The HLS Sim was born from my desire to do something different. In the vast sea of Notre Dame podcasts, I wanted to do more than stand out. I wanted to do something fun but also avoid our show being seen as a parroting of more popular Irish podcasts. So I sent a message with a wild idea to Shane: let's go on Twitch and stream a CPU vs CPU matchup of the week's Notre Dame game using a decade-plus old video game as our "preview". To my knowledge, no one was doing this (at best, they were playing NCAA '14 themselves) so I figured it was worth a season to experiment. The next thing I knew, the sim ..read more

After this episode, there will be only one more game to pick with Eddie: the 2021 National Championship. It's hard to believe this crazy picks journey is coming to an end--even crazier, we are still doing a damn good job. Despite opt-outs and COVID cancellations, Eddie and I went 7-2 last week, bringing our bowl totals to 13-10 and 12-11 as I keep my one game edge. Overall, we are 112-80-4. Yes, this means that we've hit the point in which we couldn't even screw up going over .500 if we tried! But like Notre Dame getting a good draw with Oklahoma State in the Fiesta Bowl, it'd be silly for us ..read more

It's the most wonderful time of the year: bowl season. After a ridiculously incredible regular season, Eddie and I are ready to ruin it all by throwing darts at bowl season. As we won't be recording until next Thursday, we have 14 bowl games to pick. More importantly, Eddie also has a list of bowl gifts ready to go. Even more importantly, we visit some of the websites to figure out what some of this stuff is and do we ever make some discoveries. Oh, and hang on past the closing song because you will hear Eddie and I try to figure out some confusing reference material only to find out...well, y ..read more

Yeah, yeah, Eddie won the $200 Extra Life bet. I will pay up once I finish the FFXIV: Endwalker main story/marathon on Friday (I hope!). Make sure to join that on my personal twitch channel. Thankfully, I realized that I run this show. I changed some rules. Gotta keep this interesting. After all, this isn't about the money now. It's about walking off this thing with a W. After taking some liberties with the Army/Navy pick, I go over this year's tiebreaker: our 2021 futures. Spoiler alert: they were real bad! #HAILGAMBLOR --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/herl ..read more

It finally happened. I had a massive week and tied things up with Eddie in our $200 bet for Extra Life. This brings us both to 86-60-3 on the season. Talk about going out with a bang in the last year. In fact, I'm so proud of the record, that I did a bit a math at the beginning of the episode to let you know how much money we could've been making you this season. Granted, we have now tempted fate with the brag, plus picking games on a Tuesday morning, but GAMBLOR stops for nothing, including Thanksgiving. Neither Eddie nor I have no plans of stopping our hot streak now and, by the end of the w ..read more

Once again, Notre Dame has blessed us with a dominating performance that leaves little need for anything beyond gushing. Believe me, Shane and I are completely happy with how this is unfolding. Sure, gushing is fun, but we get to spend the majority podcast having ourselves a ball with a host of other topics. We talk preparing for a heel turn when the College Football Playoff Committee inevitably shoves ND into the top four and plan a literal marshmallow war for the senior section next season because, with NBC highlighting it, the University's efforts to halt it are now completely hilarious. In ..read more

Apologies for the day delay on this one. Believe me, I was in no condition to even attempt the live broadcast on Thursday night. Thankfully, I feel better, even though I'm sure you can hear some fatigue in my voice. However, I had to push through to get the last home sim in the books in HLS history. It's been a long, crazy ride, and, hilariously, this felt like a football game. Don't worry, there are still wtf moments, but overall, the sim stayed sober for senior day. We have two (maybe three?!) more sims to go. With next week being Thanksgiving, we are coming at you with a special sim Tuesday ..read more

It's that time of year again, when teams across the nation run and hide behind some hilariously week games to prepare for their biggest games of the year. Thankfully, this year the concentrated FCS flood has been lessened than in previous years, giving us a rather solid slate of twelve games. Eddie still holds a two game lead over me in our Extra Life bet and he's still giving me hell for passing out during my 24 hour stream failure (and rightly so). I'm determined to catch up, but I'm running out of time! We have only a couple more regular season picks pods remaining. Come join the fun while ..read more

Let's be honest, when a game is played so well, there is little more to do than gush over the performance. While fun, there is only so much gushing that can be done and still have an insightful show. Thankfully, Notre Dame was forced to play more of the depth chart than we've seen all season thanks to injuries and illness this week. With that look at the future of the Irish, Shane and I spend the second half of the pod talking about what we see as the big picture for this season and beyond. Oh, and there's a story about how I blacked out for charity and completely missed this game live. --- Se ..read more

I know I say this every week, but I'm absolutely positive the sim, and all technology, knows that we are wrapping this thing up soon. Troll job doesn't even begin to descript this mess. There are more turnovers than third downs converted by both teams. This game might have set a record for combined sacks. Neither virtual coach seemed to care to manage the clock properly nor call anything resembling a coherent gameplan. And, to top it all off, Shane's audio dies right in the middle of the sim. I'm not sure if I've ever laughed harder and had more despair than in any other sim. Enjoy the cluster ..read more