Came in my mail today, always a great day each summer. My wife brought in the mail and I spotted that brownish yellow envelope from across the room. There’s nothing special about the artwork on the tickets, which you may have already seen on mgoblue.com’s ad for single ticket sales. Each ticket has the opponent’s logo along with the same shot of the stadium and field. One exception is the one designated ‘Maize Out’ game (Wisconsin), which features a shot of the student section donned in Maize gear. One change to the tickets themselves: they’ve added a recommended gate number alongside section, row and seat, best I can tell the first time that’s been done. Also within the ticket book is a notice to call the athletic department if you need wheelchair accessible seating in future seasons.

At the suggestion of an MVictors contributor, I’m going to release a weekly index featuring the Big Ten and Notre Dame. While there’s many solid polls out there including the excellent BlogPoll, the thought would be that it’d be cool to rate the teams tightly within our purview, while including a couple twists. After talking with a few guys, we thought it might be cool to rate these select teams in a blend of human polling and computer simulation. Each weekend pollsters will rate each team against the others and assign a simple score: * ‘2’ indicates Team A would beat Team B in the upcoming week with reasonable certainty (approximately 80% of the time) * ‘1’ indicates a toss-up * ‘0’ indicates a loss with reasonable certainty. Ratings assume the teams would play on a perfectly neutral field (like Ryan Field, har har). The totals are tallied and an index is created using a perfect score (11 match-ups x 2 points or 22 points) and the teams are ranked. What I like about this: * Having the Irish rated in the mix of the Big Ten teams. As a Big Ten fan, you know you slot the Irish in your head; now we’ll have data. * I think this beats simply slotting these teams 1-12. The index shows a…