College Football News’s Notre Dame preview goes horribly wrong

When Pete Fiutak sat down to write his preview of the 2010 edition of the Fighting Irish for CollegeFootballNews.com, he had no idea he’d end up in the middle of a shit storm because of it.

Once his preview was posted, it’s only natural that the folks from the Notre Dame blog HerLoyalSons.com would stumble across it and give it the once over.  Not only did they find incorrect names (Nate Montana was referred to as “Nick”) and some questionable analysis (Fiutak tabbed the Navy game as being Notre Dame’s most important of the season), they also found this:

New recuit Matt James might not be an elite prospect, but he was on everyone’s list of the best tackles of this year’s recruiting class with the size and frame to sit at one tackle spot for 4 years. At 6-7 and 291 pounds, the Cincinnati native followed Brian Kelly to South Bend and will get a long look at playing time right away on the outside. Even though he’s tall, he’s physical for the ground game and does a good job of shoving people around. (CollegeFootballNews.com)

Here’s where the preview went off the rails, because Matt James passed away this past spring after a fall from a hotel balcony in Panama City, FL.  It was sort of all over the news, everybody involved weighed in on it at the time.

Of course, you can imagine the roasting that ensued in the Twitterverse.  All of this prompted Fiutak’s CFN colleague Matt Zemek to go into full damage control mode:

If you clicked on the CFN link above you can see that any reference to James has been edited out.  As for Fiutak, word is that his 2010 Heisman watch list will be out soon.  He really likes Nebraska’s Tommie Frazier, but he’s touting Michigan State’s Lorenzo White as a serious dark horse.