ESPN’s Josh Pate Previews the HUGE Notre Dame vs Miami Showdown This Weekend

Josh Pate was raised to hate Notre Dame. Now South Bend is his favorite place in college football, and that's exactly where he'll be for Miami at Notre Dame this weekend.

"South Bend, Indiana, my friend," Pate told Rich on The Rich Eisen Show when asked where he was headed. He explained the irony. "For kids who grew up in the rural South, taught to hate Notre Dame from birth," he said, joking that his dad spoke to his mother's belly before he was born to make sure the message got through: "Notre Dame, we don't like them down here."

Then he grew up and actually went. "It's become my favorite campus. It's become my favorite place to go," Pate said. "It's like a movie scene. It's unbelievable."

And the setting for this one sounds perfect to him. "Can you imagine Miami coming in there, temperatures in the low to mid 40s by kickoff Saturday night?" he said. "It's going to be awesome."

Rich was immediately in. "I'm old enough to remember the Convicts versus the Catholics, Josh," he said, calling it "old-school, if you will, blue-blood stuff" that he'd also love to see in the College Football Playoff.

When Rich asked for a key to the game, Pate gave credit to a colleague he had recently needled. "I know that I besmirched the good name of Dan Orlovsky last week, but I thought Orlovsky made a good point," he said. "When he's not talking about Arch, he makes great points."

Orlovsky's point was about Notre Dame quarterback CJ Carr. "It feels like when you watch tape of CJ Carr, he's capable of more than they ask him to do," Pate said, relaying the line. "And I agree with that."

That matters because of what Miami has been allowing. Pate noted that Billy Edwards "carved them up against North Carolina last week," and that a couple of quarterbacks have played "the game of their lives" against Miami, in his words. "Partly it's because you can get Miami through the secondary," he said. And Miami's offense is "probably going to score on you."

So Pate doesn't expect a slugfest in the cold. "I fully believe Notre Dame's got the offensive juice, if they so choose to use it, to trade points with Miami," he said. He pointed to the betting total, in the mid to upper 50s. "The total's going to be way higher than the air temperature is."

His focus for Saturday night: "I just want to see how much they embolden CJ Carr to turn it loose."

Rich summed up Pate's position in percentages: zero percent agreement with Orlovsky on Arch, 100 percent agreement on Carr. That gave Pate an opening for one more story. While looking at coaching buyouts at the office, he found a clause in Dabo Swinney's contract saying that if Swinney goes to Alabama, he owes something like 150 percent of his buyout. So he hit up Orlovsky with a question: "If we're measuring percentage 1 to 100, how can 150 percent of something even exist?"

Orlovsky's response, according to Pate, was the new mind-blown emoji. "Well done, Josh Pate," Rich said. "Well done."