Shamrock Head

Irish Blogger Gathering: Pre-Party for the Post Season

2011-12-02T06:37:00.000-08:00

New format for the IBG starting this week! There is one post to rule them all, and it is here:

http://www.subwaydomer.com/2011-articles/december/irish-blogger-gathering-preparty-for-the-postseason.html

IBG: Stanford Week

2011-11-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

This week's IBG hosted by Keith Arnold over at Inside the Irish. This is only my second IBG, and hoo boy--what a way to get started.

1. Obviously, Saturday night's game is massive. Win, and the Irish get to nine wins after starting 0-2, and you can make a really persuasive argument that they're deserving of a BCS berth. Lose, and ND only makes incremental progress over last year's 8-5 record. Three potential outcomes: Win, close loss, ten-point loss. How does your takeaway for the season change?

Hmm. You know, unless the the Irish knock the Cardinal completely colorblind, I'm not sure my opinion of the season's going to change much. This might sound kind of defeatist, but it's not. It's the last game of the season--we kind of know who our team is by now. ND's been good this season, but they're not great. They're probably better than a number of teams ranked above them, but they don't have enough control yet to be ranked among the elite. Against USF and Michigan they lost when it was in their power to win; against Wake Forest and BC it felt like they were just scraping by. Not that I'm knocking those wins, because I really appreciated Rees's quote after the BC game: "Winning's hard, and I don't think people give the guys enough credit when games are won late in the season."

Absolutely. And a couple years ago, I think a tough close game like Wake or BC might have been a game that we lost.

But overall, I think the problems that have plagued us from game one haven't really disappeared. If we play a perfect game on Saturday, perhaps my opinion will change. More likely, though, we're going to have to wait until next season to see whether our team's going to bump up into the category of the truly spectacular.

2. Right now the Irish have 15 prospects committed to the 2012 recruiting class. Let's assume every starter with a year left is coming back (Cave, KLM, Cwynar and Slaughter) and the Irish end up signing 20 recruits. That'll make 93 players technically available for the 85-man roster (With Mike Ragone potentially being No. 94). Assuming Te'o and Eifert are back next season, what reserves do you invite back for a fifth year? Why?

Fifth-year candidates:
Crist
Goodman
Walker
Golic
Clelland
Hafis Williams
Brandon Newman
McDonald
Posluszny
McCarthy
Ragone* (Sixth Year)

All of them. Anyone who's busted his butt for the team this long and wants to come back should come back. I realize this is kind of negating the point of the question, but if these guys are dedicated and they exude the kind of character you want on and off the field, then it's worth it. Having that kind of experience and commitment around your program is invaluable. It's not just about the roster--it's about creating the team culture you want, too.

3. If you ran the website NDNation, what would you do with it? It's the most prominent Notre
Dame hub on all of the internet, but it's got a very vocal faction of readers/fans that seem to control the agenda -- most often with a significantly negative point-of-view. What would you do if that was your website?

Oh, man. So I have to confess that here NDNation kind of scares me--mostly for the reason you mentioned. Message boards do tend give voice to the passionate and pungent minority, but I'd like to think most fans actually prefer the kind of reasonable discourse championed by blogs like Blue-Gray Sky.

If NDNation's your place to rant and rave, then fine--but if I were brave enough to open this can of worms, I think I'd try to remind the angry message-board-posters (when they're talking about the team and not, for example, field turf) that these are 18-to-22-year-old kids you're talking about, and you're putting an awful lot of pressure on people who are working very hard to do exactly what you want them to do: win. If you can't manage to tear your myopic eyes away from all the things that have gone wrong and work in some respect for all the hard work these kids are putting in, then maybe don't say anything at all.

I know a lot of the heat gets lumped on the coaches, but based on the exponential increase of gray hairs on Brian Kelly's head in the past year, I'd say you need to lay off him a little bit, too. Not that I haven't done my fair share of ranting and raving over (for example) clock management this season--but it's only the coach's second year, and what he's managed to do with the defense alone in such a short time is remarkable. If we're not exactly hitting the BCS mark this season, we're still not that far off. As for any faux pas--I'd argue that Kelly knows how to be a head coach in college football, but there's still a bit of a learning curve when it comes to being the head coach at Notre Dame. And even when he's made a gaffe, I think he responds pretty well to the backlash.

I don't have any idea how I would change the website, but I beg--I plead--I implore you, NDNation, to consider that if you are the main hub of ND fans on the internet, then you are the heart from which the greater college football world takes its pulse of the ND fan base. And it has been my experience that the greater college football world thinks ND fans are delusional.

Why do you think that is, NDNation?

I appreciate a little tough love every now and again--but you gotta remember to include the love. That's the most important part of the alma mater, right? Love thee Notre Dame. Whether you're a graduate of the university or not, this should still hold true.

And whether you're completely satisfied with the season or not, let's just try not to give the coach any more gray hairs than necessary. Eh?

Clearly you've opened a little bit of a vein here, Keith--thanks for posing the question.

4. You're Brian Kelly. You spent last recruiting class successfully upgrading the front seven of the defense. Over the next two recruiting classes, what position groups do you absolutely need to upgrade to get the Irish over the BCS hump?

1. SPECIAL TEAMS. Okay, so maybe Kelly's not going to go out and recruit for special teams per se, but we need a good punt returner like a turkey needs basting. BC roasted us in the field position battle last week. We had six drives that started inside our own 15, and every single one resulted in a punt. There were other factors besides our poor return game, obviously (like who is BC's punter and how can we get Kyle Brindza to start kicking like that?!), but I can't see us winning a BCS game if we're getting bagged and cooked in the field position battle. Coach Kelly has already acknowledged the need for a punt returner, and basically indicated that the problem is being shelved until next season. I just hope one of the all-around athletes he's recruiting ends up being the next Devin Hester. Or whoever. Really any player who would rather punch people than fair catch the ball is all right with me.

2. Linemen. I'm cheating here and lumping defense and offense together, even though based on Kelly's recruiting so far it looks like D-line is getting pretty well covered. Admittedly I have not been keeping close tabs on this year's recruiting class (not that it matters much before national signing day anyway), but we're not very deep at the Center position at the moment, and personally I would rather see us focus on ensuring our line is stacked than worry about whether we've got the next Michael Floyd lined up at wideout. Also, I harbor a crazed dream that we will one day have the sickest two-deep at D-line in all of college football; a six-headed beast that will out-man the Hydra in a staring contest and shame Cerberus into life as a pink-collared lap dog.

5. I've seen dozens of analogies used to describe the current state of the quarterbacking position at Notre Dame. What's your favorite, or the one you think is the most appropriate?

This would be an excellent question if I'd seen any of these analogies myself. (Though having already expressed my fear of the NDN message boards, perhaps this pronouncement does not shock you.) Last week I compared Tommy to a peanut butter cup in my rant, but that doesn't seem very original, so let's rule that out. I think I'll leave this question to everyone else and try to read around the blogosphere a bit more so I'm not flummoxed the next time a question like this arises.

6. Get out the crystal ball. Even after an unimpressive weekend, the Irish are right around a seven-point underdog to Stanford. Do the Irish leave Palo Alto victorious?

I fail at making predictions. However, this is a team that beat Utah and USC last season after losing to Tulsa and having most of the fanbase declare them dead in the water, so I think we're capable of making a strong finish this season, too.

We're a good team. We're finding ways to win even when the performance seems lackluster, and our biggest enemy this season has been ourselves. I'd like to see us come out hot in Palo Alto, but I'd be all right watching a tough, slogging nail-biter so long as a couple lucky bounces come our way.

I think Stanford's beatable. So let's beat 'em.

Go Irish!

Irish Blogger Gathering: Boston College Week

2011-11-16T19:30:00.000-08:00

Hosted this week by Poot over at Her Loyal Sons.

Having actually seen the uniforms in the wild on Saturday night, what are your final thoughts regarding them? Does Ronald Darby stating that he liked them change your views on trying out the different uniforms for the “Shamrock Series”?

THEY WORE DIFFERENT UNIFORMS?

Oh right, sorry, I think I'm still recovering from my shamrock-helmet-induced hypnosis. I'm not sure I even noticed the players were wearing different-colored uniforms because I couldn't tear my eyes away from their heads. Maryland's helmets were practically austere by comparison. But then I started noticing them, too, and spent a fair amount of time pondering how the Maryland state flag could easily double as the pennant of a deeply confused religious order steeped in the tenets of NASCAR.

And then I remembered there was football on and decided not to care.

Overall, I don't think there's really any point to the uniform switch-up for the Shamrock Series, other than it gives Adidas a chance to throw some new swag in our direction. The whole change-up uniform thing does seem to be taking hold across the country, and part of me wonders whether this obsession isn't somehow linked to the fact that college football games can now be viewed on TV almost every night of the week. Everyone's getting TV time now, so everyone wants to stand out, right?

As for the recruits commenting on the uniforms: if they like them, great. If they don't, whatever. If a recruit's basing his decision to come to Notre Dame on whether or not he likes the uniforms, then I think I'd care. There are so many other much more important factors for the recruits to consider that I'd like to think the uniforms aren't going to be the tipping point.

Mostly I'll just be glad to see the boys back in the traditional blue & gold on Saturday. Gosh, you know, especially since they finally got the paint color right.

2. Manti is clearly hobbled right now. Re-watching the game on Sunday, I barely noticed him on the field and I rarely remember Mayock or Hammonds calling his name. I believe Kelly stated in his Sunday teleconference that Manti was did not play most of the 3^rd or 4^th quarters. If you are BK, do you sit Manti on Saturday?

Well, in his Tuesday presser, Kelly commented that Manti was running around and the rest seemed to have done him some good. Based on Manti's own comments earlier in the season that he can still feel the sting of that '09 UConn loss on Senior Day, I think he really wants to be out there on the field to send out the seniors with a win. Although it's certainly more important for him to be alive and well for the Stanford game next week, you gotta give the guy a chance to play for his teammates on Senior Day. Even if it's just for a quarter or two.

3. We’ve seen Tommy Rees play deep into blowouts against Navy, Air Force and Maryland with Hendrix only getting a significant number of snaps in the Air Force game. Rees is only a sophomore but it seems most Irish fans take it as a foregone conclusion that Golson or Hendrix will pass Tommy going into the 2012 season. So do you agree with the use, or lack thereof, of Hendrix so far this season? Do you accept the thought that this is Rees’ last year as starter?

Hm. Well, every time I try to predict something like this I'm terribly wrong, so let's just assume I'm incorrect when I say: I'd be very surprised to see Rees benched at the start of next season. As I noted in my rant after the Wake Forest game last week, I don't think a sophomore-year Andrew Hendrix (or Everett Golson) is going to be any less prone to throwing interceptions than a junior-year Tommy Rees.

Further, I think Rees is much more likely to have a breakout season next year than either of the younger QB's. He's been in Kelly's system for two years now--and if you recall, both Brady Quinn and Jimmy Clausen looked a whole lot better as juniors than they did as sophomores. Obviously this occurred for different reasons in each case (Weis showed up and whipped Quinn into a better-than-50%-passer; Jimmy finally had GOLDEN TATE and an O-line that would block for him--plus he learned how to throw the ball away), but overall I think the biggest change between a sophomore and a junior starting QB is in the mind. It's knowing the playbook. It's knowing your teammates. It's knowing how to thwart opposing defenses even when they're showing you looks they haven't shown all season.

I haven't seen enough of the younger QB's in action to make fair judgment, of course, but it doesn't seem likely that they'll be more mentally ready with the playbook than Rees, or more prepped to take on a leadership role and pick apart opposing defenses.

More likely than seeing Rees totally ousted, I think, is that we'll see more of Andrew Hendrix (or Golson, maybe) as the switch-up quarterback. I can't see Hendrix being totally ready for the starting spot next season, and as long as Tommy's around it seems foolish to completely yank him for someone with so much less experience. I'd much prefer to have just one starting QB, of course, but if Kelly can work in Hendrix effectively in certain situations and keep Rees in there as more of a stabilizing force (assuming, you know, he doesn't keep throwing INT's), then...well, maybe that's what we need to do. But I guess we'll see.

4. Tommy Rees needs 608 yards for 3000 passing yards on the season. Cierre Wood is 93 yards short while Jonas Gray is 270 yards short of 1000 rushing yards. Michael Floyd is 78 yards shy of 1000 receiving yards for the season. Despite SubwayDomer’s insistence that bowl stats count, predict final numbers for all 4 players before the bowl. Do they all hit the milestones?

I say yes. Why not? Let's contemplate how.

It's unlikely Rees will pull out a 300+ yard game against Stanford, so he needs a 400+ yard effort against BC. Let's say 444 yards by the end of the third quarter. At least 200 of those will need to be to Floyd, because it's Senior Day.

Speaking of which--it being Senior Day and all, Jonas Gray will rush for 270 yards in the first half alone.

Cierre may have to hold off until later in the game, but I say as long as Gray has the yardage covered in the first half, might as well have him scamper for the century mark in the second. Or, you know, there's always the Stanford Game.

Notre Dame opens up as a 24.5 favorite for Saturday’s game and this is clearly the worst Boston College team in recent memory. That said, BC absolutely loves to play spoiler when it comes to Notre Dame and this game will be the last chance for something good to happen this season. Given those two thoughts, does the margin of victory matter to you on Saturday?

We will score over sixty points. Every single senior will play for the entirety of the fourth quarter. Boston College will score field goals and only field goals, and they will not know the glory of our endzone.

GO IRISH BEAT EAGLES!

Leftover Halloween Candy

2011-11-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

Notre Dame 45, Maryland 21

So if you're anything like me, you pounced on the discount Halloween candy during the first week of November, and now you have a little stash tucked away somewhere that you've been enjoying--even though you had more than enough candy leading up to Halloween and you're perfectly well aware that Thanksgiving's just around the corner.

That's kind of what the end of this season feels like to me: leftover Halloween candy. It still tastes good, and you still love it (because hey, it's candy, right?), but you know the holiday's over. And probably you should wait til next year to eat more of those pumpkin-shaped Reese's, because they'll taste even sweeter if you do; but hey, as long as they're here, might as well enjoy them, right?

So maybe the USC game smashed any hopes of a BCS Bowl. But we're still winning, and that's sweet. We're still going to a bowl, and that's sweet too.

Plus, we're now officially RANKED again in the AP (#24) and USA Today (#25) polls. Looks like being favored in every game so far this season is finally starting to pull some leverage, despite the unfortunate mishaps that leave our record at 7-3. I severely doubt that even with a win over Stanford we'll be able to crack the Top 14 (particularly since the BCS poll hasn't yet deigned to acknowledge our presence among the ranked), but I'd still love to see our boys pull out a whomping pumpkin pie of a victory over Thanksgiving weekend (as opposed to, say, a bunch of cherry turnovers).

Before we get to the awesome stuff, however, let's just take a minute to ponder a few of the troublesome items that may rear their flaky little heads in Palo Alto.

Give me a break, giiiiive me a break, break me off a piece of that....

Oh, O-line. WHAT are you doing to me?

Let's assume it was dry blend of factors: two cups missing Braxston Cave, one cup throwing the ball 38 times, three tablespoons Mike Golic's inexperience, one teaspoon missed RB blocks, and a dash of defensive chutzpah. Sift it all together, and suddenly you've got enough for three sacks.

Not my favorite mixture, especially since I'm not convinced that the allspice of Maryland's defense is exactly the strongest flavor in the world. And if we're giving up three sacks against the bland ol' Terps, we'd better steel ourselves for the comparatively curry-spiced BC defense--particularly one with the giant zest of Luke Kuechly at linebacker. Kuechly's even been compared to the human habanero himself, Manti Te'o. I realize BC's 3-7 and all, but if we're giving up sacks against Maryland, we'd better be a tad bit concerned over BC.

Overall, the offense played quite well, but part of me wonders if the extra-fast tempo we saw on Saturday was as much of an effort to amp up our game as it was to disguise some of the extra-large gaps in our offensive colander, as it were, caused by the personnel changes. Braxston Cave is out for the season, so hopefully another week with Golic at center will give the O-line a chance to knead together a little better, and rise evenly and effectively come game time against BC. Perhaps the three-sack warning is the push they need to improve before the end of the season. Let's hope so.

Also, as long as we're in nit-picking mode, I'm going to whine for a second about how we gave up another rushing touchdown. What's with that? We have the third-best stats against rushing touchdowns in the FBS (right behind LSU and TCU)--and we surrender one on the ground to the Terps? USC is one thing, but Maryland? Really? It's like a tray of cinnamon buns that are all burnt on the bottom. Still gooey and warm and delicious and satisfying--but when you've peeled all the way through the top layers, there's still this burnt little canker sticking to the bottom of the pan. It's not perfect. You've got to scrape off the bottom, clean the pan and try again.

And I guess that's the way it always is, with football. I'm not sure there's such a thing as a perfect game. But if we can at least get the tray to bake so no smoke billows out of the oven and no excessive charred parts are left at the bottom, I'll be satisfied. And I think we're getting there. Certainly things are much improved from a couple seasons ago, when in nearly every game you felt the urge to throw out half the tray because they got burnt on more than just the bottom. Certainly not the kind of thing you want to lay out and serve to your guests on Game Day.

I'm just sayin'.

Reese's Pieces

So let's talk about all the tasty little candy-coated tidbits that went down on offense--which shouldn't be hard to do, because there were a lot of them, despite the sacks. The up-tempo offense served us well, particularly early in the game; our first two scoring drives were completed in 2:35 or less.

The run game went as smooth as creamy peanut butter, with both Jonas Gray and Cierre Wood eclipsing the century mark in all-purpose yards for the first time all season (I believe). (Gray officially had 138 net yards rushing, and Wood was just one yard shy of 100). Not that I expected to see anything less, but I'm glad the commitment to the run game has returned. As long as we keep this identity all the way through the end of the season, I'll be happy. No more abandoning the run like we did against USC. We seemed to stay steady against Wake Forest, even when we were down early, and it paid off. Let's hope we'll be stalwart against Stanford, too, if it comes down to it.

Michael Floyd, Tyler Eifert, and Robby Toma were the Three Musketeers of the pass game, with 9, 8, and 7 catches respectively, racking up individual totals of 90, 83, and 73 yards--including a touchdown apiece for Floyd and Eifert.

There were moments I thought Floyd looked like the Michael Floyd of olde--but it's possible he's spent too much time focusing on his blocking or just straight-up being double-teamed this season, because there were at least two occasions during the game when Rees found him, on what looked like a good throw, and he miffed the catch. Very un-Floyd like. Even the announcers said so, and normally they're too busy poring over their random bits of human interest trivia to be overly concerned with what's going on in the actual game. But Floyd's the kind of nougat so smooth everyone takes notice, so it's not overly surprising they'd have him on their radar.

More surprising is one announcer's personal fan club for Robby Toma, who up until this point hasn't gotten much playing time. But in the couple games he's made it onto the field this season (which will continue, as Riddick's out til next year), he's made a real impact. Teams tend to overlook him early due to his bite-size appearance, but after this game I think it would be unwise for defenses to spend too much time on king-sized Floyd at the expense of covering Toma. He may look like a little fun-sized bar, but he's got a whole party bag's worth of energy, and Coach Kelly acknowledged his effort and his leadership by asking him to lead the fight song in the locker room after the game. I'd look out for some nice grabs by the junior receiver on Saturday.

Also, can I just say that Tyler Eifert is basically a whole crunchity Heath bar of goodness (and if you don't think this is a compliment than you have no idea how much I enjoy toffee), and I look forward to another season of him abusing teams over the middle. We've had at least four pro-caliber, All-American tight ends in a row now (Fasano, Carlson, Rudolph, Eifert). Can we please continue this trend forever and ever until the end of time? Lifetime supply of Heath Bars. Let's go.

Lastly, let us commend Tommy Rees for his smooth, sugary, ruffled-around-the-edges-but-always-smooth-on-the-inside peanut-buttery-cup goodness. Despite the three sacks and the two inexplicable drops by Floyd, he still went 30-for-38 passing with 2 TD's and nearly 300 yards. That's a 78.9% completion percentage. And the best part of all--NO INTERCEPTIONS. Maryland's defense is not exactly the creme de la creme of the FBS, of course--but neither is Wake Forest's or Navy's, and I'm pretty sure he threw interceptions against both of them. So. Improvement?

Let's hope so, because I'm really tired of this wishy-washy, namby-pamby, back-and-forth inconsistent nonsense of having turnovers for three games and then no turnovers for two games and then inexplicable turnovers for three more games... All I'm saying is Rees better achieve consistency, or he's gonna get tossed like a sauce that won't set right. And I don't want that to happen. I'd much rather watch him stick around for a while and see the pot thicken.

Take Five

*Despite giving up our first sack in 5 games and 195 passing attempts, the offense accumulated 508 yards of offense during the advent of our 5th night game of the season, giving us our 5th 500-yard mark of the year for the first time since 2005.

*David Ruffer completed a spectacular 52-yard field goal, making him only the second player in Irish history with three field goals of 50 yards or more (the first was Harry Oliver). After missing three field goals at the start of the season, Ruffer has now kicked 5 in a row dating back to the Purdue game.

*Tyler Eifert's TD catch was his 5th of the season, hauled in at the 5:31 mark of the fourth quarter to give the Irish a 45-14 lead. Eifert now has 51 catches for 589 yards on the year. He holds 5th place in the Notre Dame record books for both total tight end receptions (78) and yards (941).

*With his TD toss to Eifert, Rees tied himself for 5th in the ND record books for most touchdown passes in a single season (he currently has 19--along with Ron Powlus).

*Lo Wood iced the offense's layer of 5 touchdowns with a TD grab of his own, intercepting the ball and running it back 57 yards for the first pick-six by the Irish since their game against Army in Yankee Stadium last year.

Hungry? Grab a Snickers

Right, so normally at this point I'd spew some lovely defensive statistics at you. And I'm still going to, only the defensive statistics aren't quite what they've been for most of the season. No double-digit tackles for anyone; no man-beast that is Manti Te'o, since he was out for most of the second half (though he should be in good shape for this week, we hear); no sacks; not even very many tackles for loss. In fact, if you look at Maryland's defensive stats, straight-up, they look quite a bit zippier: three sacks, nine tackles for loss, FOUR different players with twelve tackles or more.

But these stats are but tiny peanuts stuck in with the caramely, nougaty, chocolate-coated game as a whole. The reason Maryland made so many more tackles is because Notre Dame was a much bigger threat on offense. We held the ball on offense ten minutes longer than the Terps, accumulated ten more first downs, scored three more times, and ran the score up enough to rotate twenty-five different defensive players into the game.

I like having lots of fun stats to pore over on defense, but I think I could get to liking this even more. This having-an-offense-so-productive-the-defense-doesn't-have-to-put-up-flashy-stats thing. Because stats can be misleading, as we well know. You can rack up over five hundred yards of offense and still lose the game. Sometimes it's only a handful of stats that are significant. Like the fact that we made 10 of 16 third down conversions, and Maryland only got 3 of 12. That's a huge defensive statistic right there. And maybe we didn't get any sacks or tackles for loss; but we did have one forced fumble and a huge pick-six, and I'll take a possession change over loss of yards any day.

Whatever's going on with our team these days, I'm hungry for more.

Milky Way

So let us look upward and outward, and ruminate over what sugary goodness may foretold in the movements of the stars. Or at least in the subtle hints of Coach Kelly's press conference comments.

The most important thing I thought Coach Kelly said this week was during his post-game speech in the locker room (he may have made these comments in his post-game presser, too, but I didn't get a chance to watch all of that this week): "Don't change anything about the way you prepare," he told the players. Hell yes, I say. He's right.

Basically, caoch is warning them against getting lazy or sloppy just because the team's started to win on a consistent basis. (You know, just like I ranted about last week, about how teams like Ohio State tend to overlook their opponents just because they're 3-7.) You can't ease up on your preparation once you've found a way to win. It's because you prepare that you're able to win at all. So you have to be consistent with your approach. You have to keep doing exactly what you're doing.

aka DON'T SLACK OFF because that's how good teams end up losing to mediocre ones, and you don't want that to happen at the end of this season, especially not when you've worked so hard to get where you are, and furthermore YOU DO NOT WANT TO LOSE ON SENIOR DAY TO BOSTON COLLEGE. Trust me. You just don't.

I don't think the upperclassmen are going to need any prodding to know how important it is to win on Senior Day. Harrison Smith, for example, will most certainly remember the freezing agony of Syracuse '08. Manti Te'o has already commented on how awful it felt not being able to send the seniors out with a win for UConn '09. The sophomores can just carry over the jubilation from toppling 14th-ranked Utah last year, and the whole team can happily boot BC out of the stadium and pave their way to Palo Alto with some vim.

As Coach Kelly put it, when asked if there was a message he'd like to leave the seniors: "Win. You'll remember this a whole lot better if you win."

Let us go forth and do so. (And don't forget to brush the bits of caramel and nougat off your teeth before you hit the stadium.)

GO IRISH BEAT EAGLES!

42 is definitely not the answer

2011-11-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

Notre Dame 24, Wake Forest 17

So guys...bowl eligible!!!

Just...maybe not the way we envisioned.

Sometimes when I look at the rankings these days I get really annoyed, because Michigan and Michigan State and USC are all ranked, and seeing as we whomped Michigan State and had no business losing to Michigan and forgot how to play after a bye week and manage the clock against USC, we should...

Okay, so maybe we shouldn't be ranked, but in my head it feels like we should be ranked. Why AREN'T we ranked? Why didn't we win those two games at the beginning of the season? Why did we appear lackluster against Pittsburgh and Wake Forest? Why did we come out flat against USC? And why for the love of all that is baby-faced and gold-plated does Tommy Rees keep throwing interceptions???????

I've got a head full of questions and a pocket full of ellipses. And no answers.

I guess I could go with "42" as an answer, but that doesn't help very much because I don't know the question, so I'm just going to do my usual thing and waffle for a bit like I know what's going on.

Wakey!Wakey!

This game is hard to write about because it was so...meh. It doesn't inspire a lot of vim and fervor, thinking how you only won by a touchdown even though your opponent didn't score for the entire second half. Granted, Wake was up at halftime 17-10; there's no point complaining about a win; and it would just be wrong to undermine the stellar defensive effort in the second half--yada yada yada. Coach Kelly described this win as "Tough. Gritty." The kind of play we haven't really seen from this team before. And granted, I suppose it was. It's just as important--if not more important--for teams to win those tough, gritty games as it is for them to win high-flying, high-scoring spectacles. Win when it's a showdown. Win when it's an ugly mess. Win when everything goes down to the wire. Just find a way to win. And good teams do--period.

But good teams also do a lot of other things, such as play consistently, and anytime you've got a pair of touchdowns bookended by interceptions, you're not exactly playing your way to the top of the heap. I have to keep reminding myself not to get all bent out of shape about these things, though, because hey--at least we won. Games like this aren't going to make you leap out of your chair and jump for joy, but we won. It's nothing to sneeze at.

I would imagine that wins like this are more valuable for the team than they are for the fans. Of course we'd always like to see things flashy and exciting, but the season is long, and for the players, most of what they do to win isn't flashy or exciting at all. Like Coach Kelly's always saying: they try to go to work the same way every day. And yeah, Saturday should be different--Saturday's GAME DAY!--Saturday should be fun; but sometimes it's a slog-fest. Sometimes it's just gritty. And you have to know that even in November--even on the road at night--even when you're coming from behind, playing with two of your starting defensive linemen down and turning the ball over twice--that you can tough it out.

You don't always have to be dynamite with a laser beam. Sometimes you just have to be that brick wall your opponent can't quite knock down.

Third Eye Blind

However, since our general trajectory seems to be trending upward (even as our hopes and expectations for the season keep sliding down), games like this make people antsy. Forward-thinking eyes are flashing too far ahead to next season, wondering--Will Tommy keep the starting job? I personally would argue yes.

Based on the stats of both Brady Quinn and Jimmy Clausen, I think there's a quantum leap between sophomore and junior year. Mostly I think it's a mental leap--something to do with confidence, comfort level, ability to read the defense. Plus there's that intangible shift from being an underclassman to an upperclassman; really bumps up your ethos and your ability to lead.

I make no predictions, of course, because everything I try to predict anything regarding quarterbacks I'm horribly wrong. However, Brian Kelly has alluded more than once to Tommy's need for improvement. I fear that if Tommy's plate isn't free of turnovers by the end of the season, he may have to start looking over his shoulder for Andrew Hendrix (who will probably be busy running wind sprints up and down the field).

Keep in mind, though, that Tommy still has less experience as a starter than either Brady or Jimmy had at this point in their careers. He's fourteen games in as a starter, if you include the bowl game last year and South Florida this year--that's a little more than one seasons' worth of actual game-time decision making. I'm sure BK would like a signalcaller with better ball control and perhaps a little more flair on the ground (which may or may not be crucial, depending on the size of the gap left by Jonas Gray), but I don't think a sophomore-year Andrew Hendrix is likely to be less turnover-prone than a junior-year Tommy Rees. Although I guess you never know.

Killer Queen

Speaking of dynamite with a laser beam (like six paragraphs ago), how about that second-half defense? On Wake Forest's first two possessions in the third quarter, they ran six offensive plays for six yards. Five of those yards came on their second possession.

Not bad for a D-line with two starters down.

The D was on its heels a little bit in the first half; we gave up points early and didn't get any real pressure on the quarterback. But the halftime adjustments were good, as they've been for most of this season, and our players performed much better as a unit in the second half. In fact, the first defensive play of the third quarter resulted in a sack by freshman Aaron Lynch for -6 yards, which helps explain Wake's abysmal yardage total on the first series). Stephon Tuitt and Prince Shembo also recorded sacks, both in the fourth quarter; Harrison Smith forced a fumble in the third (which unfortunately the offense was unable to capitalize on); and Wake didn't get another scoring chance until the very last drive of the game, when they missed a 42-yard FG.

The game could have very easily gotten away from us, but thanks to the defense, it was not so. See? Tough. Gritty. We have things to be grateful for.

Hootie & the Blowfish

(The above moniker obviously referring to BK and all the beloved reporters at his press conferences. ...Obviously.)

Another thing to keep in mind is something we fans like to cite to ourselves quite often, but then conveniently forget when we have a lackluster game against a team like Wake Forest:

I think we saw last week you've got to really play well when you go on the road. Teams are going to play their very best. Maryland will play their very best against us, as has every team we've gone against; they've played their absolute best game of the year. Maybe you don't get that, but I get that from the coaches after the game.

So maybe Wake Forest is traditionally a Temple-caliber team when it comes to football--but, like Temple, they've become shockingly good in recent years (keeping in mind that Temple seems to be on the downward slope a bit since their head coach got hired away by Miami). They had the same record as ND coming into this game; they beat Florida State; and as we saw they have some quite talented players, particularly on offense. (No interceptions, you may have noticed.)

And although I think it is likely we will kick the patooey out of a 2-7 Maryland team (they've beaten Towson and Miami in their season opener if you can believe it), I like coach's comments on the matchup this week:

Again, we're going to be confronted with a similar situation. Everybody looks at Maryland's record and asks about them. I can tell you this from watching film and studying them offensively: They can put some points on the board. [...] It's the first year for Randy Edsall. I know Randy Edsall. He's a darn good football coach, and he'll have the memories of coming in here and beating Notre Dame and playing physical. That's what his teams will do.
So we have to be prepared and worry about ourselves.

(In case you were wondering, that win Randy Edsall has against Notre Dame--that would be the Senior Day game vs. UConn.)

I like this quote because A) BK is not overlooking a 2-7 Maryland team even though they are a 2-7 Maryland team, and B) he's not gonna let his players come out flat against a friggin' 2-7 Maryland team.

My biggest beef with college teams--most especially when they are good and appear to be having stellar seasons--is that they will completely overlook opponents they don't consider real threats. I don't want to point any fingers or anything, but Ohio State does this ALL THE TIME. In fact Ohio State might be the worst. Or maybe Michigan. Michigan vs. Appalachian State sounds like a reasonable example.

Anyway, point is, you shouldn't overlook any opponent ever, because A) that's disrespectful, B) that shows lack of discipline, and C) that team will probably play their best game of the season against you and your lack of focus might come back to bite you in the ass, and if it does then you completely deserve it, you great overgrown wafflehead--get your mind in the game, why don't you?

The Fray

So, brief player/injury update before I quit my somewhat colorless commentary for the week--

Center Braxston Cave is out for the season, so he'll be replaced by Mike Golic, Jr. for the rest of the season, and Andrew Nuss will move into the #2 spot at center.

WR Theo Riddick is out for the week with a hamstring injury, but he should be back for the last two games (or the Stanford game, if nothing else). Robby Toma will move up into the starting spot, and rotate out of the X position with TJ Jones and John Goodman.

Ethan Johnson's back on D-line! This'll take some of the pressure off the freshmen on D-line and most likely we'll come out looking much sharper against the Terps than we did against the Demon Deacons. (Seriously, who picked a turtle for a mascot?) Although one would hope we'd look sharper against Maryland anyway.

Manti Te'o and Aaron Lynch are both still dealing with ankle injuries, but both are cleared to play.

Also, just in cased you missed it, senior captain Harrison Smith's been invited to the Senior Bowl. Hell yes. He deserves it.

Let's go knock the shells off some diamond-backed turtles, shall we? And wear some severely shamrock-studded uniforms while we're at it. (For the record, the players seem to like the rad new uniforms, so as long as it doesn't distract them from their playing--whatever. Although it totally kills me that they spent over a year trying to get the color of the helmets right and now they're wearing these tacky-looking shamrock things.... Oh well. It's just for one week.)

GO IRISH BEAT TERPS!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....

2011-10-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame 56, Navy 14

...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Here we are: it is the best of times. Two unquestionable whomp-fests over two option teams that we've lost to in recent years. Navy would have put up a much better offensive showing if they'd been playing with their starting quarterback, of course; but as it was, I think the inexperience at quarterback allowed our defense put up one of their best showings all season. Particularly Manti Te'o (to the surprise of no one), with thirteen total tackles.

Perhaps the defensive showing wouldn't have been as impressive had Navy not so thoroughly flummoxed our defense last year; but either way it was nothing less than a gigantic Kit-Kat bar of joy to watch our tremendous young tacklers trollop the option for almost the entirety of the game. We held Navy to their lowest rushing total all season, tied for forcing the most punts (5), and after giving up three third-down conversions in a row early in the game (and getting lucky on a missed FG), we buckled down, and in the third quarter stopped them flat-out on 4th down--twice.

The two touchdowns Navy scored came as the direct result of Notre Dame's two turnovers, both of which occurred at nearly the same place on the field: one on the ND 27, and one on the ND 26. This is both good and bad--good because it means the defense prevented Navy from reaching the red zone of their own volition following every kickoff except for one; but I find it somewhat unfortunate that our D couldn't stop them either time they began their possession with an extremely short field. (Although considering we scored 56 points and it didn't matter anyway, I'm not going to gripe about it.) Obviously, the only really troublesome thing is that the turnovers occurred at all.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

This game--and the Air Force game, and the MSU game, and the first three quarters of the Michigan game--looked a lot like the season we thought we were going to have this year. We are capable of playing very well, and there have been many times we've shown it.

But the epoch of belief has faded into incredulity more than once this season. After last week's game, it's impossible to say with any sort of confidence that our team has arrived anywhere.

Not that you ever really arrive while the season's in progress; being good demands not only continual effort, but continual proof of success. In order to prove anything, you've got to prove it for the entire season. Good teams win. Consistently. End of story.

I don't think it's a question of effort. I believe our players have the desire and the ability to win, the camaraderie to play as a team, and enough confidence to have fun while they're doing it. But they do not know how to keep full focus all of the time, and last week they showed it. They're kids, you know? It was fall break. And for whatever reason, the coaches weren't able to keep them on-task enough to show up fresh for the game.

From the post-game interviews, you got the sense that the players didn't know what happened, either. Another lesson learned, right? Can't lose focus in your preparation. Not even during fall break.

But it's hard to take much comfort from this, because the problems that plagued us at the beginning of the season seem to plague us still. Turnovers. Turnovers. Turnovers.

TURNOVERS.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

We seem to be doing a lot of things in pairs so far this season. A pair of quarterbacks battling for the starting job. A pair of close losses to start the season, rife with turnovers, that we could have won. A pair of inexplicable goal-line turnovers scooped up by our opponent and run all the way back for a touchdown. A pair of 50+ scoring wins over service academies at home for the first time in decades. A pair of running backs who have come into their own. A pair of kickoffs returned for TDs by a freshman for the first time since Rocket. A pair of high-stakes night games (Michigan, USC) that have sent our hopes for a BCS Bowl game slushing into the gutter, where live the preseason rankings and almost every word that has ever come out of Mark May's mouth. A pair of freshman defensive ends (Aaron Lynch, Stephon Tuitt) stepping up for seniors plagued with injury (though now that Kap's out for the season, it'll be more than a pair).

Some of these things are good, of course, but others are grievous--sometimes even freakish--mistakes, and ones that you certainly don't want to see repeated. Oh consistency, you elusive brigand. Can't you be caught and made to stay? What lure can we possibly provide that will cause you to linger of your own accord?

There's definitely something to be said for looking great against teams that you're supposed to look great against. Be enthused--be very enthused. But all the same, look at the games in which we've struggled this year. We've been the victims of our own collapse. We've got a persistent and un-pluggable leak of turnovers. We've got a solid defense that, for a few crucial quarters this season, has not known how to be solid. And we've got a head coach with decades of experience that seem to be working very well for him--except that he seems to keep referencing the fact that he's got so many years of head coaching experience in order to defend the reasoning behind some of the things that he's done. There's a learning curve going on for everyone right now.

And the season isn't over. We still have a huge chance to make a statement, if we can manage to keep our defense on task and our offense balanced and steady. (You know--if.)

But I suppose I shouldn't really be looking that far ahead. Right now, I'm not worrying about Stanford. I just want to see what the next week brings. See how Tommy's lookin'. See if any of the wrinkles smooth out.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Allow me to digress.

Look guys, I know our stadium's not particularly loud and raucous (except when we play Michigan or USC), but there's really no need to start blaring a series of generic rock anthems at people in the hopes that something will stick. I suppose I appreciate the effort and all--but as usual when the administration steps in, there is a feeling of artifice about it that mostly makes me want to groan.

I mean, it's not as bad as the whole Freekbass incident, but playing Crazy Train a hundred times during the USC game got almost as annoying as hearing THIS is-the-only SONG we KNOW every five seconds. (Almost. Not quite. Nothing in the world is as annoying as the Condom Band playing that song over and over and over and over and over and over and over...seriously, don't they all just want to smack themselves with their instruments after a while? Or are they just too busy caught up in their pastiche of doucheness to care?)

They seemed to try to branch out a little during the Navy game, but seeing as piped-in music has never really been a thing at Notre Dame Stadium and so many songs have already been commandeered by other schools, it just feels like we're posing. And none of it sounds right, with the exception of Dropkick Murphys before kickoffs. See, that's more Notre Dame. It's loud, it's Irish, it's not arbitrary. (Although if we're going to play "Shipping up to Boston" in the stadium when we play Boston College, it will feel kind of weird. Just sayin'.)

Mostly I'm irritated because whoever is in charge of the music clearly has no idea what our identity in the stadium is, so they're just playing songs that they associate with sporting events, and instead of pumping the crowd up, it's starting to sound friggin' tacky. The crowd for USC was electric, no doubt, but they didn't need the help of loudspeakers; they would've been electric on their own. And on days when we're kicking Navy's butt by 30 points, AC/DC isn't gonna help. Better to have no music at all than something that's going to have no effect.

Anyway, don't want to gripe about this overmuch, but in closing can I just say:

THE HEY SONG SHOULD NEVER BE PLAYED IN NOTRE DAME STADIUM EVER AGAIN. GET RID OF HIGH SCHOOL CHEER. FOREVER.

FOOOOORRRRRRR-EEEVVVVV-ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Right. Well I guess that's as much as I've got for the moment.

It was a dark and stormy night...

So we're facing Wake Forest in football for the first time ever this week, in our fourth of six night games this season. Wake Forest is traditionally a bit of a limp noodle when it comes to football, but currently they've got the same record as the Irish (5-3). They've lost to Syracuse, Virginia Tech, and North Carolina; notable wins include Boston College and then-23rd-ranked Florida State. Last week's 49-24 loss to North Carolina was a five-turnover affair, with 28 of Carolina's points coming off Demon Deacon turnovers.

“We definitely weren’t sharp and it’s tough to put your finger on the one thing that caused that,” quarterback Tanner Price said.

Oh, my. That sounds familiar.

But unlike the Irish, the Demon Deacons haven't been plagued with turnovers all season; they had five total in seven games prior to playing North Carolina.

Let's hope both teams show up with a clean game this Saturday. Not that I wouldn't love to see the Irish strip the ball and force another stellar special teams turnover, of course...but I'd like to see us manhandle another opponent without any help from turnovers at all.

GO IRISH BEAT DEACONS!

The Palace of Dim Night

2011-10-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame 17, USC 31

What fray was here? Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

I admit that, in my heart of hearts, I was nervous when Dayne Crist took the field and drove the team all the way down to the one-yard line. We hadn't had a turnover in so long. There was really no reason to fear. I thought to myself surely—surely—not again. Just because Crist is on the field doesn’t mean we’re more likely to commit turnovers. And anyway, the last time we fumbled on the one-yard line it was Jonas Gray’s fumble, not Crist’s, so surely—surely—

………………………

…………………………………………

……………………………………………………………….……..............

………………….…never mind.

Seriously, WHAT’S with the turnovers this year? We’ve had more fumbles, botched snaps, interceptions, ball-bounced-off-the-shoulderpads-and-right-into-the-arms-of-the-nearest-defender than I can remember seeing in a single season. Even in the Season of Five Sacks Per Game we did not have this many turnovers.

TURNOVERS BELONG IN A BAKERY, NOT ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD.

Geez, guys. Get your sh*t together.

You’d think I’d have come up with something cleverer by now to direct toward those beloved boys in blue & gold, but apparently stagnant frustration inspires no wiser words. Plus it’s football. Football should simple. HIKE! TACKLE! GO FIGHT WIN! STOP GETTING OUTSCHEMED BY INFERIOR OPPONENTS AND MAKING INEXPLICABLE REGRESSIONS FOLLOWING BYE WEEKS WHILE PLAYING YOUR BIGGEST RIVAL!

And can we PLEASE not abandon our run game in the first half? Even if we're down by two scores early, we know our passing attack is not what it could be, and we know USC—even as a shadow of what it once was—is the best defense we’ve face so far this season. So whyyyyy would you fail to establish a rhythm with the run game? WHY? Especially when there doesn’t seem to be much of a rhythm going with your receivers in the first half, either.

Bewildering.

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms

Dear Brian Kelly,

THIS ISN’T SOCCER. YOU HAVE TIME OUTS. USE THEM.

I know you once said you don’t really care about time outs, and as far as you’re concerned you don’t really need to take them, but I’m pretty sure THAT ONLY APPLIES IF YOU’RE WINNING, and personally I don’t care if you’re down by three or ten or thirty—you gotta at least PRETEND like you’re gonna play until the whistle blows.

Were you saving the time-outs to use on offense? Is that what you were doing? Or did you just honestly give up with six minutes left to go in the game? Because that’s what it looked like, and nothing in the whole entire game – not Dayne Crist’s fumble, not the botched lateral to Cierre Wood, not the defense’s apparent inability to put real pressure on the Trojans until way too late in the 4th quarter – made me angrier than watching the clock tick down and tick down and tick down with absolutely no attempt to stop it.

You could make the argument that our defense wouldn’t have been able to stop them from converting first downs and running the clock out anyway. You could also argue that the offense was doing its best impersonation of incompetence for most of the evening and Tommy Rees REALLY REALLY needs to figure out how to play as well in the first half as he usually does in the second, so perhaps a clutch, game-winning drive was out of reach for us anyway (which I personally don’t believe because the offense has already shown us this year that they’re capable of being perfect in the clutch even after a whole night of suckfest), so I reiterate--

WE WERE ONLY DOWN BY TWO SCORES. THERE WERE SIX MINUTES LEFT. IT’S USC. YOU HAVE TO AT LEAST TRY TO STOP THE CLOCK!

It ain’t over til it’s friggin’ over, man. You can come back and score twice in two minutes if you’ve got the balls.

Obviously I don’t know what was going on on the sidelines, but come on, if you wanted this team to be BCS-caliber, why aren’t you treating them like they’re BCS caliber? You can’t win BCS games by giving up with six minutes left to go in the half. Did someone on defense decide they’d be able to stop the Trojans so they didn’t need to take the time outs yet? Is that what happened? Because if so, that argument falls apart after the first 1st down conversion. And even if at that point you don’t think our defense is going to be able to stop them and it’s not worth it to call the time outs because really the game is probably over—

A) NO IT’S NOT FRIGGIN OVER, and

B) WHAT THE HELL KIND OF MESSAGE DOES THAT SEND ANYWAY?!

I hope the players understand wtf you’re doing, because over here on the fans’ side we’re all befuddled as shit. Not even ONE timeout? Not ONE? Even just as a showing of good faith. “Here defense, here’s an extra thirty seconds, let’s give you a little more time to think about this one, then maybe you can finally sack this f***er.”

You know what, Brian Kelly? You have been many things in your life, I’m sure, and seeing as it’s Wednesday I should probably get over this and move on to thinking about the Navy game, but right now all I can think is that you are a vile, pernicious waster of time and I will find it hard to forgive you until there is another giant trophy sitting in the Gug. Or until we beat Stanford. Or until next season when we beat USC again. Whichever comes first.

Love,

Lisa

I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

Dear Lane Kiffin,

Just FYI--THIS WAS NOT OUR SUPERBOWL.

First of all—you know what’s like the Superbowl? THE FRIGGIN’ SUPERBOWL.

Second of all—you know what’s a lot more like the Super Bowl? THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP.

And biggest rival or not, night game or not, playing USC in the regular season—especially this regular season—is NOT like playing in the national championship. Just isn’t.

And let’s face it, Laney—nobody going into this season (except possibly a few rabid delusional USC fans/coaches) thought USC was going to be our biggest game. In terms of making a statement about the state of our football program at a national level, everyone’s eyes were fixed on Stanford, right from the start. (Stanford. STANFORD! Sometimes I still can’t believe it’s true.)

Furthermore, I don’t know why you keep commenting that we “changed it to a night game,” as though it was some sort of last-minute switch on USC’s behalf. Yeah, sure we changed it to a night game. In MARCH. Pay attention, bleach bucket. Pay attention.

*puh*

Lisa

Thou detestable maw

All right, Notre Dame football. I will follow you down into the tomb. I will bemoan the fading of your glory. I will marvel at the raiment of your former life.

And then I will bitch-slap the sh*t out of you until you wake up—because what the hell are you doing down here playing dead anyway? Get the f*** up already, we’ve got things to do, let’s get the hell out of this whited sepulcher and create our own damn destiny. I’m sick of this kowtow-ing to the stars sh*t.

Everybody’s been waiting for you to wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Or Juliet. (Whoever you are in this metaphor.) There may have been some wailing and gnashing of teeth—even some moments of downright despair in the soft October night—but rest assured, when that rosy glow on your cheek translates to waking, you will not arise to discover that all who love you have dropped dead beside you. No, we’ll just be standing here going, “GEEZ man, TOOK you long enough—what are you waiting for? We have some Trojan/Wolverine/Cardinal/Spartan/Eagle/Hurricane/ Sooner/Tigerband ass to kick. Let’s GO.”

No need to shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh or anything; just stop playing like you’ve taken the Draught of the Living Death and everything will be dandy.

The time and my intents are savage-wild

Right, so, no BCS bowl game this season obviously, unless everybody in the top 10 decides to start losing and we somehow win out the rest of our schedule. (Ha.) But nonetheless I’ve got that Thanksgiving weekend game against the Cardinal buzzing on my mind. If we can get to that game, and get there clean, and then show up and play a real game….

Well, it’ll feel good, certainly, and undoubtedly catapult us into the rankings if we can manage to win out. But unfortunately a win over Stanford—even a win in a good bowl game—won’t erase a lot of the questions or lingering doubts we’ve accumulated this season.

Because we looked good at the end of last season, too—so what guarantee have we that it’s going to carry over? How can we trust that the team knows how to prepare if they don’t know how to prepare by now? How can we watch without fear of turnovers after what happened last week?

I’m not sure even the coaches know what to do at this point, except to keep on doin’ what they’re doin’ and hope that at some point it clicks. And then you’ll have a team that doesn’t need wake-up calls. That doesn’t have to be reminded how important it is to get out there and p’own the line of scrimmage on every play. That doesn’t lose games it should’ve won three turnovers ago.

All I can hope is that this season—with all its stumbles and pitfalls and great gaping maws of seemingly surmountable defeat—is the stinging, vinegar-soaked marinade we need to squeeze all the sweet succulent juice out of the next.

In the meantime, all we need is another victory to smooth things over. Preferably one where the defense shows up for four quarters and the offense scores on every drive. Another kick return for a touchdown from THE THIRD wouldn't hurt, either. Let's show the option who's boss. Again.

GO IRISH BEAT NAVY!

Sunny with a Chance of Bowl Game

2011-10-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

So guys. I'm gonna try real hard not to completely explode with glee over this one, but... HOLY SH*T DID YOU SEE THAT?!?!??!

That's the most points we've scored in a game since Lou left.

Most. Points. Since. Lou. Left.

Not to draw any conclusions or overly hopeful parallels, of course, but compared to the beginning of the season, it sort of feels like we're floating around in a big buttery-mashed-potato, mostly-sunny-with-a-chance-of-bowl-game sky, doesn't it? The offense and defense, at points, get a bit thin, but other than that I quite like it up here, what with all the forced fumbles and the blocked kicks and the gravy train offense running like a dream....

I'd take second helpings of that any day.

Gravy Train

Hands off the jersey, man.

So this was the fourth game of the season we've racked up over 500 yards--but only the second we've won. It was also the second game in a row that we haven't committed any turnovers, after a combined 15 turnovers in the first three games of the year. To add a little spice to all this gravy, it was the most points scored since 1996 (when we won 62-0 over Rutgers), the most points scored in a half since 1990, and the first game since 1999 in which seven different players recorded touchdowns.

After watching the live game, the NBC replay, the game highlights, and the second set of game highlights with commentary via the Irish Connection (like the big obsessive dork I am), I can safely say that WEEEEEEE KIIIIIICK ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

But we have sooooooo much left to do.

Thinning Out

I'm not sure what the exact stats are when you take away the yards and points racked up against our second- and third-team defense, but the fact remains that Air Force ended the day with more yards of offense than the Irish (565 to 560), a scoring total just four points shy of their season average (37.4), more first downs (32 to 28) , and five out of five successful fourth-down conversions.

Most of these stats are meaningless, of course, considering Notre Dame still won by 26 points. As Irish fans know all too painfully well, the only numbers that really matter are the ones on the scoreboard at the end of the day. Plus, any time your first-string offense holds an option team to less than twenty points, you should feel enthused.

But all that aside, I am a trifle annoyed that we stopped playing the game before Air Force did; that we let them score more points than any of our previous opponents except Denard Robinson; and most of all that we let them go FIVE for FIVE on fourth down conversions.

I realize that they're running the option and all, and that trying to stop the option in a short-yardage situation is kind of like pitting a squeegee against a fire hose, but COME ON. Our players have to outweigh the Air Force players by an average of like fifty pounds. Just shove them all on their butts at the line of scrimmage and let Harrison Smith and Jamoris Slaughter pick up the edges. Or something.

This picture pretty much typical of the entire day.

You can tell we got beat on the edges a lot just by looking at the defensive statistics, because the highest tackle total on the team this week came not from Manti Te'o, but from Harrison Smith, who racked up twelve. Te'o and Blanton were not far behind with ten apiece, but any time a safety is your leading tackler, you're losing the game up front. Stats like that give me flashbacks to Mama Kyle--who was totally awesome, of course; but who you sometimes got the impression was holding the defense together all by himself.

As I have to keep reminding myself, however: 1) stats don't quite mean the same things against the option as they do against other teams; 2) this hasn't been a season-long trend, and 3) this isn't the kind of defense one player has to hold together all by himself. This is the kind of friggin' defense where twenty-seven different players recorded tackles; six of those also recorded pass break-ups, and six more (assuming Te'o occasionally counts as two people) dropped tackles for loss. The top three leaders in tackles all put up double-digit numbers, and the number-four leader (Darius Fleming) had two quarterback hurries and a sack. Most of all, this is the kind of defense where the top four leaders in tackles didn't even have the best game.

Speaking of which--give it up for Jamoris's

Slaughterhouse Five

1. Jamoris Slaughter ended the day with 6 tackles, which was good enough for the fifth-highest total out of the 27 defensive players who slammed somebody to the ground during the game.

2. During the very first play on defense, Slaughter stripped the ball from Asher Clarke, nullifying a 29-yard run and popping the ball right into the hands of Robert Blanton to set up ND's second scoring drive of the game from the Air Force 48.

3. In the second quarter, Slaughter broke up a pass, scooped the ball up in midair, and then landed on his back with the ball still in his hands to force Air Force's second turnover of the day.

4. In addition to reveling over Slaughter's involvement with 14 of Notre Dame's 59 points, I would just like to point out that he has one of my favorite football player names of all time--right up there with Peerless Price, Booger McFarland, and Golden H. Tate III.

5. In case you were not aware, this was Slaughter's first game playing outside linebacker. He's listed on the depth chart as a safety, but this week the coaches shifted him over to Prince Shembo's spot, and moved Shembo up to cover a spot on the D-line (possibly to help fill the gap left by currently-injured Ethan Johnson). Most likely Slaughter willl be moving back to safety after this week, but you can probably expect to see him back on the outside against Navy--because basically he kicked so much ass against the option that the coaches named him defensive player of the game.

And speaking of players who deserve a little recognition...

Robby Tomaaaaaa!

Watching the footage of the post-TD celebration on this one made me laugh out loud. There's nothing quite like watching Michael Floyd lose his shit and start beating on Toma's helmet like a bongo drum. Or watching pretty much the entire offense swarm into the endzone and jump around like he just scored the game-winning TD. Robby Toma's a junior (from the same high school as Manti Te'o!) and this was his first college TD.

Toma's probably one of the few guys on the team who could fit into an Air Force uniform, but based on the entire team's reaction to his score you can tell how hard he works and how much he's done to earn the respect of his teammates--and the chance to go out there and haul one in for the Irish.

Hurricane Andrew

Just in case the post-Toma TD celebration didn't make you chuckle--do yourself a favor and pop open the Irish Connection video for this week. If you don't want to watch the entire video, just jump forward to approximately the 15:00 mark and watch Cierre Wood's reaction to Andrew Hendrix's 70-yard (almost TD) run.

Nothing evokes high-pitched shrieking like a 70-yard run followed by an aerodynamic shoestring tackle.

I love this team. I love that they play like a team, and act like a team, and go out there and have fun like a team--you know, like you're supposed to, because Washington State two years ago was pretty sweet, but that came at the end of an era, and the feeling of "Geez, where has THIS been all my life?" was pretty short-lived. Only time will tell where this season's going to go from here, of course, but this game...I don't know. It doesn't have the feeling of a fluke about it. It sort of feels like we're just heating up.

"Frankly," said Air Force coach Troy Calhoun, "when you see them playing live, you're a little bit surprised that the record is not even better."

Leaving aside all frustrations over whether the record should be better--there are reasons we've been favored in every single game we've played so far this season. And now we've got just one more.

This Hendrix kid is wicked talented. He went 4-for-4 passing and ran for 111 yards--and he was only on the field for 10 plays. It kind of makes you drool a little thinking of all the possibilities for the future. And makes you wonder what in the world Everett Golson's going to have to do to compete with him once he's primed to take the starting spot. Or what Tommy's going to do. Or even Crist.

Kelly's plans for the quarterbacks are all very perplexing at the moment. But at least for now, he's said that Tommy is clearly #1 and Dayne's still definitely #2. Hendrix doesn't know enough of the offense yet to be able to run the total package. He's not on the field to take anybody's starting job at the moment--he's just there to give opposing defenses fits.

For as much as I detest Wildcat packages, and as much as I love to malign coaches trying to play two-quarterback systems, I have to admit I kind of like what Kelly's doing here with Hendrix. Would my opinion be less rosy if it weren't for Hendrix's 70-yard (almost TD) run? Perhaps. But it's not just the fact that it's working that's winning me over. It's the whole methodology behind it: only playing Hendrix in certain looks, only putting him in at appropriate points in the game, giving him good playcalls that aren't hopelessly redundant like the direct-snap-to-Golden-Tate Wildcat scheme (which pretty much reached its apex of glory in the aforementioned Washington State game).

But most of all, I like that the possibility of Hendrix throws a wrench in the schemes of our future opponents. Regardless of whether Hendrix takes another snap for the rest of the season (though I'm sure he will), just the threat is enough to give defensive coordinators headaches. It's not enough that they have to worry about covering Michael Floyd, stopping Cierre Wood and Jonas Gray, keeping an eye on Tyler Eifert, trying to outrun Riddick, or attempting to flummox Tommy so badly that he can't even find TJ Jones or Robby Toma in a pinch. Now they have to steel themselves against the possibility that some punk freshman option-style quarterback is going to come out and scramble all over the place.

Perhaps our head coach is a lot craftier than I give him credit for.

Buttery Bye Week

Look, guys! I think I see a bowl game in our future!

So, guys--we're on a roll. Now we've just got to pull it apart, slab some butter on it, and chow down on some tasty food for thought during the bye week.

Six games down, six to go--starting with our biggest rival in the first night game at Notre Dame stadium for over twenty years. I think Coach Kelly said it right: "We wanna make sure everybody handles themselves appropriately, makes it a great event--except for maybe USC, we don't need them to have a good time."

More thoughts on this game will be coming to you after the bye weekend. But in the meantime, let me just say what I've been waiting to say all season:

GO IRISH BEAT TROJANS!

Post-Palindrome Pursuit of Perfection

2011-10-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much of an urge to mute the television while watching Notre Dame football lately. This is quite stunning. Normally there comes a point in every broadcast where the commentators get on my nerves so badly that I either start throwing pillows at the TV or make a violent lunge for the remote control. But except for a few minutes during the Pittsburgh game (when, among other things, I thought my head was going to implode), the last two weeks have been surprisingly pleasant. There were even moments when I felt the commentators enhanced my game-watching experience by talking about the actual FOOTBALL GAME instead of talking about the players' calves or the height of the stadium grass or the local eateries or...whatever....

Versus Pitt, the commentators made some quite keen observations regarding the Panthers' defensive scheme and its success in disguising coverages, which effectively screwed with Tommy Rees's head. It's difficult to feel grateful to Urban Meyer for anything, but the dude does in fact know what he's talking about, and I believe his presence on the crew influenced a lot of the actual football-related talk. I further appreciate that Urban hasn't yet been reduced to a driveling talking head (like Lee Corso, for instance--who, I maintain, loses his composure more frequently while announcing his pick for the game of the week than Brian Kelly does on the sidelines. But alas, that is another argument for another time).

And against Purdue...well, to be honest, I couldn't even tell you who was on the commentating crew for the Purdue game. It was such a joy to watch I stopped paying attention to everything except Cierre Wood's yardage total (and the lovely bottle of wine that accompanied my game-watching endeavors). It was a blissful game to watch, was it not? One thing I do remember the commentators saying, however, is "if the Irish keep playing like this, they should be perfect for the rest of the season." Or something to that effect, anyway.

The point is that we're goooood, and we finally look like we're good, and we had better keep playing like we're good, because if we do, we're gonna end up having the kind of BCS-worthy season everybody expected us to have in the first place.

Notre Dame 15, Pittsburgh 12

Pitt's Perplexing Perfidy

As mentioned, Pitt's defense was playing a sneaky little game of deception against still-cherubically-youthful (although-you-wouldn't-quite-know-it-from-his-record-as-a-starter) Tommy Rees, and unfortunately it was quite effective for most of the game. Taking Michael Floyd out of the equation and disguising the safety coverage was enough to flummox a young signal caller who has a tendency to lock in on his favorite target when the O-line seems to be crumbling around him.

Not that the O-line was exceedingly awful (let's face it, we've definitely seen worse), but Rees wasn't making the right reads or the best decisions in the pocket during the first half, and since there wasn't much the coaches could do to counteract Pitt's deviousness with the QB holding onto the ball too long , the O-line didn't have a lot to go on. To put it simply: we got out-schemed. But in the end, we did not get out-played.

Getting out-schemed still feels like a relatively new phenomenon for the Irish--at least compared to those five years of Weis at the helm being all Scheme-y McSchemerson. Even during that 3-9 year (when our O-line was busy giving up more sacks than a grocery store), we didn't get out-schemed so much as straight-up beat. Which wasn't exactly comforting, of course. But nevertheless, getting outmatched on the X's and 0's was never as much of a concern as, for example, watching our "bend-but-don't-break" style of defense turn into "bend, splinter, snap in two like Ron's wand in Chamber of Secrets and then be hastily bound back together with various ~~bits of Spellotape~~ defensive coordinators until you start emitting sparks of brilliance or belching up slugs." (Mostly, I'd say, we ended up belching lots of slugs).

Anyway. After getting out-schemed all over the place in the Navy game last year (and, erm, a wee bit in overtime against MSU), it's hard not to feel perturbed anytime an opponent takes the field with a scheme the Irish clearly were not expecting. Our defense has made enough strides that I'm starting to expect them to be able to adjust to just about anything, but our offense is obviously a work-in-progress. With all the fumbles so far this season, you could argue that we're still belching up slugs--but I think these are slugs of a slightly different nature.

Our coaches are a lot of things, but they don't really strike me as schemers. I am completely okay with this, because as we have learned (both from the Weis years and from watching Pitt's defense on Jonas Gray's 79-yd touchdown run), schemes don't mean very much if you can't execute. And I'd much rather have a team that can execute and finish the game than a team that looks all fancy losing. (This is not to say you can't have good teams with scheme. You've just got to have the rock-solid foundation of We're Gonna Kick Your Ass No Matter What built underneath it first.) As it happens, so would Coach Kelly: "For me it's really about winning games and making certain that we do that. I'd rather do that and be out coached and win ugly and do all those things but at the end of the day win the football game. Beauty points, style points I'm not really interested in those things."

But sometimes I do wonder whether our coaching staff's general lack of perfidy makes it more difficult for them to prepare the team for their opponents' attempts at trickery. I'm going to guess the coaches would say "no" to that, and I guess I see their point. If you've got all the fundamentals of a good team in place, your players should be able to make game-time adjustments. Their mental game should be tough enough for them to learn how to read the field over the course of the game and deal with what comes along accordingly. As Kelly put it this week, looking forward to the Air Force game, "Certainly we have to play the way we play. We cannot become so out of character in stopping the option that we forget about the things that we teach every day. That is playing physical, flying to the football, great tackling. I think you've got to be careful because sometimes option, you get this sense of, Hey, it's option. But we have to do what we do."

Experience is, I think, the biggest factor in being able to make these kinds of game-time adjustments, and that helps to explain why Rees struggled so much in the first half. "There were some new looks for him that he had not seen before that we had to adjust," Coach Kelly said. "And after Tommy sees it, he gets much more comfortable."

Rees's comfort level took much longer to emerge in the Pittsburgh game than we would have liked--but it emerged, and that's what counts. Of course there's still the worry that Rees sticks too much with one target, once he's found one that works; he had four passes to tight end Tyler Eifert on the game-winning drive. But hey, a win is a win is a win, and if Eifert is the guy open in the endzone for the two-point conversion, by all means throw to him. It doesn't matter if it's the seventeenth time in a row--if it works, then it isn't stupid, right?

Furthermore (and on a slightly different tack), we finally (FINALLY?!) seem to have enough of our sh*t together that the sheer level of talent on our squad is to be making a difference in close games. Case in point: JONAS GRAY. (See? Even the commentator says so.)

That's the longest rush by a Notre Dame player since the year 2000. This could be kind of depressing, but mostly I think it's just exciting. We know the level of talent on our squad is higher than the level of talent on most of the squads we've been losing to the past few years. But talent (much like scheming) can't win games all by itself unless there's a system in place that allows the talent to flourish. So let's keep flourishing, shall we? FLOURISH!!!

Petite Pause

So I need to move on to the Purdue game now (before I stay up past my bedtime), but I feel like I'm neglecting the defense a little bit. if it weren't for the D, we certainly would not have won the Pittsburgh game. They kept us afloat after two turnovers (off which Pitt only scored 3 points), and sacked Tino Sunseri twice during Pitt's final possession of the game to push the Panthers back to a 4th-and-26 and stuff any chance of them pulling off a last-minute miracle surge for the win.

They did a lot more than that, of course, and they've been doing so on a pretty consistent basis since the end of last season. For example (to pull some tidbits from the ND postgame notes), the defense has allowed one offensive touchdown or less in 7 of the last 9 games. They've also only allowed 2 rushing touchdowns in the last 9 games, and only one rushing touchdown so far this year (best in the FBS).

The Irish defense has surrendered 100 yards on the ground just four times over the last 9 games, limiting opponents to an average of 91.3 yards per game and 2.9 yards per rush. No team has rushed for more than 135 yards (it took Army, a triple option attack, 43 carries to reach that mark).

Lastly, Purdue only had forty-four rushing yards against the Irish. Forty of those yards were racked up on Purdue's final drive of the game, against ND's second- and third-string defense.

So other than I LOVE YOU DEFENSE, PLEASE CONTINUE KICKING ASS, there's really not much else to say.

Notre Dame 38, Purdue 10

P'owning Purdue

So you know how sometimes the first play or drive of a game is just a fluke, and after that the game sort of settles down and turns into more of an even matchup? Like in the Pittsburgh game, when Michael Floyd bobbled the ball, then caught it, then ran through a defender for a first down, and it looked like it was going to be totally awesome but then Floyd basically didn't catch the ball for the entire rest of the game.

Yeah--the Purdue game was not like that. The Purdue game was exactly how it looked, right from the very first play from scrimmage when Gary Gray intercepted the ball, the offense took over, and in two more plays and ten seconds of game time we had our first touchdown of the day.

And it was awesome.

The Irish have racked up over 500 yards of total offense in three of their games so far this season, but thanks to turnovers and inexplicable fourth-quarter defensive breakdowns, Purdue is the only one of those games that we've actually won. This statistic is not so exceptionally awesome, of course, but after last week's win I find it hard to complain. Man was it nice to sit back and watch the Irish steamroll over an opponent they were supposed to steamroll. We had a lot of help from Purdue's defense, of course, and the ridiculous number of penalties they incurred (Purdue had 13 on the day for 118 yards; probably 9 of those were defensive), but for once we also had a lot of help from ourselves.

For example, we didn't turn the ball over. Not once. We fumbled twice, sure, but we held onto it, and that's the important thing.

We also had the best run game we've had in years--possibly decades . We racked up some pretty good yards on the ground when Julius Jones or Darius Walker were around, but I can't think of the last time we had two running backs combine for nearly 300 yards. (Anybody? Anybody?) Cierre Wood had 191 net yards on the day (at a ridonkulous 9.6 yards per carry), and Jonas Gray finished with a career-high mark of 94. Wood's numbers are the best in a single game by an Irish running back since Julius Jones ran for 218 yards vs. Stanford in 2003 and Darius Walker averaged 10.2 yards per carry vs. Air Force in 2006.

We only had to punt twice the entire game--and one of those was at the very end when we had our second- and third- team offense on the field. Which basically means there was only one drive during the entire game in which Tommy Rees failed to lead the offense into scoring territory.

Sometimes looking at the drive charts can be very telling. For games like this, my personal favorite is the "How Lost" column, which for Notre Dame against Purdue looked like this:

*TOUCHDOWN
Missed FG
*TOUCHDOWN
Missed FG
*TOUCHDOWN
Punt
End of half

*TOUCHDOWN
*TOUCHDOWN
*FIELD GOAL
Punt
End of half

Obviously the most perplexing things here are the two missed field goals, which still seem like an anomaly for a kicker who made 23 in a row last year. I'm starting to think there's something funny going on with the kicking unit out there. I find it hard to believe there's something wrong with Ruffer's head or his toes; it seems more likely that the three-man dream team from last year (long snapper, place holder, and kicker) got shaken up somehow, and perhaps lack of cohesion in the new unit is what's causing all the trouble. (LACES OUT, DAN.) I don't know for sure, of course; I haven't investigated enough to discover if we actually have a new snapper or place holder for this year. (If you happen to be a bit savvier on this topic, by all means comment.) Ruffer did make the last field goal, though, so that's something, isn't it? Hopefully the start of another streak....

As mentioned, Purdue's defense did seem to help us out quite a bit when we had the ball (and they didn't do nearly as well covering Floyd as Pittsburgh did), but even so, I thought Rees had quite a nice game following the rough week at Pitt. Three different receivers (Floyd, Tyler Eifert, and TJ Jones) caught touchdown passes, and Rees was 60% passing for 254 yards, which is respectable. Not spectacular, but respectable (and plenty good enough if you're also racking up 300 yards on the ground). If we can maintain the balance between the run game and the passing game and hold on to the freaking ball, then I completely agree with the commentators from the Purdue game: we should win the rest of the games on our schedule. There's absolutely no reason we can't compete with Stanford--we just have to fix our own mistakes. Which we're doing, little by little. The game against USC should be very telling. (But we've got two weeks to prepare and it's a night game in Notre Dame Stadium. I think we're gonna beat them again.)

So...3-2. Not exactly where we hoped we'd be at this point in the season, perhaps, but still all right. Back above .500. And we're getting better. We're even approaching the vicinity of becoming relevant. If the rest of the teams on our schedule don't watch out, we might actually end up in the rankings again.

I'm looking forward to it.

And hey--after the whomping Pitt put on South Florida last week, that win is looking better and better all the time, eh? Eh? Eh???

Sorry for the delay and the lackluster ranting this week--I'll try to do better next week. And in the meantime...

GO IRISH BEAT FALCONS!

IRISH WIN BY A PALINDROME

2011-09-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame 31, MSU 13

In case you're not familiar with the term, a palindrome is a word (or a series of numbers) that's the same backwards as it is forwards. Like "Hannah." Or "Stanley Yelnats." Or "A man a plan a canal Panama."

Or 31-13.

May a moody baby doom a yam?

Right, so not all palindromes make sense, but then neither do inexplicable back-to-back face mask penalties by fifth-year captains during the season opener, so as a sports fan you've got to gird yourself for a certain amount of bewilderment. You've also got to live with the conviction that at the end of long periods of murk and confusion, daylight bursts.

The longer it's been since you've seen the light, the more dazzling it is. And you don't want it to keep flashing into view and then retreating; you want it to stick around long enough to get used to. You want it to shine so often it doesn't burn you.

Only then can you stop worrying about whether the offense is going to keep doling out balls like a machine at the batting cages; or whether the defense is going to do its best impression of a sieve and allow a last-second touchdown in a down-to-the-wire, heart-cleaving rivalry game; or whether the team as a whole is going to play so sloppily it makes you want to wail and fling things like an infant making a mess out of a mashed-up mound of sweet potatoes.

Only then can you pound out a solid, undeniable victory for four quarters against a good team with an obnoxious bipolar fan base wielding an inferiority complex the size of the ACC (which, by the way Dan Wetzel, Notre Dame is NOT INTERESTED IN JOINING).

Only then can you remember what it feels like to breathe--and in turn exude correspondingly louder shouts of exultation.

In an interview with Jack Nolan this week, Coach Kelly dismissed the notion that there might be any lingering "Oh no, here we go again" mentality clinging to the team following the first two games:

"Our players don't have it. You know, I'd like to get our stadium to [not] have it as well, because I didn't think that we were loud enough on the last couple of drives in our stadium. We've really gotta get that cranked up, and that's a challenge to all of our fans."

YOU HEAR THAT, IRISH FANS? GET YER BONNIE WEE VOCAL PIPES A-WAILIN'!

I like that our campus is generally pleasant to visit and we try to keep Catholic Disney World classy for our visitors, but the stadium only ever really gets loud when we're playing Michigan or USC. Even if we're starting 0-2, that's just not good enough. Especially when it's the kind of 0-2 start we've had this season--you know, the kind where Vegas favors your team every week even though you haven't actually won a game yet.

To gank an observation from Irish Illustrated, the team ain't exactly feelin' all peaches-and-cream about the first two weeks of the season, either.

"They're not going to forget the fact that they've let two games slip away," said Kelly during his Sunday teleconference. "I'm hoping that the mentality that they carried with them at practice [last] week is one that stays with them the rest of the season because you're absolutely right, you want that feeling of, 'We're not going to let this happen again; enough is enough."

Enough IS enough.

Enough with the turnovers. Enough with the doubting. Enough with the failing-to-play-four-quarters-of-football. Enough with everyone knocking on Gary Gray--who, despite being a bit overshadowed by the stellar efforts of Robert Blanton, Harrison Smith, and a bevy of other defensive knockouts, had a great comeback after his perplexing play against Michigan and was singled out by Coach Kelly in the locker room to lead the fight song after the game.

And ENOUGH ALREADY with the fake field goals, MSU. We've got your number now. You're just an OOZY RAT IN A SANITARY ZOO, and we wash our hands of you.

No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention

...unless I'm a defense pluggin' up gaps and preventing yo' ass from scoring.

I could get used to watching defense like that. It wasn't perfect, of course--MSU outgained us in yards of total offense and accumulated more first downs--but the scoreboard is what matters, and at the end of the day it was all pretty friggin' impressive.

Our D shut down MSU's rushing attack--they had 29 net yards rushing on 23 attempts for a whopping 1.3 yards per carry. Some combination of a PASS RUSH I NEVER KNEW EXISTED and some key clamp-down plays by our secondary forced Kirk Cousins to throw for short yardage, basically betrothing him to screen passes in the second half.

Toward the end of the game, MSU drove into scoring territory more times than I would've liked, but then Cousins is a good quarterback, and it would be ridiculous not to expect him to make plays. The important thing is that our defense buckled down when it mattered.

And here are the stats that do matter: Only three points allowed off three turnovers. No touchdowns allowed after the first quarter. One forced fumble and one interception, with both turnovers occurring immediately after Notre Dame coughed up the ball to MSU.

The defense finally looks like they're back in the groove they had at the end of last season. It's difficult to say who had the best game, because there were so many players out there sharing the load and kicking ass. Manti Te'o (man-beast) led the team in tackles as usual, with 12, but Gary Gray was not far behind with 10. Harrison Smith resumed his post as resident ball magnet with five pass break-ups and 8 total tackles. Freshman Aaron Lynch channeled the spirit of Victor Abiamiri and came up big with five tackles, six quarterback hurries, and a sack that caused MSU's forced fumble, which was scooped up by fellow defensive end Ethan Johnson.

And Robert Blanton, of course, did his best to upstage everybody with six total tackles--including one sack and three tackles for loss--three pass break-ups, and the game-clinching interception followed by an 82-yard return that set up ND's final score of the game.

I spew all these stats at you not because I think they'll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside (ALTHOUGH THEY SHOULD), but because they are reflective of a total defensive effort. There's not one guy on this squad who doesn't play, or who doesn't think this team can win. Even if there are still tremors of doubt in the fan base, this is team is mentally locked in. And now they're finally going out on the field and proving it.

I admit to some amount of dread and horror when Goodman fumbled that fair catch in the fourth quarter and MSU recovered the ball deep in Irish territory. It was even more infuriating because the play clock clearly went down to zero before the ball was snapped; if you watch some of the game footage on UND.com, you can even hear one of the coaches yell out "Delay of game!" from the sidelines. (I'm pretty sure the clock went down to zero before MSU's fake field goal attempt in OT last year, too, but whatever.)

And if the game had gone differently...well, that'd just be one more thorn to pull out of my side, wouldn't it?

But things didn't go that way this time. Our team refused to let it go that way.

You could say Robert Blanton got lucky, but I think the defense is getting to the point where they're not just lucky; they're creating their own luck. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

The team is working that hard, and we're starting to see its effects. We're not falling apart--we're getting stronger. If this trend holds for the rest of the season (which I believe it will), our defense isn't just going to be good; they're gonna be great. And if it holds through next season, they're gonna be friggin' elite.

Go deliver a dare, vile dog!

I dare you to malign the play of our offense in the second half. Go on. I dare you.

Okay, so actually that's a terrible dare, because our offensive play in the second half wasn't particularly flashy or exciting or, um, point-scoring, but it did have a couple things going for it:

1) We held on to the football.

2) We held onto the football.

Ideally one day this will not be a statistic we get so excited about, but coming into this week we were pretty much ranked dead last in D-I for turnover margin. (Now we're one up from dead last.) And although I would have liked to see our run game churn up a few more yards and our boys pick up a couple more first downs, I'm perfectly okay with an offense that scores 24 points and doesn't cough up the ball when the team's ahead in the second half. MSU has a good defense and they made some key adjustments; Notre Dame was ahead and played conservative to keep the lead without endangering the football (a la South Florida).

Of course it is worrisome to think that the offense might not have scored at all in the second half if it weren't for Blanton's 83-yard interception return. They didn't even manage to get into field goal range for nearly two whole quarters. It'd be nice to have a run game bruising enough to pick up yards even when we're not grappling for the lead.

The offense isn't quite a four-full-quarters-of-football offense yet, though, so we're just going to have to settle in and be patient. Kelly has focused more of his recruiting efforts the past couple years on getting the defense squared away, because as he so rightly noted during his fall camp press conferences, "Winning championships starts on the defensive side of the ball--make no mistake about that."

Tommy Rees is still a young quarterback, still making mistakes. A lot of our receivers out there are still pretty young, too--but we're coming together. Just let it age a bit, like a good cheese or a fine wine. I think the bouquet's gonna be pretty stellar.

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Behold the future. It is already here.

It's Aaron Lynch blowing up O-lines, and Steve Filer and Troy Niklas stepping in for Prince Shembo, and Kyle Brindza kicking the ball all the way to the end zone, and George Atkinson III running it back 89 yards for a touchdown.

And the newly-renewed optimist in me affirms that it's only going to get better from here. The season, the team--everything.

It would be disrespectful to say we can breathe easy the next two weeks, but at least we've got some breathing room. The air should be a lot less cloying now that we've made it past the first three weeks of fake field goals, Skunkbears, and sons-of-former-coaching-legends. Unranked Pittsburgh, Purdue, and Air Force ought to be hearty, but not heart-attack-y, matchups leading up to the bye week, and if the Irish can hold onto the ball and the defense can slam a few more run games out of existence, we ought to be in tip-top shape (both the team and the loving, stalwart fans) to gear up for our mid-October matchup with USC and a Halloween weekend grudge match against Navy's option. (Grudge match? Navy? Really? Maybe I should stop trying to think so far ahead...)

Only one more word to the wise for this week's rant:

Don't nod

Or rather, don't flash your hands at the camera to show off your sweet glove design. Apparently the leprechaun logo is now a sign of excessive celebration*.

You have been warned.

GO IRISH BEAT PANTHERS!

*Note: According the Notre Dame ESPN Blog, the excessive celebration penalty was, in fact, an incorrect call. Kelly knew it, too.

"We went over this," Kelly said. "We literally went over this specifically, because our gloves have the Fighting Irish on the inside. [...] That's like giving your 8-year-old a lighter, you know what I mean? I knew this thing was gonna be something that we're gonna have to deal with. And certainly we brought it up and got the green light, so there was miscommunication along the way."

Finding the Echoes

2011-09-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame 31, Michigan 35

Beat me in an agonizing, soul-shearing, bladder-bursting, throat-clenched-up-around-your-eyeballs, down-to-the-wire brawling rivalry match once—good for you.

Beat me twice—shame on me.

Beat me three times—WHAT THE F***?

A rant for my comrades-in-arms

I do not care about statistics or fumbles or interceptions. I don’t care about all-time win records or Desmond Howard or fucking night games in the Big House. I don’t care about the numbers. It doesn’t matter how many yards we racked up or how many points we scored or whether our players broke any school records (which probably they didn’t, although they did last week—WHATEVER). Do you know what does matter?

Dear Notre Dame Football,

I love you and support you no matter what, so please GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

I say this out of a deep and extremely painful place of faith and support. I say this with a total commitment to everything I said last week, and the week before that, and the week before that. I’m not going to reiterate any of that because there’s no point.

I know that nothing I say or do or blither senselessly into the night is going to have any impact on how you prepare or how you act or what you do out there on the field, so everything I spout out amounts to basically NOTHING, but I know of no other way to cope with the frustration and the astonishment and the unholy heartache of watching a good team and a more-than-good defense lose YET AGAIN to a team that they could have beaten—that they had beaten—for absolutely no reason at all.

And I’m not going to watch the coach’s interviews, or the player’s interviews, or anybody’s interviews; and I’m not going to look at the stats from this week or read any articles or look at any fucking blogs; and I’m not going to come up with something clever because there’s nothing clever left to say. Not at two in the morning.

You know what is left to say?

You are Notre Dame, and you need to get over this. Whatever “this” is—snap out of it. I don’t care if you’re playing or coaching in a fishbowl. So what? I don’t care if every other team wants to beat you more badly than anything ever. YOU’RE NOTRE DAME, RIGHT? SO DON’T LET THEM.

Love, Lisa

Pontifications on Perplexities

Too many of our recent coaches—possibly ALL of our recent coaches—have treated the Notre Dame tradition like it’s some kind of burden, some kind of weight, some kind of distraction. Even the coaches that you felt like “got it”—as soon as they feel the pressure and experience the perplexity of the fishbowl, they want to get away from it. They want their teams to tune out of it and just go to work every day.

And on the one hand, sure. You want your team to go to work every day. But on the other hand—THIS IS WHAT NOTRE DAME IS.

I know everyone’s tired of Notre Dame being all in-the-national-spotlight even though fans of most other teams will gladly tell you we are no longer relevant and haven’t been for years. And maybe it is tiresome to cling to the good ol’ stories about championships and Heisman trophies and the Four Horsemen and Louuuu, but it’s important. Not because we’re crazy and not because we’re clinging to the past like it’s all we have.

It’s important because whether or not we’re playing like YE OLDE NOTREE DAMEE OFE YORE, we’re still…you know, Notre Dame.

During its 25th anniversary season, ESPN ranked the Irish as part of the #3 greatest college football rivalry of all time: Notre Dame vs. Everyone.

Which is still true. Everyone wants to play the Irish. And beat the Irish. And straight-up hate on the Irish. For curious reasons, beating us still matters, even when we suck.

Although right now we don’t suck. That’s not our problem. We’ve just got this discouraging little trend going of allowing-opponents-to-beat-us-when-they-have-no-business-beating-us.

A couple years ago, Dr. Lou gave our team one of his “pep talks." He said something along the lines of, “Sure, other teams get excited to play the Irish, and they’re going to go out there and give you their best game. But you get to go out there and represent the University of Notre Dame. What greater motivation do you need?”

Right on, Dr. Lou. I think you’ve hit the problem on the head.

I’m not saying this team doesn’t have the drive to win or the right idea about What It Means To Play For Notre Dame. I think we’ve got a lot more heart and a lot less punk-face ego than we’ve had in previous seasons.

But we’re still somehow in a place where our head coach is telling us to “be patient,” which is coach-speak for “holy shit it’s game one of season two and already people are hanging me out to dry.” More for resembling an heirloom tomato on the sidelines than for losing the South Florida game—but still, it’s not like the two weren’t related.

Obviously B.Kelly’s just as frustrated as the rest of us. Only lucky for him, it’s his job to fix this. So he gets to scurry off and do that while the rest of us sit around twiddling our thumbs wondering what’s going on behind closed doors and whether next week’s game against MSU is going to be another hope-staining stinkbomb of agony.

Mostly what concerns me, though, are Brian Kelly’s comments over this past week about living in the fishbowl and not being used to this kind of scrutiny. Which, okay, I understand--I’m sure it’s a harsh adjustment being suddenly so under-the-gun after experiencing the somewhat more patient and less hostile fan base during Year One. Not that year one was so easy—I recall writing a post last year commenting about how we, as a fan base, just need to CHILL OUT sometimes and let the players and coaches do what they do without the crushing pressure of OMG NO NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IN OVER TWENTY YEARS PLEASE WIN ONE NOWWWWWWW.

However. While I still believe the coaches and players need to tune out the restless pontifications of the fans, the students, the media, and desperate football bloggers everywhere, there are some things they don’t need to tune out. There are some things that I think are starting to be treated as a burden instead of as a boost, a boon, a bedrock of support.

What I mean by that is this:

Last night, after the game ended, when I was full of too many beers and too much disappointment and absolutely could not handle staring at footage of the Big House for one more freaking second, I went into the bathroom (I was at a friend’s house), shut the door, closed my eyes, plugged my fingers in my ears, and hummed the Notre Dame fight song.

I don’t know why I did this. I know it's strange, but I did it without thinking, and you know what? It made me feel better.

I confess this to you not because you need further evidence of how much of a total psycho I am, but because as I stood there blocking out everything except the single-note strains of my favorite fight song, I realized something.

Dr. Lou is right. All the things that we keep referring to as “pressure”—all the traditions and the history and the ongoing demand to Play Like a Champion Today—aren’t just cheesy harbingers of a past that has no place in our present. They’re not a burden or a curse or a marker of an era gone by. They're the reason you coach. They're the reason you play. They're the wellspring from which you draw strength.

The coach that is finally able to embrace this--to imbue the players with the sense that the echoes are not just out there waiting to be lived up to, but that they are yours, they are a part of you, from the second you step on campus--is the coach that will finally bring us all the way back.

Maybe Kelly is working on this. Maybe this is why he says “be patient.”

But it’s hard to be patient thinking of comments from last season when the coach described the team as "playing like they didn’t have all the traditions and history and expectations of Notre Dame hanging over them—they just flat-out played.”

Yeah, I want our team to flat-out play, but if you’re going to win a championship ever again, you have to do more than that. You don't shirk the traditions. You don’t even try to live up to them. You just have to live them.

The “measuring stick” of our team from yesterday informs us that we are not exactly there yet. And how do you get there?

I don’t know. I don’t think you can get there based on a confidence that comes only from accumulating wins—otherwise you end up like Utah last season, and you totally crack after your first loss.

So you have to get your strength from elsewhere. You have to have confidence that comes from nowhere but yourself, your teammates, your coaches. Not in spite of the pressure, but because that's why you came.

And it's not like the players aren't saying these things. They're just not doing them yet. At least not in a way that's allowing them to win games.

So I’m going to keep watching, and waiting, and hoping. One day we’ll round the bend and we will no longer lose games that are within our power to win. One day we’ll get back everything we had at the end of last season, and play for all four quarters. One day we’ll play like NOTRE DAME again.

Like next Saturday, maybe.

If all else fails, I’ll sit on the floor, plug my fingers in my hears, and hum.

GO IRISH BEAT SPARTANS!

This rant brought to you by the National Weather Service

2011-09-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

ATTENTION ~~BASEBALL~~ FOOTBALL FANS: The National Weather Service has issued a warning for severe weather that is almost definitely occurring somewhere 100 miles west of the stadium. For your safety we ask that you seek shelter immediately. Please proceed with a benign acceptance that the stadium is being evacuated even though to your knowledge the only kind of weather that actually halts football games is the kind featured in The Day After Tomorrow, and the current conditions seem somewhat less intimidating than, for example, the subzero conditions of the 2008 Syracuse game, during which everyone in the stadium developed some degree of hypothermia (but since sky-to-ground lightning wasn’t involved, clearly it was much safer).

So it seems the University’s really taking these new safety procedures seriously. On the one hand this is a good thing, because people’s lives are considerably more important than football games. But on the other hand, I would prefer not to leave my seat at a football game unless I’ve been informed that if I don’t get my ass off the bench right now an F-5 tornado is going to remove it for me. This is football, yo—the sport with enough wanton disregard for the weather to shame the U.S. Postal service.

Or so I like to imagine.

I must have missed the worst of the weather, because I didn’t notice much of anything while I was hanging out in the stadium concourse or eating candlelight dinner in South Dining Hall during the World's Longest Halftime. (I used to make fun of people who paid to eat in the dining halls. Apparently I can no longer do this.) Pigging out on all-you-can-eat SDH allowed me to not only revisit my scandalous passion for fro-yo, but also to take a mental break from everything that was happening on the field. I came back after halftime feeling pretty good about life.

Apparently the team did, too, because they were in much better form during the second half. Or, more specifically, the offense actually scored in the second half. In the words of Tommy Rees, "Not only that, our guys stayed focused, our coaches did a great job of keeping us in the game. When we went out there after the first time, after the first delay after halftime, really our whole fan base was still here pretty much, and that was awesome to see. I felt like coming out of that we had the advantage with all the excitement and the fans, and it was a pretty cool atmosphere actually.”

It was. It totally was. And it was great watching the offense finally find the endzone, but it was kind of spastic-twitch-inducing watching two more interceptions and a missed field goal. Instead of watching the offense find a rhythm and catapult themselves into stratospheres of greatness, we're sort of watching them spelunk down into the nether-realms of bumblefuck.

Oh, that was unkind.

Let me rescind some of that by emphasizing that at no point yesterday did I think we were going to lose. Until, you know, we lost. I have a lot of faith in this team. Possibly too much. Let's discuss.

ATTENTION FOOTBALL FANS: The National Whether Service has issued a warning for severe whether that appears to be approaching the vicinity of Notre Dame Stadium. This system has already produced severe optimism, sky-to-ground fervor, and heavy deluges of kool-aid. For your safety, we ask that you please avert your eyes immediately. If you failed to bring a backbone, now is the time to put your head between your knees and wail. But do it quietly, so the person next to you doesn’t punch you for being such a floundering nincompoop after only two quarters of football.

So there was this lovely article in the Irish Insider on Friday that highlighted the dangers of drinking too much of the preseason kool-aid, but I stopped reading it halfway through because I’m tired of hearing the undergrads wax pessimistic about the state of our football program. I realize none of the undergrads were even born the last time Notre Dame won a national championship, but as a cranky belligerent old alum, I posit that this is no reason to gird yourself with undue angst before the season’s even started.

So maybe you haven’t seen Notre Dame do anything glorious lately. (Assuming last November & December don’t count.) So what? Just shut up and watch for it. It’s coming.

Maybe you think I drank way too much of the preseason kool-aid. Maybe you think I’m using denial as a coping mechanism. Maybe you think I watched the replay of ND-Utah 2010 instead of Saturday’s actual game.

But I didn’t. I promise you I didn’t. I watched the entire game with eyes wide open (you know, except for the bit I missed running back from South Dining Hall following the World’s Longest Halftime), and I did not despair.

Last year’s team started 1-3, lost to Navy, lost to Tulsa, lost half of its veteran offensive starters, and still managed to win its last three games of the season and notch a bowl win under a first-year head coach for the first time ever. And the players did all this in the face of haters and doubters and nay-sayers from their own student body.

So if you’re hating now, you better come up with a contingency plan for when the Irish prove you wrong—such as stop being such a spastic moron and get with the program because Brian Kelly has created championship-caliber programs at every single level of football he’s ever coached and it’s way too early to despair now because there is a level of football at which this team is capable of playing and Saturday was NOT IT. Right? Right.

Remember four years ago (you know, the 3-9 season) when the first play of the first game resulted in the quarterback (I’m pretty sure it was Demetrius Jones) fumbling the snap, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the season? You didn’t want to believe this was true, of course, so you kept hoping. And hoping. And hoping. And then the Irish ended up having had the worst season ever, and the hope just killed you.

This season is not going to be like that season.

I’ll admit to not having read any commentary on the game so far, so I don’t actually have an accurate gauge on how people are reacting to Saturday’s shenanigans, but my best guess is that the players are down (but not beaten), the coaches are PO’ed (but are gonna fix it), and the fans are drenched with bewilderment (and possibly going into self-protective let’s-not-get-our-hopes-up mode).

Sometimes I wonder if our collective psyche as a fan base still hasn’t recovered from the devastation of that 3-9 year. (Or the Bush Push game. Or the 1993 Boston College game. Or since Lou got run out of town. Or whenever.) We’ve got too many consecutive years of crushed expectations, too many decades of mediocrity, too many herky-jerky rounds of WE'RE BACK--we're gone--WE'RE BACK--we're gone--WE'RE BACK--we're... Oh, piss it, let's just go to the Backer and pretend this isn't happening.

Weis in particular was really good at talking the talk and building up the team’s swagger. There were times you got to thinking the team was capable of scoring every single time they had the ball--especially when you had Brady Quinn or Jimmy-to-Golden on the field. Both Quinn and Clausen had their share of miraculous, last-minute-comeback victories, enough to send you into heart attack/seizure/spontaneous combustion mode, but so painfully addictive you couldn’t stop hoping, couldn't tear your eyes away.

Hope, man. Hope. Shattered hope just destroys you.

So believe me, I understand being tired of GETTING REALLY HYPED UP and then TOTALLY BEATEN DOWN. But once again--I refuse to despair. This team is NOT SHATTERED.

But obviously they have a lot of work to do.

As Coach Kelly noted in his post-game presser, “we've been down this road before. The disappointing thing is that we thought going into a year where we had some experience that we wouldn't have to go through this.”

The bad news--and the good news--is that it is completely within the team’s power to fix everything that went wrong on Saturday. We just need to stop beating ourselves.

“You can't start winning until you stop losing,” Kelly said. “You lose football games because you turn the ball over. You lose football games because you miss field goals. You lose the football game because you have four personal foul penalties. The list is long.” (For further pointers on how to lose football games, please see Notre Dame vs Michigan 2009). However—“given all that, you know, our kids put themselves in a position to battle the second half. There's no quit in this group, but you can't win playing like that.”

We didn’t get shoved around. We didn't get p'owned. We did a piss-poor job in the red zone, but there were many points where the game could have been ours and we freaking lost it.

Don’t get me wrong—I think South Florida’s a very good team. They played smart, they protected the ball, they pounced on our mistakes. They absolutely earned the win--nobody's going to deny them that.

But it was basically a total wonk-fest for the Irish, and in the words of Skip Holtz, “I give Coach Kelly an awful lot of credit. I think he's got a very good football team. We were just able to turn and win the turnover battle today, and winning the turnover battle and capitalize on a couple of errors, capitalize early and have the opportunity to put some points on the board.”

Watching this game actually reminded me a lot of watching the home opener vs. Nevada two years ago. We flattened Nevada 35-0, and everyone was kind of surprised (and enormously pleased) because we were coming off a mediocre .500 year and Nevada was supposed to have a top-notch quarterback and a pretty good team.

Nevada did have a good team that season—just not against us. After a rocky 0-3 start, they managed to clean up their mistakes, reboot their offense, and string together 8 wins in a row.

Not that this is much comfort to Irish fans, since everyone's gunning for a 9-win BCS Bowl season, and cleaning up the crap is what we were supposed to be doing LAST season.

But least we can take comfort that things still seem to be working out all right on one side of the ball. Speaking of which--

Dear Defense,

Thank you for not sucking.

XOXO

Love, Lisa

P.S. Harrison Smith get your shit together.

Two sacks, five tackles for loss, 1 QB hurry, 1 pass break-up, and no touchdowns allowed until the end of the third quarter. Plus the defense only allowed USF to score once as the result of a turnover--a field goal, following a fumble recovery. The four interceptions resulted in three punts and a missed field goal attempt. (Unfortunately, the D was not on the field to prevent that 96-yard fumble return for a TD, although I did appreciate the hustle of some of the offensive players attempting to chase down Kayvon Webster. Dayne Crist is much faster than I give him credit for.) Overall the D looked pretty solid. B.J. Daniels was kind of a warm-up for Denard Robinson, so if they can keep that little bugger contained I think we'll have a decent shot at bringing down the Big House.

Depending on which version of our offense decides to show up, of course.

ATTENTION FOOTBAWL FANS: The National Whatever Service insists that you park your hootenanny on the concourse YET AGAIN so you can agonize about the nature of turnovers, enjoy the ten-minute spurt of rain, and listen to the student section spontaneously burst into choruses of “Don’t Stop Believin” and “The Notre Dame Victory March.” Please try not to think about all the times you’ve sprouted mold and fungus watching the Irish play in a downpour, and at least console yourself with the fact that the Michigan-Western Michigan game was called before the players even had a chance to take a whack at the fourth quarter.

All of the interruptions had a really weird effect on my perception of the game. Prior to checking the numbers, I would not have been able to inform you that Notre Dame racked up twice as many yards of total offense as South Florida (508 to 254), or that Michael Floyd and Cierre Wood gained roughly 150 all-purpose yards apiece. Clearly my recollection of the offense is somewhat muddled now, because what sticks out the most in retrospect are those bleeping red zone turnovers, delay of game penalties, Crist getting swapped for Rees, and two of my favorites (Theo Riddick and Jonas Gray) fumbling the fleeping football.

However, as mentioned, all is not lost. I'm keepin' the faith. All of these players will have a chance to go out there and redeem themselves (except possibly Crist, although I guess we’ll see), and I urge you to resist the urge to denounce them with vicious rhetoric until they've been given the opportunity to do so. (Actually, I would urge you to avoid denouncing them altogether. Keep the faith, guys. KEEP THE FAITH.) And as a matter of fact, you have to have faith in Theo Riddick and his punt returns, because he's staying put.

“He's got to do it," Coach Kelly said. "I told him to get his butt back out there. If we're going to have the kind of playmakers we need at that position, we don't have a waiver wire, we can't trade for anybody. We've got to get him to that position. The only thing I reminded Theo is he can't let his disappointment or emotion show in the way he plays. He's got to bounce back, and he's going to have to bounce back for us next week and have a great game.”

Whether or not Kelly wishes he had a waiver wire is beside the point. Riddick is a talented fellow and he's all we've got, so he's just going to have to step up and git 'r done.

That goes for the rest of the team, too, although everybody already seems to know that. As Exhibit A, I bring you parses from the post-game presser:

Tommy Rees: It's definitely a learning experience because you've got to move forward. We've got Michigan next week. So tomorrow this has got to be behind us and just got to look forward to the next game.

Kapron Lewis-Moore: We've got to bounce back. We've got Michigan next week, so we have to do that. We need to make corrections from the film and we have to move on.

Manti Te’o: I just say keep doing what we're doing. You know, learn from our mistakes and come back Monday and just make sure that things are all right. When an opportunity presents itself to make a big play, to make a game changing play, that we're in the position we have to be to do what we need to.

Cierre Wood: That fumble was just a moment that we had. I don't look at that as a defining moment, just an obstacle we have to overcome.

Harrison Smith: Sometimes, especially the first game of the year, you just get caught up in the game. If you're a good defense, you want to make plays. Part of that is being aggressive. We just need to eradicate the other stuff from our defense. […] This week is over now. We're on to Michigan already. That's all we can focus on.

These are not life-altering quotes, but I’m not really looking for life-altering at the moment--I’m looking for consistent. If you want to play championship-caliber football, this “first game of the season” bullshit isn’t gonna cut it. But if this is how the season started, then it's what we're gonna have to work with, isn't it? And at least we know we've got a team that's ready to bounce back from a loss.

Obviously we'd all prefer that they didn't have to bounce back from anything, but if this is what it takes for us to build consistency and toughness, then so be it.

T-minus five days til we take on the Big House. Let's fix our BS and rock this bitch.

GO IRISH BEAT WOLVERINES!

P.S. Dear band, I'm very sorry you didn't get a chance to play your halftime show. That's lame.

"You wait all year long for football season, and then it comes and it just flies by."

2011-08-30T04:27:00.000-07:00

--Dayne Crist

Five days! Or four, or three, or whenever the hell you read this--it's almost here. It's so scintillating I had to write another preseason football rant.

Crist -- the second coming! (Oh wait. Too irreverent?)

So most of us ("us" being crazy rabid Irish fans) were not overly shocked by the announcement that Dayne Crist would be the starter for this year. Although as this article in the Observer points out, it wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion that Crist would be named the starter.

"Call it whatever you want," Coach Kelly said. "I've got two really good quarterbacks who are ready to play championship football."

Crist and Rees are so statistically even that it became "very cloudy" trying to determine the #1 and #2 QB based on numbers. This is a good problem to have. Kind of like waking up in the morning and asking yourself, "Which car do I want to drive today? The Ferrari, or the Lamborghini?"

Not such a hard choice when you know you can switch off at your leisure. Much harder when you've got to make a commitment.

But we've made the choice, and now we've got the Ferrari. Or the Lamborghini. Whichever. You decide.

High-Octane overdrive

After naming Crist as the starter, Coach Kelly noted, "He overcame a knee injury to start the [2010] season, then underwent another knee injury and infection for the spring. He didn't have a great spring, but fought through it and had the kind of summer and preseason camp you want your players to have. He's a much better football player, a much better quarterback. He's the kind of guy I wanna coach. He's tough mentally. He handles himself in that leadership position the way I want our quarterbacks to handle themselves. I didn't know Dayne very well last year. But I do now."

Crist has plenty of tenacity, but he owes a lot of his improvement in the off-season to Rees. Both quarterbacks would have worked hard in any case, I'm sure--that's just the kind of strapping, stalwart youths they are--but nothing makes you run fast like the knowledge that you're being chased. They were both forced to play smarter, work harder, and get better faster. They couldn't have done it on their own, and the best part is they know it. Crist himself said after winning the starting job: "I told Tommy--you gotta keep pushing me."

Just as long as you don't bust your knee again, Dayne, I think we'll all be happy.

Goooooooooooo--oooooooooooo--ooooooooo--ooooooooooOOOO! Irish!

So I've been neglecting the special teams, but the good news is Coach Kelly hasn't. In fact, he's talked a lot about them during fall camp, particularly in terms of player development and the overall direction of the program.

First things first, in case you were wondering who's going to be in the backfield waiting to receive punts and kickoffs this year, the answer is "Theo Riddick, Theo Riddick, Theo Riddick." (Yes, that is a direct quote.)

Second, freshman kicker Kyle Brindza will be handling kickoffs. (Possibly also punts.) I think Ruffer's still getting the nod for field goals and extra points, but it's definitely Brindza on kickoffs. I'm quite enthused to hear this, considering Kyle is the first great kicker we've actually recruited in, oh, I don't know, FOREVER.

Of course, it's difficult to determine whether a kicker will remain consistent (and who can tell whether they'll be "great"), because the quality of their game is mostly in their head and their playing time largely consists of nothing...nothing...nothing... OMG SO MUCH PRESSURE DON'T SCREW UP ...nothing...nothing...nothing.

However, if you take a look at the first three lines of Brindza's player bio, you will likely feel reassured:

Set Michigan state high school record with 19 made field goals as a senior in 2010, including six of nine from 50 yards or more ... averaged 43.2 yards per punt and 60 of 63 kickoffs resulted in touchbacks in 2010 while handling kicking and punting duties for Plymouth High School in Canton, Mich. ... rated ninth-best player in Michigan by Detroit Free Press

Ninth-best player. A kicker. Ninth-best. In the state.

I love our recruiting staff.

Thirdly (or is it sixth and lastly?), Coach Kelly noted that he's been utilizing special teams to help younger players gain valuable game-time experience. Both Bennett Jackson and Lo Wood played on special teams last year, and this year they're expected to aid Gary Gray and Robert Blanton at cornerback. This year, freshmen running backs Cam McDaniel and George Atkinson III are slated to play on special teams so they'll be ready to contribute next season--or even this season, if need be.

This is a common enough strategy--widely used to break in NFL rookies everywhere--but things are different when your players have limited eligibility. Although this system works for now, Kelly would eventually like to abandon it. "I'd prefer that we have enough strength and depth in our program that we didn't have to play guys in special teams roles to get them game-time experience. Down the road, we won't have to do this, because freshmen won't be expected to play as second-year starters."

Whoa, guys.

Whoa.

I've grown so accustomed to witnessing the career arc of players like Brady Quinn, Golden Tate, and Manti Te'o from freshman year onward that the concept of an all-upperclassman team now seems strange. No more four-year starters? Really? That's kind of...sad.

Except that it's not.

If you're starting freshmen, that means you haven't got any upperclassmen who can play the position better. And that doesn't mean your freshmen are so spectacular--that just means you've got some serious holes in your depth chart. Very rarely do you get a player like Julius Jones or Denard Robinson (try not to gak on the maize-and-blue here), who are so straight-up good you'd be crazy to keep them off the field. (Although between you and me, I think Coach Kelly's trying to build the kind of team where you could keep those players off the field for a year. If you wanted to.)

I'm sure it's agonizing for players who were brilliant in high school to come to college and have to wait years before they can start. But if you've got the right system in place, it's much better to give players time to redshirt than it is to just throw them in and let them learn as they go. Game-time experience is valuable, but you shouldn't be getting playing time as a starter when you're still trying to learn the plays. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but the end goal is to build a team where freshmen don't have to start. Not unless you want them to.

Looks like that's the road we're headed down once more.

Let's hope so.

Tidbits

Right. I've waffled on longer than I intended to (everybody's shocked), so in closing I'm going to provide you with some favorite quotes and tidbits I've picked up from interviews, articles, and und.com videos in the last week or so:

Movin' on up. The Irish were ranked #18 in the USA Today preseason poll, #16 in the AP preseason poll, and #14 in Sports Illustrated's college football preview. These are the highest preseason rankings since 2006, when the Irish opened at #2 in the AP poll. (Wow, that seems like a zillion years ago.)

Great Expectations. Most pundits' predictions have the Irish headed to a BCS Bowl game with a nine-win season. My favorite matchup so far has the Irish playing Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl--although actually I'd love to see us play in the Sugar Bowl again. (Any excuse to go back to New Orleans, really.)

We're number...4? Sports Illustrated is fond of rankings. In this year's college football preview, they ranked the best gameday traditions, best overall gameday experience, and best coaches in college football. Notre Dame appeared on all three of these lists, coming it at #10 on the coach rankings with Brian Kelly; #9 on the best game day traditions with the postgame alma mater; and #4 on the best overall Game Day experience, behind Texas A&M, Wisconsin (really? Wisconsin?) and LSU.

Coach Kelly on accountability and the 'Canes: (if you haven't heard about the NCAA's investigation of Miami this might not make sense to you) "That's not to say that the guys at Miami didn't want to go to school--but they had other things in mind, too. As a coach, as a program, you recruit guys who understand that they're coming to a university to get a degree--and understand the value of that degree and what it costs--and play football. The rest of the stuff--we're gonna have to be more vigilant, everybody. Everybody says, 'well, that's just the NCAA.' I think it's a cop-out. I think it's the NCAA, the institution, the coach. I think it's everybody."

Manti Te'o, man-beast. Junior linebacker and All-American candidate Manti Te'o is currently listed on four presason watchlists for awards (Lombardi, Butkus, Bednarik, Nagurski), following a sophomore season in which he recorded 133 tackles--the most since Notre Dame's single-season record of 147 was set in 1983. (Better go ahead and gird your fibers for the season, kids. There's gonna be grass stains.)

ND's version of the Gameday Bus. Apparently this year, the football team is changing up its pre-game traditions. They'll attend mass in the Basilica as usual, but instead of walking to the stadium afterwards, they'll walk back to the buses, which will then drive pretty much all the way around campus before ending up in the tailgating lots south of the stadium and heading back to the Gug. There, the team will have a final pre-game meeting to go over the game plan. After the meeting (a little over 2 hours prior to kickoff), they'll walk from the Gug to the library, swing by the statue of Fr. Hesburgh and Fr. Joyce, admire their reflections in the reflecting pool (this part optional), and then walk down stadium quad to the stadium. Lest we forget, stadium quad is where Cartier Field used to stand--home to Knute Rockne, the Gipper, the Four Horsemen, and the first fabled notions of that blue-gray sky. This is also the part of campus where the Navy trained when they came and saved our school from closure. Fans are encouraged to line the route and cheer.

Season Opener Stats. (courtesy of und.com)

Notre Dame and USF will meet on the gridiron for the first time in the 123-year history of Irish football. The Bulls are the 140th different opponent in Notre Dame football history. The Irish own an all-time record of 117-19-3 (.853) when facing an opponent for the first time.

The Irish are 102-15-5 (.857) in season openers and have taken 20 of the last 24.

The 102 seasons Notre Dame has won its opener, the Irish went on to post winning records 93 times (91.2%), with four losing seasons and five .500 records

Revenge of the Skip? (okay, I don't think Skip Holtz wants revenge, but I'm tired, so just go with it - these are more tidbits from und.com)

Skip Holtz, a former member of the Irish football team and assistant coach and son of former Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz, returns to Notre Dame Stadium as he leads USF Bulls into Saturday's season opener for both teams.

Holtz's playing career at Notre Dame lasted one season, 1986, where he predominantly saw action with the special teams unit. Following graduation, he worked as a graduate assistant under Bobby Bowden at Florida State and a wide receivers coach at Colorado before returning to Notre Dame as an assistant coach under his father, Lou (1990-1993).

During Skip's two seasons as offensive coordinator (1992-1993), the Irish posted a 21-2-1 record and averaged 37 points per game, good enough to earn them a top-10 ranking nationally in total offense.

Last one -- a quote from the golden boy...

Crist, on confidence: "If you're not confident, it's because you're not prepared. I think we're gonna prepare better than anybody in the country."

Damn skippy.

GO IRISH BEAT BULLS!

Notre Dame's Starter for 2011...

2011-08-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

Dayne Crist!

Notre Dame Football 2011: Let's Make the Coach Bald edition

2011-08-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Giddy like a gilded bagpipe

It's been a busy summer, thank goodness, or I'd be jumping out of my pants right now at the thought of fall training camp and the knowledge that football season is a mere three weeks away. I've been so distracted by work and weddings and the weather lately that I've practically lost track of everything.

It's been so stinking hot and humid in Chicago that I've gotten used to walking out my front door into what feels like an instant sheen of sweat. But last weekend we mercifully had a storm blow through, and all this past week the mornings have been stunningly cool. And then one day I walked out my front door to discover that it was suddenly Perfect Football Weather. I about keeled over.

It's almost here. That crispness of fall, that scent of burning leaves, that tangible feeling of possibility that lurks around preseason like a set of bagpipes, blaring hopes and expectations that reverberate giddily through the eardrums of the faithful.

I am so--freakin'--pumped.

If you're as crazy (read: awesome) as I am, you've probably been watching the fall practice reports on und.com. Jack Nolan and the und.com team have been highlighting a different unit during each practice every day; so far they've covered the running backs, wide receivers, tackles, guards, center, defensive line, cornerbacks, and I think quarterbacks. (There have been nine practices so far, so probably there's another unit they've highlighted, but off the top of my head I can't think which.) The reports include practice footage, as well as snippets of interviews with the players, assistant coaches, and position coaches. Coach Kelly has also given two lengthier interviews with the media, both of which are available via streaming video, and one of which has a written transcript posted online as well.

The following is a series of ruminations, extrapolations, and cogitations based on these five-minute pieces of absolute GOLD.

QB Shuffle

Let's start with the question that is surely burning in the minds of all Irish faithful who like to see the offense score touchdowns: Who the eff is our starting quarterback going to be?

Except that this is not really a question, because the answer is Dayne Crist.

Oh, what's that? Sorry? You read some article that looks a lot like this one here?

That's nice. The answer is still Dayne Crist.

I know Coach Kelly is saying there's a battle going on, and I would not be surprised to see both quarterbacks get significant playing time, because the spread offense definitely allows for that sort of thing--and as we know from Kelly's tenure at Cincinnati, he will rotate as many quarterbacks in and out as he has to if he feels like it's the right thing to do.

But I don't think he wants to.

I think he wants solid, consistent leadership at the helm--someone who can not only go in there and play, but who has the ability to help guide the offense to the next level. Not that I'm casting any aspersions on Tommy Rees; he did a great job as a freshman playing in some very high-pressure games. I think he took up the helm better than most freshmen could have, and he definitely looked better out there than freshman year Jimmy Clausen or (much as it pains me to say it) Brady Quinn.

Part of that is due to Rees's own skill and leadership. Part of that is due to the tremendous effort made by the rest of the team to come together after losing not only Dayne Crist, but also lead RB Armando Allen, All-American TE Kyle Rudolph, and (for a split second) Michael Floyd. But I think the biggest part of Rees's success is definitely due to Coach Kelly changing his scheme to accommodate the knowledge base and skill set of his freshman QB--using a contingency plan that would not have been in place if Dayne Crist hadn't gone down for the second half of the Michigan game and alerted the head coach to the fact that none of his backup QB's were anywhere near as prepared as they needed to be for a game-time situation.

If you've been tracking the quarterback buzz in Coach Kelly's interviews from the time Dayne Crist was injured last season up until now (which clearly, why wouldn't you? doesn't everybody do this?), you'll notice that in almost every conversation, Coach Kelly makes some reference to how he wants to get Crist back at the helm. It's possible that the coach's opinion has changed a bit since last fall, considering Rees finished the last four games of the season with twelve touchdown passes, a 61% rate of pass completion, and a bowl victory, but nevertheless...Crist is still older, more experienced, and has a mental edge in understanding the intricacies of the offense, considering he played the spread in high school. There's slightly less need for development and a greater chance of introducing some finesse if Crist is the guy in the pocket. And (just channeling my psychic powers here) I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Coach Kelly wants.

However, like I said, I would not be surprised to see the #2 QB get significant playing time this year. Not only because I'm hoping we're going to kick everybody around so much on the field that we'll have no choice but to give our beloved starters a much-needed rest during the second half, but also because Kelly's "next man in" philosophy supports the development of a real depth chart.

Lots of comments are being made during fall practice about how "you don't want to have such a drop-off" between your #1 and your #2 guy. You want to be able to sub people in. You want to know you have multiple playmakers at any given position. (Kind of like if you get a flat tire, you want the reassurance that you're going to get a replacement for the tire that's just as good as the one you lost, if not better--because you'd really rather not be driving around with a donut for the rest of your life.) This is slightly more applicable to defense, of course, where the subbing in and out of players is practically a necessity if you're running the kind of fast-paced offense that's likely to keep the D out on the field longer. (And even if you're not--defense is tiring, man. You've gotta make sure you've got some juice left for that fourth quarter.)

Plus, with the quarterback position especially, there's always that fear of injury. I hate to bring it up because it seems like bad luck, but come on: two years in a row Crist gets injured? On practically the same date? Crist has another year of eligibility after this, but if he gets injured again this season, I'd say Tommy has a much better shot at taking the helm all the way through that oh-so-crucial third season. Not that I want anybody to get injured. (FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, NO MORE INJURIES PLEASE.) But this year is make-or-break for Crist. He's gotta stay healthy, and I think the job is his. If not, Rees can probably look forward to a little more underclassman record-breaking.

I guess we'll see.

So right, the rest of the offense

They're going to actually play the spread this year, guys! Not just something that resembles the spread, not something that looks like a bunch of guys trying to figure out how to run an up-tempo no-huddle offense, but the actual spread offense. Coach Kelly has already commented that he believes this year we'll be able to go out there and not only increase the speed at which we play the game, but also control the speed of the game. (It's kind of like we bought this new-fangled high-tech TV a year ago and we've only just now found the remote control. And the remote control has slow-motion settings. Right, this is a metaphor that makes sense. Moving right along...)

We've got an extremely capable center in senior Braxston Cave, and we're lucky to have Michael Floyd back after that seriously distressing, semi-mind-boggling, what-the-hell-there-are-like-fifty-cab-companies-in-South-Bend-and-you-should-have-at-least-five-drivers'-personal-numbers-programmed-into-your-phone-by-now-aren't-you-supposed-to-be-a-senior-or-something-how-did-this-happen??? DUI charge in the spring.

Cave, Floyd, and whoever our beloved quarterback turns out to be have it in their power to give us some flashy ZING! BOOM! POW! VICTORY CLOG! this season. If they're all on top of their games, I think we're gonna see a lot of replay-worthy touchdown passes. I mean, let's hope we get a lot of touchdown passes this season anyway; there are going to be a lot of younger wide receivers out there with something to prove, and I hope they prove it--especially the flashy-fast Theo Riddick. (C'mon Theo! You're one of the fastest guys on the team, and you're a WR converted from a RB. Channel the spirit of Golden Tate already, will you?!) But Michael Floyd is an anchor and everyone knows it. With him on the field, we are 70% more likely to be totally badass. (Our opponents will hit the ground so hard trying to chase after him they'll get grass stains on their EYEBALLS.)

With the final departure of Armando Allen and Robert Huuuuuughes, we've got some gaps in the run game to fill. (Ha. Gaps in the run game.) But we've still got Cierre Wood back there, and he picked up the bulk of the carries after Allen got injured last season. And if he can just settle in and stop playing like he's trying to win the Heisman (Coach Kelly's comment, if I recall correctly), he'll probably start playing a lot more like he's capable of winning the Heisman. Plus we've got up-and-coming Jonas Gray, who has shown flashes of brilliance, and who I hope continues to get better until he just is brilliance . (Kind of like Huuuughes at the end of last season, who went from being inconsistently good to just straight-up solid like a freight train.) Also they are talking about switching Theo Riddick in and out of the backfield / WR slot if necessary, which I can't complain about. (C'mon Theooooo.)

Let's just hope our offensive line is getting to be as good as the coaches say it's getting. It's easy to be optimistic during pre-season (OBVIOUSLY), and although it's true that our O-line held defenses to 1.5 sacks per game last year--the lowest total since 1998--I'm still kind of itching for a run game that, you know, looks like a run game. By which I mean I want to see holes open up along that line big enough to drive the College GameDay bus through. Or, in a pinch, I'd settle for the next coming of Julius Jones. (Hey, remember when Julius Jones made our offense look like an offense even when our defense was the highest-scoring unit on the field? Sometimes I drool a little thinking about the possibility of having a running back like that playing with a unit that actually knows how to score touchdowns.) But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about the defense.

D! D! D! -- Diaco!

Can I just say that Coach Diaco is probably my favorite of all the Notre Dame coaches? I love watching his interviews. He's so keyed into his players and so passionate about his job he kind of makes me wish I were a college football coach. (Okay, so I kind of wish that anyway. But that's beside the point.) And particularly in his most recent interview, all of the things he said were just so dead-on I wanted to hug him, or...run around and spike a football in the endzone, or...something.

Anyway, many of the comments he made in this interview are things I've heard echoed by the players and coaches throughout fall camp. One of the best comments I've heard all week is that "The players are happy to be back together. They really like each other." One of the other defensive coaches even referred to the D-line as a "brotherhood."

HOT FRESH CANNOLI, CAN IT BE TRUE?!

Is our team a team? Are they starting to act like a--wait for it--family?

(FAMILIES WIN CHAMPIONSHIP GAMES. JUST WATCH MIRACLE. IT'S TRUE.)

This is such a far cry from a couple years ago when the guys were coming into practices and getting into fights with each other. Probably out of sheer frustration over how non-cohesive and non-team-like our team was.

Another favorite moment in Coach Diaco's interview is when he mentioned this quote from Gandhi: "Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory."

This is such an excellent quote to begin with, and Coach Diaco's tie-in to our team was that "We're interested in focusing on full effort, and that's tough because there's a lot of questions. So there needs to be insulation, a focus on what needs to be done today."

And indeed it is difficult to keep focused on the task at hand when you've got a zillion questions and opinions zooming in from all sides--particularly when expectations for the team have now been raised so high. We're talking BCS bowl this year. And by "we" I don't mean just me and my wishful thinking--we're talking fans, the media, Coach Kelly himself. Coach Kelly has actually promised to shave his head this year if Notre Dame wins a BCS Bowl game. (Technically the head-shaving will be to support cancer research, but nevertheless it's quite a promise.)

The bar has been set. We're climbing toward the possibility of a national championship game--or at least we're trying. (C'mon guys! Let's make the coach bald! You can do it!)

But none of that matters if you can't keep focused on what needs to be done now to allow that to happen. And in watching the interviews this week, it's easy to see that the coaches and the players are all on the same page about things. The coaches in particular are doing the best they can to keep the players focused on one day, one thing, one task at a time. The upperclassmen seem cognizant of the importance of how the players conduct themselves in practice, in meetings, in the weight room, etc., and by recognizing their role as leaders they're working to pass that all down to the younger players.

Which is true of any football program worth its salt, to be sure. But I just cannot get over how excellent it is that so much attention is now being paid to the little things. How you conduct yourself, how you carry yourself, how you approach your work--these things are just as important as the work itself. These things are what make the work possible. And these are the qualities you take away that in the end are the most valuable. Teamwork. Focus. Dedication.

******THIS IS WHY SPORTS ARE SO VALUABLE. NOT BECAUSE YOU CAN WIN BIG SHINY TROPHIES AND MAKE LOTS OF MONEY PLAYING THEM.*******

So I'm glad our players are learning these key attributes of sports / life. I'm as glad about this as I am about all this talk of a BCS Bowl this year. In the words of Kronk, "Oh yeah. It's all comin' together."

So about this actual season we're going to be playing

Right, so I realize I didn't talk about the actual defense much, but my general opinion is that they're going to be straight sick this year, what with most of our starters returning and Manti Te'o being a man-beast and Harrison Smith developing into an outrageous ball magnet and all.

But of course this is all pre-season drivel so make sure you ignore it as soon as the actual season starts.

Speaking of which...let's take a look at the hapless victims (I mean, opponents) on our schedule:

September
vs South Florida
@Michigan
vs Michigan State
@ Pittsburgh

October
@ Purdue
vs Air Force
--Bye Week--
vs USC
vs Navy

November
@ Wake Forest
vs Maryland ("home game" in MD)
vs Boston College
@ Stanford

Not a lot of breathing room in this schedule, is there? No "cake" game for the season opener--not facing a USF team with six straight bowl appearances and Skip Holtz as the head coach. And no walk in the park for the next couple weeks in September, either, as we head up to Ann Arbor for our first-ever night game in the Big House, followed by a continuation of our grudge match with MSU at home.

I don't think Michigan's looking at a particularly stellar season, but freaky things always seem to happen when Michigan plays Notre Dame, and one or the other of the two big Michigan teams we play every year always seems to get under our skin when we're not expecting them to. It's been a good long while since we've beaten both Michigan and MSU in the same season. I would cascade into ignoble paroxysms of delight if that we managed to do it this season. As it is, however, I think we're probably looking at at least one stupid trip-up in the first three weeks of the season.

I think the D will be solid enough to manhandle our next couple games--because whatever, Pitt, we're not afraid of you or the Big East; and Purdue is probably the surest win we can point to out of the three night games we're playing this season. Plus, by the time we get to weeks 4 and 5, we will have had time to smooth out some of the wrinkles our first three match-ups will have caused. I'm not going to get my panties in a twist over Air Force (no offense to AF, but if we don't beat them that means there's some serious trouble going on in paradise), so hopefully we'll notch one more win and then--whew!--bye week.

Hate to say it, but last two weekends in October could be kind of a blood bath. Night game vs USC in Notre Dame Stadium for the first time since 1990 = turn me into an emerald and stick me in the jeweled shillelagh, I'm done.

And as achingly depressing as it is to have to worry about Navy--they've beaten us three times now (aughhhhhh), we couldn't stop the option last year, and if we don't watch out we could be toast. (But let's assume that Coach Diaco won't be overlooking anything with the defensive preparations this season, eh? We did manage to handle Army later last season...)

The two big games in November will be Senior Day (really? Boston College on Senior Day??? REALLY???????) and Stanford. Since our program seems to be back on the up-and-up (I know we've said that with the last couple head coaches, but just go with me here), and we somehow managed to pull out a win against Utah on Senior Day last season, I'm actually feeling pretty optimistic about protecting our house against those pesky Eagles.

But eurghhh...Stanford. I think most people are looking at Stanford as a definite loss this season, but I don't know. We improved a lot last year over the course of the season, and I'm expecting us to do that again this year. If all goes the way I hope it's going to go, the beginning of the season will be more at risk for upset losses than later in the season. I expect Stanford to be the best team we play this season, but I also expect our team, by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, to be ready to play them.

Anyway, I think this rambling has run its course.

T-minus three weeks til we meet again, football season. In the meantime, there's only one thing left to say.

GO IRISH BEAT BULLS!

News from the Bend

2011-03-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember when I said Michael Floyd is Notre Dame? And then he got that DUI and....

Never mind that. Here's the word from Spring Practice:

Q. That's been a theme for you, you're more comfortable; is there anything after looking back at last year that you'll do differently, now that you know what goes into the day to day life of being a Notre Dame coach?
COACH KELLY: Win more games. I think definitely win more games.

Sold. I am on board for 2011, Coach Kelly.

I might post a real update in the near future....but for now, let's just let the coaching staff git 'r done.

Floyyyd

2011-02-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

I am so incredibly behind that it's embarrassing. I never wrote my glowing reaction to the chilled-out Sun Bowl. I made only a cursory mention of my despair when Kyle Rudolph declared for the NFL Draft. I never fully expressed my gratitude for Michael Floyd's decision to return for Senior year.

But seeing as National Signing Day is upon is, I hope to remedy some of that.

So can I just start by saying: Michael Floyd is Notre Dame.

Just in case his performance on the field doesn't speak for itself--just in case you weren't convinced when he called and personally encouraged you to buy tickets for the Sun Bowl--just in case his decision to stay isn't reason enough alone--

Lo and behold this quote from his presser back in January:

I'm returning to Notre Dame for three reasons: to earn my degree, return Notre Dame to the top and improve myself as a player. First, I promised my mom I would graduate from Notre Dame and I am 40 credit hours shy of attaining that goal. I chose to attend Notre Dame in part because I knew it was a 40-year decision and not a four-year decision. Graduating from Notre Dame will help me for the rest of my life. Second, I want to get Notre Dame back to a BCS game. I believe we are very close to returning the Irish to where we belong and I want to be part of something great. Lastly, I want to show everyone in the country that I'm the best wide receiver in college football in 2011. There are many things I need to improve, but I feel with the coaching I have at Notre Dame, I can become the best at my position in this game.

That paragraph, right there, is pretty much the thesis statement of Notre Dame football. What's been done or not done in the past will cease to matter when every player on the team buys into these three inevitable truths:
1. You come to Notre Dame to get an education
2. You play football because you want to win a national championship
3. You work to be the best player at your position. Not just on your team, but in the entire f*ing country

Number three has to come last, though. After the education. After the team.

And it's not like being the best f*ing player in the country is going to be possible for every player on the team--but shit, shouldn't they try? Why not try? Even if you fall short, being not-quite-the-best-in-the-country is still pretty f$#@ing good. It's just like Brian Smith says--"You've got to play like you're the baddest mother on the field, even if you aren't."

Lucky for us, Michael Floyd is. And he's coming back.

This is way too late to matter, but: Rejoice!

ND Bowl Game preview: Go Irish Beat 'Canes edition

2010-12-31T07:27:00.000-08:00

Let me just start by saying that I had every intention of doing some actual research and composing an in-depth, well-structured, fact-based diatribe about tomorrow's game.

But instead I ran out of time, so I'm just going to ramble for a bit about all the reasons we ought to win tomorrow. And hopefully somebody actually reads this before the game starts, otherwise there's just no point to this at all, is there?

Catholics vs Convicts renewed

One can only hope that the players themselves have only a fleeting understanding of what this whole "Catholics vs Convicts" thing really entails. I mean, don't get me wrong--I love watching footage of the 1988 tunnel fight as much as anybody--but I don't think there's any real need to try to bring back the feeling of that 80's rivalry. It seems to me as though the main perk of this matchup is that we get to reminisce about the old days without having to actually call forth the demons of yesteryear and renew the desire for bloodshed that got the whole ND-Miami series canceled in the first place.

There was a good piece by Jeff Carroll in the South Bend Tribune this week detailing the end of the ND-Miami series. You can read the whole thing here, but for the purposes of this rant, here is the most pertinent excerpt:

Many people seem to trace the demise of the series to before kickoff in the 1988 contest, when the two teams locked up in a ferocious brawl near the tunnel leading to the locker rooms beneath Notre Dame Stadium. Holtz fueled that conjecture, with comments after the game that it might be time for the schools to take a break from one another - effective immediately.

But the truth of the matter is that the next two meetings between the teams went off largely without a hitch. They were both hard-fought, cleanly contested battles between two programs that had developed a grudging mutual respect.

In actuality, crowd control was a much greater factor in the series' cancellation than player control. Although the CATHOLICS VS. CONVICTS T-shirts are today entrenched as an indelible piece of Notre Dame football lore, the university was not pleased at the time with the image they portrayed.

[...]
During the week leading up to the '88 game, an article in the Observer, ND's student newspaper, parodied Miami: “You intellectual snobs like to poke at .... our academic program. Now, we may not have any Rhodes Scholars, but I'll have you know that we have the nation's leading programs in intramural bowling, gator wrestling, drug running, and sports car appreciation.”

Notre Dame's campus did not have a monopoly on ugliness.

The 1989 game was played in primetime at Miami's Orange Bowl, and the school put in 3,400 extra seats to accommodate a rare overflow crowd. Irish offensive lineman Justin Hall recalled that his family members, who flew to the game from Texas, were spit on as they tried to make their way to their seats.

“That was the most vile, vicious venue for a college football game that I've ever been in,” said long-time Notre Dame beat writer and columnist Tim Prister, then working for Blue & Gold Illustrated. “They weren't there for Miami. They weren't there just to see Miami win. They wanted blood from Notre Dame. There was a nastiness - I would even call it an evilness - in the crowd that night. You could cut it with a knife.”

Hot damn.

It is safe, however, to assume that the heat generated between the two teams, and particularly the two fan bases, were a product of their place and time.

True.

I think it's going to be a fun game to watch, scrappy and gritty and superimposed with old ghosts. Kind of like watching ND vs Army in Yankee stadium, only there are going to be a lot more people watching this game who actually remember Catholics vs. Convicts. (You know--people who still have all their teeth.) And speaking of which--if you've never seen this video of Rocket Ismail describing the 1988 tunnel fight, you should definitely go check it out right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq1PXq2egMg

(Also, if you have an extra 8 minutes to spare and really enjoy nostalgic films with cheesy old-school-sports-music and voiceovers, this is the video for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcRNUFbwPiE&feature=related)

But of course, as both Notre Dame and Miami fans know all too well, this isn't exactly a renewal of the rivalry that sparked tunnel brawls and 14.3 Nielsen ratings. This is something else.

This is the chance for the Irish to start their climb back to the top.

The Echoes

I don't want to attach undue importance to a matchup between two 7-5 teams, one of which just lost its head coach and the other of which is relying on a freshman quarterback who turned the ball over four times in his regular-season finale...but nevertheless.....

This is big, yo.

This is a Moment for us. Or it could be, if we play it right.

Remember back at the beginning of the season when we were 1-3 and everybody was like "Ah, f*ck"?

And then later after we lost to Navy and everybody was really like "Ahh f*ck"?

And then when we lost to Tulsa a week after that and everybody was like "F*** it, the season's over"?

And now we're all 7-5 and going to a bowl game and we won on Senior Day and beat USC and shit. So it's like "F*** yeah, bowl game!"

Except that we still got no respect. We've still got shit to prove.

I was listening to some rambling idiots over on Yahoo! Sports the other day (these were actual sports pundits, mind you, and not just the crazy-asses who hang out on college football message boards), and they were hating on Notre Dame so hardcore I almost couldn't even believe it. It was all that horseshit again about how Notre Dame "lacks team speed" and "doesn't have the athletes" to keep up with Miami and all that other statistical bullshit that may in fact be true, but did not, for example, prevent us from beating USC.

Miami has some tremendous athletes on its squad, this is true. On paper, we may very well be screwed. But luckily football games are not played on paper. And as USC so heartily proved on Thanksgiving weekend, it doesn't matter how fast you are if you can't catch the damn ball.

Furthermore, talent doesn't mean shit if you can't play as a team. I'm not trying to insult Miami here; I'm just laying out some facts. We had plenty of occasion to say this to ourselves under Charlie: With all the talent we have on this team, why the f*ck aren't we winning more games? (All last season we have Jimmy-to-Golden and we still only scrape together six wins? Are you shitting me?) And just look at what Coach Kelly did last year. 12-0 with Cincinnati. (Seriously, who the f*ck plays for Cincinnati?) Yet another reminder that football is a team sport.

And let's not forget it.

The Hunger

One of the Yahoo! Sports pundits also pissed me off by saying that Miami is the "hungrier" team.

The hell they are.

Have you been paying any attention to Coach Kelly at all this season? (Of course not, because all you know about Notre Dame is whatever bullshit ESPN's been feeding you all year. Which means you've been listening to Kirk Herbstreit. Which explains where you're getting all this "Notre Dame lacks team speed" nonsense.) Coach Kelly wants to win a national championship, okay? That's why he came here. That's what he's working toward. He's got the hunger. And I think the team's got that hunger, too.

We've still got a lot of doubts to assuage, though, and at this point we've got a lot of disrespect being thrown in our general direction.

-Is the defense for real?
-Was that Utah win a fluke?
-How good do we really think USC is this year, anyway? (Answer: Not that good. But still good enough that it matters that we beat them. Especially since, you know, they were the best defense we've faced all season. And probably USC's players were too fast for us to keep up with. Although I'm pretty sure Robert Hughes didn't notice this while he was busy plowing through people like a human juggernaut.)

I've got no idea what the Miami players have had to put up with this year, but what with their head coach being fired and all, we can assume there's some frustrating shit going on down there, too. So perhaps they will enter this game with some hunger. But a hunger they can't focus, if their end-of-season loss to South Florida is any indication.

The 'Canes

To be honest, I haven't watched Miami play a single game all season and I have no idea how they're likely to fare as a postesason unit. As mentioned, the Hurricanes ended the season with some disappointing losses, and then their coach got fired. My best guess is that they are not exactly in the most unified state right now.

You never know, of course. Sometimes teams use these things to bond together. Leaders step up, the team miraculously gels, they go out there and win one last one for the coach (or...the Gipper or whoever), yada yada yada.

But, more likely, they lose their focus and sense of leadership, head into the postseason feeling uncertain and tank out big in their bowl game. (Re: Cincinnati in the Sugar Bowl last year.)

My guess is that Miami will lie somewhere between these two extremes. It's difficult to say.

I still think we ought to win. I don't like to make predictions, really, but I will say this:

Our defense is so hot right now. I mean, for serious. Only allowing two touchdowns in the last seventeen quarters of football? Hott. They've been a really consistent unit for the last four games, and I absolutely don't understand why people are questioning it as a "fluke." It's a fluke if it happens in one game. Maybe two, depending on your opponent. But four games? Four? Really? Need I remind anyone that it took USC four tries to get the ball in from the two-yard line?

What really kills me is now that our defense is playing so well, people have started questioning the quality of our opponents rather than commending the D for its achievements. Which is halfway valid (in the sense that Utah kind of tanked themselves after that TCU game), but also kind of insulting. To be fair, however, I think the reluctance to commend our D may be more of a reflection on how the defense has been playing the past couple seasons than it is on the D's improvement and evolution throughout this season.

Anyway--moving right along to some actual talk about Miami--

According to Rakes of Mallow, Miami leads the country with 23 interceptions and they've fumbled the ball an additional 19 times. Their QB for this game, Jacory Harris, apparently started the season as a Heisman hopeful, but has been riding the bench for the latter part of the season. Harris could come out and play a perfect game, of course, but generally speaking, when a team's been struggling with turnovers and inconsistencies all season, they're not going to come out and play a clean bowl game. (Although I guess you never know.) Plus, our defense has gotten to the point where they're not only capitalizing on most of the opportunities that come their way--they're also starting to create opportunities. So really I think everything's boding well on the defensive side of the ball.

Offense is a little more concerning, but I think Tommy Rees should have a pretty good game. He's won on Senior Day, he's played at Yankee Stadium, he's thrown several picks at the Coliseum -- he's gotten a lot of big-time game experience under his belt very quickly, and I think all of that is going to help him focus during his first major postseason game. (Okay, I know it's only the Sun Bowl and all, but come on. It's ND vs Miami, the tickets sold out faster than they ever have in the history of the Sun Bowl, the Sun Bowl president is saying this is the most excitement he's ever seen about a Sun Bowl matchup, and I guess he'd know since he's been around it for fifty years.) Do I think he's going to get picked off during this game? Probably. He does that. (To be fair, Dayne Crist does that too.) In fact, the only game in which the Irish have not had a turnover all season was on Senior Day against Utah.

It'd be really nice to hope for another game with no turnovers, but I just don't think that's likely. As Rakes of Mallow puts it,

Miami's secondary is nasty, full of four and five-star athletes, ranking third in passing yards per game, second in pass efficiency defense, second in completion percentage allowed and eighth in sacks. It seemed very unlikely Notre Dame was going to attempt to ride Tommy Rees to victory in its bowl game regardless of opponent, but the Hurricanes lining up on the other side of the field almost guarantees that we're going to see a lot of Robert Hughes left and Cierre Wood right.

Which I am totally okay with. In fact, I think Robert Hughes is about due for another 100+ yard game. I'd just like to see him barrel people over all afternoon. Human juggernaut. Human juggernaut!

The Spread

Without going into any further detail, I think we're heading into a fairly even matchup. If Miami's supposed to have the better players, I think right now Notre Dame's got the better team. A strong finish in November says a lot. It means more, I think, than a lot of the pundits are willing to give it credit for. (Mostly because they've got no faith that our team culture is changing into, you know, a winning culture.) I think, heading into the postseason, Notre Dame's definitely got the mental edge.

Right now, though, we're listed as three-point underdogs. We're also being described as a "struggling" program.

I guess that's true. This season was a struggle.

But we never punked out, we never gave up, we never caved in. (And by "we" here, we mean the players and the coaches. The same cannot really be said for all the fans.) And we're not going to cave in now.

All of the hardships we've faced this season have only made us play harder. And anyone who's being hard on Brian Kelly at this point is an effing moron who hasn't been paying attention to the way the team is coming together. We're headed on the up-and-up. Can't you feel it?

I don't think this game's going to be easy. No game is a gimme, and anytime you think so you end up losing to (for example) Appalachian State. But I don't think we should be underdogs in the spread, either. I know it's only three points, but still. I think we got this. We're hungry, bitches.

You want to know how hungry?

In the words of Ian Williams, upon being asked how he felt about Miami not recruiting him because he was "too small"--

"I guess you'll find out on December 31st."

GO IRISH BEAT HURRICANES!