. And The Process is a very simple plan to do one thing: Win.

“I think it’s just being committed to winning. You know, you can’t win unless you eradicate all the things that go against it, and that is the process,” Kelly said Oct. 2. “It’s looking at all of the things that go into winning. … There are so many factors that you have to concentrate on and the details on a day-to-day basis that goes to winning.

“That’s what I think people mean when they talk about the process. Making sure you have your hand [on] those things that go directly to win it. Most of the time it’s eradicating those things that go to not winning more than anything else. So I think that’s the process.”

When Kelly first met with the media after he was officially announced as Notre Dame’s 29th head coach, he never once mentioned The Process — not by that name, at least. Yet from the very beginning of his tenure, he set about putting The Process into place.

The Hiring
The Process brought Kelly to Notre Dame. When Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick announced his decision to hire Kelly, he said as much, if not in so many words.

“At every step along the way, it kept taking me back to the same place. It kept taking me back to the conclusion that Brian Kelly was the right person to lead this program,” Swarbrick said during Kelly’s introductory press conference. “He has won at every level with every kind of team. He is a winner. And he’s a winner that at every stop along the way has done by doing it the right way.

“He was the right man at the right time for Notre Dame. And we are very fortunate to have him lead our program.”

Before his move to Notre Dame in 2010, Kelly already had a long track record of building winning programs, from Division II Grand Valley State to Central Michigan to Cincinnati. He described the Notre Dame program, with all of its unique opportunities and challenges, as a new task in many ways — but he said he would stick to his tried-and-true formula: The Process.

“First, this one is totally different than any of the other jobs that I’ve had. It’s unique in every facet,” he said on the first day of fall camp in 2010. “But the one consistency here are the players. The players are the same in terms of what they want to achieve under my leadership, and that is they want to be successful. So we’ve got the same thing we had at Cincinnati. We’ve got a bunch of kids that want to win. Now, we’re going to do the same things that we did. This job is different, but we’re going to do the same things behind the scenes we did everywhere along the way.”

His priority for installing The Process was simple.

“Well, the first thing is you’ve got to stop losing,” Kelly said in August 2010. “All the things that detract you from winning, you know, how do you live your life? … So I look for all those things that can keep you from winning because I know how to win and I know what the things are that needed to be put in place here.

“To me, that’s how you win. It’s not just about what the scoreboard says; it’s about how you go about doing your job seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

2010: Installation
From the first day of spring practice in 2010, Kelly emphasized The Process would be key to molding the Irish to his vision.

“We don’t have five years to put this thing together. We’ve got to do it right away,” he said March 26, 2010. “We give them some very basic parameters to start with. If they stick to those basic parameters, we can move them quickly through the process.”

By the time mid-August rolled around, Kelly said he had already noticed a change in his players.

“All of the players have done exactly what we’ve asked them to do,” he said on Media Day. “They knew there had to be a sense of urgency relative to their preparation. They were sick and tired of being sick and tired, too. They were 6-6. They felt that walking around campus. We got that buy-in from our guys immediately. Really what it’s been about is just a paradigm shift [of] different leadership styles.”

Although the groundwork had been laid during the previous offseason, it looked like the same old Irish during the first half of 2010. Mired by a three-game losing streak, capped by a 37-14 loss at home to Stanford, Notre Dame simply wasn’t physical enough to compete with elite teams like the Cardinal.

“[The players are] going to be back next week and they’re going to strap it back up and they’re going to fight and play as hard as they can,” said Kelly of continuing to build a physical mentality. “We’re going to build this program to where it needs to be.

“There’s going to be success down the road for them if they stay with it, and I’m certain that they will.”

The Irish then won three consecutive games, but the short-term outlook hardly remained rosy with a blowout loss to Navy and a home defeat to lowly Tulsa to fall to 4-5. Kelly was heavily criticized for trying for a touchdown with freshman quarterback Tommy Rees when a field goal from David Ruffer (18-for-18 in his career at that point) would have given the Irish a win.

Kelly, though, stuck behind his vision and decision-making.

“Keep in mind, you better get used to it, because that’s the way we’re playing,” he said. “To me this is how we play. We’re going to play aggressive. We’re going to play smart.”

Few could have foreseen it at the time, but the Tulsa loss marked the final defeat of the season for the Irish. In need of two wins in the final three games to become bowl-eligible, Notre Dame upset No. 14 Utah at home, beat Army at Yankee Stadium and concluded the regular season with a 20-16 win over USC, the program’s first win over the Trojans since 2001. A month later, Kelly became the first Irish coach to win a bowl game in his first season when Notre Dame dominated Miami 33-17 at the Sun Bowl.

With the 4-0 finish, the Irish used the momentum to finish the recruiting season with a bang, earning commitments from three four- or five-star defensive players in the final month of recruiting.

The Process was beginning to take hold.

2011: Sticking with it
All the positive momentum garnered from the end of Kelly’s inaugural season seemed to vanish in a thundercloud in the 2011 home opener. Between two weather delays, Notre Dame’s BCS hopes received a reality check in the season opener as South Florida topped the Irish 23-20.

Outside of the loss, the biggest story was Kelly’s handling of the quarterback situation, a theme that would persist throughout the season. Senior starting quarterback Dayne Crist was pulled at halftime with the Irish losing 16-0, and the job was Rees’ the remainder of the season.

“You can’t start winning until you stop losing, and the things that we did today out there obviously go to the heart of how you lose football games,” said Kelly of his team’s error-laden performance. “You lose football games because you turn the ball over. You lose football games because you miss field goals. You lose the football game because you have four personal foul penalties. The list is long.”

For three quarters of the following week’s contest at Michigan — the first-ever night game at the Big House — Notre Dame played its best football to date under Kelly. The offense clicked, the defense held Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson in check and it looked like the season-opener was more an aberration than foreshadowing.

However, the Irish suffered a complete meltdown in the fourth quarter, surrendering 28 points in the stanza, the final seven of which transpired with two seconds remaining in the game.

For Kelly and the Irish, it was back to the drawing board and a commitment to trusting The Process.

“We’re shaping our team every single day,” Kelly said the day after the Michigan loss and 0-2 start. “Again, there are so many details to that. All you guys care about — and I understand that, and our fans — is that it equals wins, and we’re not doing that for them. I understand the frustration.

“But we’re building it the right way. We’ll get them there. We’re not there yet. I know this journey all too well. I’ve been on it before. It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing. It’s all those things. We’ll break through. There’s too many good things happening out there for us not to break through.”

The Irish sparked a four-game winning streak the following week with a 31-13 beat down of No. 15 Michigan State. It wasn’t a perfect contest, but it was the most convincing sign The Process was working and Kelly’s squad was on the rise in the national outlook.

“I know one thing is that they weren’t lacking confidence, but sooner or later you gotta get paid,” Kelly said. “You gotta be validated in what you do. And so it was a big win for us.”

Heading into the USC game with a four-game winning streak, the Trojans hampered by NCAA sanctions and the 2010 win at the Los Angeles Coliseum, it appeared the rivalry might be shifting in Notre Dame’s favor. USC emphatically put those thoughts to rest with a 31-17 victory in Notre Dame’s first home night game since 1990.

The following Thursday, Kelly created a controversy regarding players he recruited and ones Weis had recruited.

“You can see the players that I recruited here. You know who they are,” Kelly said. “We’ve had one class of recruiting, kids that I’ve had my hand on. The other guys here are coming along, but it’s a process. It can’t happen overnight. They’re getting there. They’re making good progress.”

A Twitter firestorm erupted as some players rushed to social media to let out their frustration. (Irish linebacker Manti Te’o tweeted, “Playin for my bros and that’s it!!!!”)

After Kelly apologized to the team, the Irish recorded a four-game winning streak for the second time in 2011. However, the Irish were no match physically for an elite Stanford squad in the regular-season finale; in the Champs Sports Bowl, Notre Dame blew a 14-0 second-half deficit and lost 18-14 to Florida State to finish 8-5 for the second consecutive season.

The Process was tested, and so was the team’s resolve. A quarterback battle ensued. A mediocre recruiting class enrolled. Two players transferred, including defensive end Aaron Lynch, who dazzled during his freshman season with five and a half sacks.

“The challenges are great here,” Kelly said. “If your head and heart is not in it, you just can’t be successful. Aaron and I talked about it and mutually agreed that the best decision for him is to leave the football team.

“I’ve been in it 25 years — people are going to quit all the time. It happens. It’s part of the process. … Why is it newsworthy? Because [Lynch] is a really good player.”

While Lynch and cornerback Tee Shepard left and a class of new players signed, the most important recruiting pitch Kelly had to make was to Te’o and tight end Tyler Eifert to return for their senior seasons.

Trusting The Process, both did so.

2012: Proof
The Process guided Kelly as he prepared for a pivotal third year with a schedule harder than any other in the nation.

“Year one, it’s the typical learn the names of the players, begin to implement your schemes; year two, try to develop that depth in the units; and I think for me in year three it’s a comfortable feeling that I know my football team very well going into year three,” he said at the beginning of spring practice.

Kelly said The Process was more about preparing his team for the grueling slate mentally and physically.

“One part of the challenge to our football team is to get all of our players to play at a championship level on a consistent basis,” he said Sept. 11. “I think you build toughness in so many ways before you get to the season, and then when you get to the season you look to see it come together. … I think we are developing it, and I think it’s something that we continue to talk about every single day.”

After reeling off four wins to start the 2012 campaign, Kelly said The Process was finally starting to show results.

“Our guys have been committed to the process. It’s painstakingly slow, sometimes it’s quicker. But they’ve been committed to the process,” he said. “It’s taking that and translating it to Saturdays. And this group is translating it to Saturdays, at least for the first four weeks.

“But they’ve done a nice job of preparing and doing the things we’ve asked them to do.  We think we’re close to being consistent in that approach.”

Part of the Process-based approach involved keeping the Irish focused on the game ahead — with the grind of week-in, week-out competition, a single glance at the final goal could mean the season would be derailed. When his squad improved to 5-0 and a No. 7 national ranking, Kelly had to make it clear to his players that attention to detail mattered more than ever, especially with a titanic home date with Stanford looming days ahead.

“We don’t talk from that level from 30,000 feet because it doesn’t do us any good. All we can focus on is what we can control on a day-to-day basis,” he said before the matchup with the Cardinal. “Among us, it’s about today and what we do today.”

Yet with ESPN’s “College GameDay” in South Bend for the first time in seven years and hype building around Notre Dame’s rise in the polls, The Process was beginning to deliver results that would only draw more attention to the big picture.

“I’ve worked this plan for a number of years. I’ve had great success with it,” Kelly said. “If [the players] choose to continue to follow it they’re going to continue to have success. It’s the trust element of staying focused on what we can handle and what we need to handle and we will be fine.”

If the players didn’t embrace it, The Process would consist only of words from the head coach, and they would not translate to the field.

“I’ve always felt that teams in November have a distinct advantage if they’re enjoying the process, if they really come over here and feel good about practice,” Kelly said before facing Oklahoma. “I think you really have to enjoy the process and enjoy winning in particular.

“I’ve had teams that have really enjoyed the process. And this group does.”

The Process, which had been in place since Kelly’s arrival, led the then-No. 5 Irish to a dominating 30-13 victory over the then-No. 8 Sooners, a win a long time in the making.

“I think it’s a process of not just this year,” Kelly said after the win. “These wins happen over periods of time, not just one-year cycles. This has been a group that has had to take some lumps and learn along the way. It’s got great leadership. I think it’s a cumulative effect that this football team is now positioning itself to win these kinds of games because of what they’ve gone through the last two years.”

As his team continued to win games and rise up the rankings, with a shot at the national crown becoming ever more tangible, Kelly said he could feel The Process had firmly taken root in his program.

“It’s a process, that when you’re so involved in it that you don’t know there is a particular day, but you do know that things are being done the way you want them on a day‑to‑day basis. You sense and feel it,” he said Nov. 13. “I don’t know that there was one particular day. I think the last couple years our players really understood preparation. They understood how to prepare. They were learning how to play the game.

“I think we’ve learned how to play the game on Saturdays a lot better over the last year and a half.”

And when his team finally lit up the sign atop Grace Hall, needing only to vanquish rival USC to earn a trip to the BCS National Championship Game, Kelly emphasized The Process once more.

“We’re operating on, ‘You better have a good day today in practice because you just watched film, and we saw the things you did wrong yesterday,’ he said Nov. 20 before the Irish traveled to Los Angeles. “We keep them away from the big picture, because they don’t see it that way. They don’t come to work that way on a day-to-day basis.”

Finally, in the aftermath of a raucous celebration in the Los Angeles Coliseum, Notre Dame’s ticket to Miami punched, Kelly said The Process had been vindicated.

“Here’s what I know: We set out this season to build our program and get it back into the national discussion when you’re talking about championship programs, and we’re in that discussion,” he said.

The Process brought the Irish back to the top.

2013 and beyond
Even with tangible proof of the validity of The Process, don’t expect Kelly to abandon the message, regardless of the result of the BCS National Championship Game.

“When you go in that locker room and you’re around the guys I’m around, you’re not surprised because what they’ve done, the commitment they’ve made, they’ve done everything I’ve asked them to do,” said Kelly after the season-concluding win at USC. “Everything. So it doesn’t surprise me anymore because of the guys that we’re around.”

Twenty-two high school prospects have committed to Notre Dame so far in the 2013 recruiting cycle, good enough for a No. 2 ranking nationally on Rivals.com.

Kelly will continue to stress defense on the recruiting trail and in the locker room, and offensively the next step for the Irish is to build around sophomore quarterback Everett Golson.

Former Irish coach Ara Parseghian, who led the program to national championships in 1966 and 1973, said he has witnessed The Process while observing the program.

“He’s done a good job recruiting, he’s well organized,” Parseghian said. “He can motivate. I’ve gone out to practice a few times and talked to him and what he’s been able to do — and this is important for coaches — is place the personnel where they best function for the team.

“He would just spend so many hours between the end of one game and the beginning of the next. Time is at a premium, so any wasted period wasted on something not important is thrown right out the window. I think he does a great job of that.”

Kelly’s next challenge is to sustain the program’s success on a consistent basis. Past coaches have noted the stress of working long-term at Notre Dame, even when they are successful. If Kelly can stick to The Process, there’s no telling how long he might last.

Facebook is yet again undergoing an overhaul, except this time it’s not just a switch to Timeline. The proposed changes have to do with its privacy policy and terms of service, so they are much more important than any sort of superficial layout change, even if you can’t necessarily see them. Many of these are written in legalese and are very subtle — for example, user data can now be shared with Facebook’s many affiliates, which include other social media. However, the most important one is that there will no longer be a governance vote system if the changes take effect. It takes a majority vote among at least 30 percent of all users to prevent the changes from taking effect. If less than 30 percent of Facebook’s users vote, the changes will be put into effect anyway. By the time this article goes to print, the vote will have already happened, as it occurs on Dec. 10, but judging by the current numbers, the 30-percent threshold won’t be reached, though the “against” side is ahead by an extremely large margin. Only about 600,000 people have voted, but about 540,000 of those were votes against the changes. It seems that the popular opinion is clearly against abolishing the governance voting system, yet that’s what will happen anyway.

The current governance voting system was established in 2009 to allow users to essentially have veto power over Facebook’s attempts to revise its privacy policy or terms of service, though the company designed it to be very inaccessible from the start. For a vote to even be triggered, there have to be at least 7,000 comments on the post describing the relevant changes on the Site Governance page. Even then, the 30-percent requirement — about 230 million users — needed to veto the changes is a very high number to overcome, and changes that are vetoed could probably be quietly enacted later anyway. The entire idea of the governance voting system seems like a prolonged public-relations stunt to make Facebook appear receptive to user feedback when, in reality, the company has little interest in its users other than making money off their personal information. There is a reason that Facebook is free — in fact, it really isn’t free because someone somewhere is paying for the access to your personal information so they can set up ads that specifically target you and your particular interests. The new proposed changes would allow Facebook to share your data with its “affiliates” — Instagram and Spotify are probably two of the more well-known ones. Facebook will be moving to a question-submission system, with occasional webcasts, but that seems even less accessible than the voting system — it would be like deciding an election based solely on questions asked by viewers during debates.

None of this would be important if Facebook weren’t such a widely used product, but it has become nearly obligatory to have an account these days. Here at Princeton, most of the student events that I hear about — performances, parties, study breaks — all appear as invites to Facebook events before I see a poster on a lamp post or a bulletin board, certainly before I hear about them by word of mouth. Facebook has so many users that it would be the world’s third or fourth most populous country. Yes, nobody is being forced to join Facebook, but the social pressure to join Facebook is unavoidable and overwhelming for most college students, to the point that letting other people know you don’t have a Facebook account is a faux pas of sorts. One of my friends here has never owned a cell phone, yet he has a Facebook account that he regularly uses.

Facebook is now basically a requirement to have a social life of any kind, especially in college or high school, and it has a user base in the hundreds of millions. The company can start making drastic, fundamental changes to its business model, knowing that not enough people will probably even notice, let alone be able to do something about it. A few weeks ago, that ridiculous paragraph declaring privacy rights began to appear in my Facebook news feed in many of my friends’ statuses. It worries me that people actually think this will have an effect — using Facebook is still a personal choice, and the check box next to “I agree to the terms of service” means you’ve signed away some of your rights to privacy. I am not saying Facebook is evil or that nobody should use Facebook, but I do think we need to be more informed about what goes on behind closed doors. Facebook is still a business, and it exists to sell a product. When that product is our personal information, we should be even more wary of how that business is conducted.

A federal judge has deemed North Carolina’s Choose Life license plates unconstitutional, according to an article in CNN Tuesday.

Since the state does not offer alternative, pro-choice plates, the Choose Life plates “constitute viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” the judge wrote in the court ruling Friday, according to CNN.

Choose Life is a nonprofit that assists states that want to sell the specialty plates and currently, 29 states sell Choose Life plates.

In 2011, the bill making Choose Life license plates available in North Carolina was passed. At the same time, amendments to create alternative pro-choice license plates were shut down.

The judge’s ruling makes sense. License plates are distributed by the state. By passing out plates that represent only one side of an issue, the state gives members of that side an unfair advantage. If license plates addressing the abortion issue are going to be offered at all, they should be designed to reflect all sides of the issue. Residents should have equal opportunities to express themselves. Denying some residents that opportunity is unconstitutional.

The effectiveness of these plates is also something that should be addressed. Are these plates worth the hassle? Perhaps not. If the initiative behind the plates is to sway other drivers to adopt a pro-life or pro-choice stance, this seems like an ineffective way of doing so. A few words on a piece of metal hardly seem convincing. Initiating talks on the subject seem like a more effective way to encouragesomeone to take one side over another.

Also, who says pro-life or pro-choice messages can only be displayed on license plates? If residents are intent on displaying these messages on their cars, they can purchase on bumper stickers or other items that are not issued by the state and are subject to their restrictions.

The state seems to have shot itself in the foot here. Measures to provide alternative pro-choice license plates were proposed and shut down. While the court has confirmed their error, it is something that the state should have realized earlier on.