Saw the piece, and man, I really don't see what the fuss is.
As has been stated, it was balanced. Palmer and Urban were loving ND, and Herbie not so much. But really, was Herbstreit out of line? If you think so, check out these #'s and tell me he was wrong: 3-9, 6-6, 6-6, 7-5. Those are our regular season records the past 4 years. You know what fans predicted on this site for those years? Almost 10-11 wins each year (myself included for 2 of those years). Now, who doesn't know what they are talking about???
Seriously, I love my Irish, but why should we expect everyone to expect ND to be great this year? Because we finally won some games in November? Because we beat a bad SC team w/out their starting QB by 4? Because we beat a coachless Miami team?
Do you guys realize how insanely rabid ND fans are, and how HUGE our fanbase is? These TV guys and writers have to deal with TONS of mail/email/voicemails from ND fans any time they predict something bad for ND...and they've been write for the better part of what, almost 2 decades? But every year we do this - we bang on 'experts' for not loving ND, and yet we never go back and say how right they were and how wrong we were.
Now, I think we're ready to explode this year, providing we get good QB play and Cierre Wood stays healthy. But until we do, we need to stay in the "show me" and "prove it to me" mind frames before we start killing the media, IMO...