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2025 - present
The launch: On 14 July 2025 a new Notre Dame football podcast, The Echoes, began publishing weekly, produced by Sinclair, Inc. and hosted by two alumni: Mike Golic Jr., who played on the Notre Dame offensive line, and Jessica Smetana, a Notre Dame graduate and veteran sports media producer. Its premise, in its own listing, is Fighting Irish talk from two proud alumni, distributed on YouTube and the podcast platforms with its own social accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok and Facebook. By November 2026 the directory count stood at 65 episodes. No audience figure for the show was fixed by a citable source, and none is printed; the episode count and the corporate backing are the documented facts.
What it marks: Golic Jr. explained the show's origin to Awful Announcing in August 2026: he and Smetana are, in his phrase, the other half of the same brain, and the podcast is the conversation the two of them used to have by text during every Notre Dame game, now held in front of a microphone and shared with fans. That is the alumni layer of the university creator scene, distinct from Fighting Irish Media's in-house plant: a national media company employs two graduates to talk about their school, for an audience of fellow alumni and fans, in a format that did not exist when either of them was a student. Neither host is recorded as a South Bend resident, and the show is not claimed as a South Bend production; it stands in this section as infrastructure, evidence that the audience the university built now sustains a trade of professional alumni voices around it, one more floor in the city's creator economy.
Sources:
- Listen Notes and Audible directory listings, THE ECHOES: A Podcast on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish: first published 14 July 2025; published by Sinclair, Inc.; hosts Jessica Smetana and Mike Golic Jr., "two proud ND alums"; weekly release; radio.net listing, Nov 2026: 65 episodes.
- Barrett Media, 2025: Golic Jr. on launching The Echoes with Sinclair Media and co-host Smetana, a fellow Notre Dame graduate.
- Awful Announcing, "The Golics discuss ESPN Radio homecoming, calling Notre Dame games", 22 Aug 2026: Golic Jr. on The Echoes and the text message conversations behind it.