Candyland

Notre Dame 40, Washington State 14

The Irish spent Saturday night strolling down the colorful lanes of Candyland, stuffing their pockets with bonbons and lollipops and ice cream floats and tossing their opponents into the Molasses Swamp.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dembicer/126630489/in/photostream/

Appropriate, considering it was Halloween, and the Irish are 15-0 in games played on the 31st of October.



Rumbling Through the Gumdrop Mountains

Is it just me, or did the Washington State defense make our running attack look particularly spectacular last weekend? It's pretty hard to say boo to 255 yards rushing and 5.3 yards per carry. Robert Huuuuuuughes racked up 131 yards on the ground (as well as 51 through the air) and 1 TD, more than making up for the absence of injured lead running back Armando Allen. There is absolutely nothing that is not fun about watching your lead runner consistently pound it into traffic and knock three guys over at once while lunging for first downs. The WSU defense might have been a bunch of squidgy, sugar-coated gumdrops for all the difference it made to our runners.

But gumdrops are an exceedingly appropriate metaphor, seeing as they do occasionally glob onto you if you don't watch out. Case in point: the speedy, scrappy play of Theo Riddick (right), who on more than one occasion looked like he was going to make a break for the endzone, only to get tripped up by his shoestrings. You have to give credit to the WSU defense for that, at least--Theo's the fastest guy on the team, and if WSU didn't manage to stuff the run, at least they managed to stop our runners from churning up more than 20 yards at a time. But Theo was pretty sweet to watch nevertheless, and what I loved most about him was the passion he brought to the game--almost every time he was downed, he pounded the ball to the ground as if to say, "Damn! I shoulda had more."

Which is more or less exactly the attitude you want every single player on your team to have, if you expect to go forth and win any games at all.

So, props to you, Irish rushing attack. Not only did you pound it to the WSU defense all day long, you helped us rack up massive amounts of time on the clock, leading the Irish to win the time of possession battle in fine fashion, 40:54 to Washington State's 19:06. (And this week, winning the time of possession actually meant something.)


Soaring Over the Rainbow Trail

And by that, I mean Golden Tate.

So, if you're like me and you just can't get enough of Golden Tate's spectacular Hail Mary touchdown grab in between the hands of three Washington State defenders...here's a little highlight clip for you.

Also in this clip is Charlie Weis's other pick for "play of the game"--the mad dash by Mike Ragone to stop a WSU player for returning our blocked punt for a score, which also deserves a ROY G. BIV nod of recognition.





Every week, there is more to say about Golden Tate. The man is absolutely unstoppable. He does it through the air. He does it on the ground. (He waves his hand around a lot and catches things on special teams.) Because it's not enough to have four grabs for 80 yards and 1 receiving touchdown. It's not enough to have 61 yards on the ground (including the longest run of the game, at 33 yards) and 1 rushing touchdown. Golden Tate must also have the absolute greatest stat of the game--which was that after the first half, he had more all-purpose yards by himself than the entire WSU offense combined.

Tate is currently #3 in the country in receiving yards with 927, sandwiched in between players from the apparently juggernaut offenses of Bowling Green, Hawaii (#1 and #2 in receiving yards) and Toledo (both the #3 and #4 receivers in terms of yardage play for the Rockets). Unranked teams in Ohio apparently have killer pass offenses this year...who knew?

And Golden Tate wasn't even the #1 receiver on our team this week (in # of receptions). That distinction goes to Kyle Rudolph--apparently Coach Weis remembered he could catch the ball and decided to actually throw it to him this week. Six catches for 59 yards and a tidy little collection of first downs...no complaints there. Though of course it seemed like every time Kyle Rudolph had a really big play, it got called back on a penalty. Speaking of which...


Our Very own Molasses Swamp

Six penalties on offense is far too many. And two completely unnecessary personal fouls on Eric Olsen that negated two really spectacular plays? Inexcusable. Olsen's a senior. It's way too late in the game for this kind of nonsense. (You know what, Eric, you better just sit there for a while and wait until I draw a red card.)

The penalties were our only really reprehensible aspect of play in this game, I thought--that and our continuing failure to make it to the endzone after we reach the red zone. Come on, guys, seriously? We can throw 50-yard touchdown bombs to end the second half but we can't run it in from the 11?

Although I guess it is nice to say that our current kicker now holds the record for the most successive field goals made by an ND player, with 14 in a row. (Which just goes to show you how much of a priority special teams have NOT been for the Irish for, oh, pretty much forever.)


Chucking it over the Gingerbread Plum Tree

But let's not let the minor frustrations of our offense overshadow the exemplary play of our gunslingers, who both, in addition to throwing beautiful touchdown passes, also apparently have the special ability to become injured by having other people fall on them. (You know, Dayne, you don't really HAVE to follow in Jimmy's footsteps, that's...just an expression...)

That horrifying (and simultaenously brain-scratching--seriously, did YOU remember Evan Sharpley was still on the team?) moment aside, however, Dayne Crist gave us a glimpse of why he was such a highly-rated recruit, and what we can expect to see from him in the future:




As the announcers point out in the video, Crist didn't have a stellar day; only 2-of-6 for passing and then that injury...but his only significant playing time in the past two seasons was during this year's Purdue game, and as I recall it there were an awful lot of Wildcat plays called in that game. So give it another year or so, throw in some more playing experience (fingers crossed for some nice, easy fourth quarters next season) and a chance for him to catch up to the college game speed...and I'd say we have another solid passer on our hands.


Speaking of which, JimmayJimmayJimmay once again proved why he's the #2 (not #1 yet? durn) college passer in America, finishing with 22-of-27 passing (good for an 81% completion rate), 258 yards, and 2 TDs by the end of the third quarter. Not too shabby.

As I understand it, there have been a lot of rumors flying around about whether dear Jimbo's going to declare for the draft after the end of this season.

To which I say: damn fool move if he does.

But I don't think he will. I am of the opinion that Jimmy wanted to play college ball--and wanted to play at Notre Dame--for a few different reasons:
1) He wanted to start all four years.
2) He wanted to win the Heisman Trophy.
3) He wanted to win a national championship.

And he's not going to accomplish any of those this year, so I highly anticipate his return next season.

(If you don't believe me, I present to you Darius Walker & Declaring Early for the Draft: A Cautionary Tale. D-Walk, despite his obvious talent and good looks, has now been on the practice squads of 3 different NFL teams, most recently the Denver Broncos. Not exactly a superstar career so far.)

I personally, despite my enduring disdain for Jimmy Clausen, would advise him to go nowhere. (Especially, you know, if Dayne Crist is seriously injured.)




Knocking over the Crooked Old Peanut Brittle House
aka This is the story of how the Notre Dame defense lit up the field ALL--NIGHT--LONG.


I have to say, the first time the Notre Dame defense went out there and failed to force a three-and-out, I was disappointed.

But that was on WSU's fourth possession, so really, who am I to complain?

There is absolutely nothing but sweet, crunchy, peanut brittle-y goodness when it comes to the defensive play on Saturday. Sure, there were some weak patches--once when our starting secondary got beat for a TD reception to WSU's Jared Karstetter, and then after our second-string came out, missed a few tackles, and gave up another TD pass to Karstetter.

But other than that, our secondary did a pretty good job of disrupting WSU's passing game--freshman QB Jeff Tuel, who passed for 354 yards and 2 TDs against Cal, was 12-of-24 passing for 104 yards. WSU's leading receiver had 3 catches for 27 yards.

Looks to me like the WSU receivers got whacked with some pretty big sticks of peanut brittle.

In other crunchy, tasty news, our defense recorded 10 tackles for loss, 3 pass break-ups, 2 interceptions, and 5 sacks.

The rest of the defense has also decided to continue the trend of proving they can tackle as well as Kyle McCarthy. McCarthy tied for second this week in total tackles, along with Jamoris Slaughter. Both Slaughter (who, by the way, has one of my all-time favorite football player names--right up there with Golden H. Tate III, Booger McFarland, Justin White-Frisbee, and Peerless Price) and McCarthy finished with 3 solo and 1 assists in tackles, behind Kapron Lewis-Moore, who had 5 total tackles.

The best news, though, is that twenty-four of Notre Dame's players recorded tackles this week, and half of them came away with more than one tackle. Which just goes to show you that our defense knows how to play like a unit after all.

My absolute favorite defensive picture of the week has to be the one of Brian Smith (above) bearing down on Tuel from above like a sheet of flying shrapnel (good for abrasions, contusions, and incomplete passes!).


Ice Cream Floats

That's what it feels like to be on the other side of this game...like we're floating on a big, creamy, dreamy lake of--

Oh wait we're playing the triple option this week against a 6-3 Navy squad that apparently has a defense this year. Shit.

So let's just rewind to the end of this game, shall we? And stay there and celebrate with Sergio Brown for a while....

I'm not sure what's better in this picture...the aerodynamics of Sergio Brown or Golden Tate's face.

Also, if you're like me and just can't get enough of embedded video, here is a very nice highlight reel of the game, complete with intense rock song overlay. (I advise you to watch Michael Floyd's face when Charlie Weis is telling off the offense for having too many penalties, at around the 1:35 mark in the video. Even when that kid's not in the game, he is INTENSE.) Also I highly advise you to overlook the fact that this video oversteps the boundaries of the rest of this post. Or at least it does on my computer. (I'm considering a change to a new blog template, but I'm just too lazy to do anything about it right now.)





Thus concludes our stroll through Candyland.


GO IRISH BEAT NAVY!


P.S. Did anyone else notice that this game was being sponsored by the U.S. Navy? Gotta love that Navy. So classy.

Also, for those of you not watching the game at home, here is a little recap of the advertisements put out this week by Washington State University and the University of Notre Dame (paraphrased):

WSU: Guess what? We save sea otters!

ND: Oh yeah? Well we refashioned the government of Chile into a DEMOCRACY! What now? Bring it! *manly chest thump*

STREAK-BREAKERS

Notre Dame 20, Boston College 16

They're fast....

They're bold...

They're high-flying -- they're odds-defying --

They're heart-stopping -- they're eye-popping --

They're *Golden*....

They're the

STREAK-BREAKERS!!!!!!!!!
(Coming this fall to a stadium near you!)

Come see the team that conquered oceans, slaughtered water parks, and grappled the gridiron to wrest a pineapple trophy (and the nation's top linebacking prospect) from its manxome foe in the exotic kingdom of Hawai'i!

Come view the vortex of victory that vilified the voracious villains of Sparta, vanquishing their vile view that our venue was their vacation villa!

Come marvel over the Golden victory-Smiths who snatched glory out of thin air to swat away their .500 record against a stinging, pestering, festering foe!

Let us bow our heads in remembrance of the team that broke the 42-game win streak against our noble comrades from the Naval Academy...let us not forget the sorrow of Senior Day against Syracuse...let us lament the tears of our laconic leader following our loss to the lowbrow lugs of Los Angeles...

For the STREAK-BREAKERS are but a fledgling company, and they have many yards to cover before they can return true Glory to our trophy cases...




Hail to the Interceptors

So. Five turnovers isn't a bad way to go about winning a game. Especially when three of those came in the form of interceptions--two of them courtesy of the unstoppable inferno of testosterone that is Kyle McCarthy, and the game-winner courtesy of the barreling bone-crusher that is Brian Smith. Those three interceptions suggest that our pass-rush isn't just a whim of wishful thinking. The two forced fumbles (by a back who hadn't lost the ball in his last 356 carries) suggests that our fundamentals have upped the ante not only with tackling, but with stripping the ball.

The successful conversion of a 4th-and-17 by our opponent suggests that members of our secondary ought to go home and rethink their lives.

BC came into this game ranked 106th in passing offense, averaging 117 yards per game, and left Notre Dame Stadium with 279 yards through the air, including 10 passes of 20 yards or more.

It's great that our run defense is doing so well and all, but forcing teams to take to the air really only works in your favor if your secondary doesn't keep coughing up huge plays.

Giving up the big play has been a struggle for our defense all season long, but it does seem like our defense has improved a little bit in every game this season. We've tightened up our run defense. We've improved our fundamentals in tackling. We've given Manti Te'o more playing time. We've made some strides in our pass rush. We've forced some turnovers. We've managed to win more than one game because of our defensive play.

And now, for only the second time all season, we managed to hold our opponent to less than 20 points.

Horrific 4th-and-17 conversions aside, our defense pretty much gift-wrapped this game for our offense. They handed them five possessions to rack up the score against Boston College.

But apparently the defense used double-sided tape and superglue to gift-wrap the game, because the offense absolutely could not rip it open--even though, presumably, they were trying.



Pass on

This game was (technically) won through the air by both sides of the ball. 128 receiving yards and 2 touchdown passes for Golden Tate. Passes to 6 different receivers and a 66.6% completion rate for Jimmy Clausen. (Also, you know, over 100 yards on the ground for Armando Allen and some halfway decent clock control to win the time of possession battle.) According to Rivals.com, Jimmy and Golden are now the top QB-WR duo in the nation.

It seems astounding that this can be the case when it felt like the offense was trying really hard to lose for most of the game.

A safety in the first quarter?

Failure to convert a 4th-and-1 on the goal line?

Less passing yards for JimmayJimmayJimmay than for Old Fogey Freshman QB Dave Shinskie?

Five turnovers and only ONE of them was converted into any kind of points at all?


I don't know what to think about this. Is our offense just hungover from the loss to USC? (The players claim they're not, but, you know, sometimes they lie.) Did the injury of Robby Parris hurt us that much? Was Charlie a complete dumbass for calling that Wildcat play on the goal line instead of just QB sneaking it? (I suppose that's debatable. We all know how I feel about the Wildcat. But that prejudice aside--when you're direct-snapping it to Robert Hughes, you're not fooling anybody. I am not at all surprised that BC's defense picked up on that play and managed to stuff us. However, despite my disdain for the Wildcat, I do expect better things out of our O-line at this point. Also, it is difficult to argue against the decision to give the ball to Robert Hughes in a situation like that, particularly when you think about the absolutely absurd 2-point conversion he made against Washington.)

Some credit is due to the Boston College defense, I suppose, but frankly any offense that can rack up 27 points and several touchdown passes against USC's defense shouldn't be having fits and starts and failures against opponents like BC. I don't want to criticize Charlie's "dink and dunk" strategy here, because I am such a fan of the short passes. Also I think it's good for Charlie to force Jimmy to rein himself in before he turns into another Rex Grossman, whose entire strategy in life seems to be, "F*** it, I'm throwing the ball downfield."

Perhaps the biggest problem we encountered with the "dink and dunk" strategy was that most of our receivers didn't do very well after the catch. You get the ball in Golden Tate's hands, and he will rack you up some extra yards. But this is not necessarily true for most of our other receivers, and if you're throwing short passes all day long, you really NEED your receivers to step up and make those after-the-catch plays, because the secondary is going to be swarming all over them like a pack of evil invading ladybugs. Robby Parris has gotten better at after-the-catch plays this season, but unfortunately he was out for most of the game. Duval Kamara did a decent job as the #2 receiver, averaging 8 yards per catch, but his longest gain was only 12 yards. And overall our offensive strategy didn't seem to work that well, considering over half of our drives didn't even make it past the fifty-yard line.

I suppose you could argue that we've improved our production in the red zone, because only once did we get inside the twenty and fail to score. I mean, that's some sort of improvement. Or something.

But...come on, seriously? FIVE turnovers and all we walk away with is one lousy field goal? That's almost as bad as making it to the red zone five times and coming away without a single touchdown. Or maybe it's worse. I really can't decide.

All I know is we need Michael Floyd the way diabetics need insulin. It shouldn't be this way, not when Jimmy and Golden and Armando are all playing so well--but without him, it seems like our offense just isn't working quite right. I don't care what kind of rankings the Rivals people are giving our QB--we should be racking up five touchdowns against teams like BC. And we're not. So something needs fixing--STAT.



For ND

On the flip side of that...isn't it exciting that we've gotten to this place again? This, "damn our QB threw for a couple hundred yards with a 66% completion rate and our top receiver & RB had 100+ yard days--this is so PATHETIC, why aren't we doing BETTER?" place. We're almost back where Weis started, at "9-3 is not good enough." Because, for this team, 9-3 is NOT good enough. We're still only seconds (and one overtime) away from being undefeated. We're still breaking streaks. We're still finding ways to win.

And we are nowhere near reaching our potential.


So COME ON, Coach Weis. COME ON, team. We are this close--THIS CLOSE to being a great team again. I don't know what it's going to take--I don't know what we have to do--but someone has to do SOMETHING to find that switch that will just TURN--US--ON.

I know that we've got it in us somewhere. I KNOW we've got the ability to play in every game the way we played in the Hawaii Bowl. And I keep thinking--maybe this week, maybe THIS week, maybe NOW we'll break out and make it happen. Maybe maybe maybe. Waiting waiting waiting.

We are sitting on this enormous effing geyser of potential and it JUST -- NEEDS -- TO -- E -- RUPT.

It's almost enough to make you want to strangle something. Possibly a giant stuffed animal in the shape of a cougar. (I mean, I wouldn't want to hurt a real animal.)



AD's Aweigh

So, in other news, let me just take a moment to vilify our Athletic Director.

Dear Mr. Swarbrick,

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SMOKING? WESTERN MICHIGAN? REALLY? WESTERN MICHIGAN? ISN'T IT BAD ENOUGH THAT WE ALREADY PLAY TWO OTHER TEAMS FROM MICHIGAN? AND WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS PLATED IN GOLD LEAF COMPELLED YOU TO PUT WMU IN THE SAME STREAK OF GAMES AS TULSA, NAVY, UTAH AND ARMY? DO YOU WANT NOTRE DAME TO NEVER MAKE IT TO ANOTHER BCS BOWL GAME EVER AGAIN?

Look, I know you've got it in your head that all Notre Dame fans are all crazy-asses who want to be playing Top-10 teams every single week, every single season from now until forever, but that's just not true. We're not complete masochists. No one wants us to play, I don't know, Michigan followed by USC followed by Texas followed by TCU followed by Ohio State followed by Florida followed by Alabama followed by Boise State followed by Oregon followed by Iowa followed by Navy followed by LSU. I mean, maybe I'd put that kind of schedule together on NCAA Football just for shits and giggles. And I'm not saying it wouldn't be totally badass to see all of those teams on our schedule at some point. But all of them on the same schedule? Right in a row? We would die. Any team would die. Everyone would be injured by the end of the season. It would be worse than playing in the SEC. And no one actually wants that. (You know, unless our team magically transformed into the best team in the entire history of college football and kicked the crap out of all those other teams. But that's called "fantasy land," and contrary to popular belief, Notre Dame fans do not actually live there.)

What we DO want--and what you currently seem to be failing to grasp--is to at least have a STRONG schedule every season. Regardless of the ability of our team to compete for a national championship every single year, we do expect to have a schedule every single year that would actually allow us to be considered for a berth in the national championship. And seeing as we're an independent and all--you may have noticed--we are actually free to schedule games with ANY SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY, so the fact that you are wasting perfectly good game slots on schools like Tulsa and Western Michigan kind of breaks my brain. You want to extend the Purdue series to 2021? Fine. There's a history there. You want to give us opponents like Nevada to open the season and opponents like UConn for Senior Day? Sure. Whatever.

But how the hell is our team supposed to be ready for an away game at USC when the five games leading up to it are WMU, Navy, Tulsa, Utah, and Army? With any kind of luck, ONE of those teams might be ranked by the time we face them. And I know most of our O-line is leaving next year and all, but you know, I'm pretty sure Jimmy signed up to win a national championship. And I just don't see how that schedule is going to help us make any kind of case for a national championship at all. And how the hell are we supposed to ever get any ND team in shape for a national championship game again if we don't give them a proper lineup of opponents to battle with? Even if, hypothetically, we play like geniuses next season and steamroller over every single opponent 56-0 on our way out to California to clash with USC...even if we snap the streak against the Trojans and pull out the regular season undefeated for the first time in FOR-FREAKING-EVER...even if such a glorious and unlikely thing does happen...then we've still got to face some powerhouse team in the national championship game, probably from the SEC or the Big 12, and...we just won't be conditioned for it. You simply cannot come out of a schedule like ours prepared to face an opponent that's managed to survive the gory bloodbath that is the SEC. I mean, helloooo, did you watch Notre Dame play in the Sugar Bowl?

Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, you are setting us up to lose.

And that--that is despicable.

If you ever stoop so low as to schedule a I-AA team (or whatever the hell it is they're calling them these days), I will be sending an actual letter to your actual office that will probably qualify as actual hate mail. And it will be interesting to see whether the alumni actually let you keep your job.

Love, Me



Onward to Victory

The 25th-ranked Irish (#23 in the BCS rankings!) are headed out to sunny San Antonio this week to play unranked Washington State (1-6).

If there was ever a time to lay a smackdown on an opponent...that time is now. Washington State's closest game of the season was their 30-27 victory over SMU. Their closest loss was a 14-27 decision against Arizona State. Most of their games have been total blowout losses, and there's no reason the Irish shouldn't be able to blow the game wide open against them, too. It won't necessarily be a cupcake game, but there's no reason we shouldn't walk out of the Alamodome with a solid, convincing victory on our hands.

We're facing another true freshman QB this week, Jeff Tuel, and he just put up 2 TDs and 354 yards through the air against Cal -- his best performance of the season and the best by a Cougar freshman since Drew Bledsoe in 1990. Our secondary better watch out, or Washington State could make this game way closer than it needs to be.

However, it looks like most of Washington State's weaknesses are things our team can exploit:

-Our offense needs to score often and early. WSU has been wildly outscored by its opponents in the first quarter this season, 112-3. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to do the same.

-Their run defense has been described as "non-existent." They gave up 309 yards on the ground to Cal; the Bears averaged 7.9 yards per carry. Should be a big day for Armando Allen, and I'm looking forward to seeing more production out of Robert Hughes, James Aldridge, and possibly even Golden Tate. (I strongly suspect Charlie of using the Wildcat formation during this game. I guess we'll see how it goes.)

-Their special teams (described as "a mess") gave up a 54-yard kickoff return and a 76-yard punt return against Cal. Let's hope Theo Riddick, Barry Gallup Jr., and Golden Tate all get some good blocks, because I'm hungry for a special teams touchdown. It's been quite a drought.

Now that we've got the Boston College monkey off our backs, hopefully this will be a good week for the team to refocus, get organized, and play a solid, dominant game.

After all, I expect nothing less from the STREAK-BREAKERS!!!!!!


GO IRISH BEAT COUGARS!

The Fighting Irish

Notre Dame 37, Washington 30

"We're gonna go, go, go, go! -- and we aren't going to stop until we go over that goal line! And don't forget, men -- today is the day we're gonna win!" –Knute Rockne



This week, it’s all about school spirit. Yesterday’s game wasn’t anything worthy of a Grantland Rice article, but it’s certainly worthy of a few school song lyrics and some Notre Dame quotes of olde. (Yes, olde. With an “e.” The “e” is very important. It adds character and a sense of nostalgia.)



The Fighting Irish

“We will fight in every game, strong of heart and true to her name…”
–The Notre Dame Victory March

Those of you in the band possibly haven’t seen Notre Dame’s television ad this year, but it focuses on all of the research, academic work, and service work Notre Dame does to fight disease, social injustice, and poverty in various parts of the world. The tag line is, “We are the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.”

This fits in well with the theme of yesterday’s game—we are a team now that fights, fights, fights, and never stops fighting. We take games right down to the wire, and we prevail. (Never mind, for the moment, that these games shouldn’t be going right down to the wire—just go with me on this.) Charlie Weis said it himself in yesterday’s presser: “I’m just happy, really happy for these kids. They just keep fighting and fighting and fighting.”

Or, in the words of Golden Tate, “I guess we’re just a clutch team.”

Word.

Once again, the maturity, unity, and leadership of this team continues to shine through, prevailing over bad luck, dumbass coaching calls, and questionable officiating.

Gone are the accusations that Charlie Weis can’t win a close game. (Well. Maybe he can’t, but now he has players who want it badly enough and they sure can.)

Gone is the inability to win in overtime. (Screw you, last year’s Pitt game. You are but a bug splatter on the foggy windshield of my memory.)

Absolutely eviscerated are the questions about whether this is a team that can play with heart. (Our hearts are as big as the Emerald Isle, with hopes stretching higher than the top of Dublin’s Millennium Spire. …you know, metaphorically speaking and all of that.)

And gone is the tight pinch of dread in my chest that has me flashing forward to the worst of all possible outcomes (i.e., WE LOSE) before the game clock’s even run down to 5:00. (One of these days, football’s going to put me into cardiac arrest, but at least it won’t be with me thinking, “Oh BOLLOCKS, what a bunch of TOSSERS, we’re going to lose a bloody close game AGAIN!” ……because apparently my anguished inner monologue speaks with a British accent. Which is unfortunate, really, considering I’m cheering for the Irish.)

And, as the sign hanging in my bedroom back home so boldly proclaims, THE FIGHT IS BACK.



Fighting the Fight

”And when the Irish backs go marching by
The cheering thousands shout their battle cry
For Notre Dame men are marching into the game
Fighting the fight for you Notre Dame…”
-When the Irish Backs go Marching By

Notre Dame racked up 530 yards of total offense on the day, with over 400 of those yards snatched from the air by 6 different receivers. Despite this, however, it’s impossible to say that this game was won through the passing game.

This game was won on a miraculous 2-point conversion by Robert Hughes. This game was won on the swift feet of Golden Tate. This game was won in the trenches by a defense that put up monstrous, score-stopping goal-line stands worthy of the NFL. This game was won by the foot of Nick Tausch. This game was won by a replay official who decided Washington’s runner was down on the 1-yard line. This game was won by Jimmy’s presence in the pocket and the hands of Kyle Rudolph on a fourth-quarter TD grab. This game was won by the man, the mystery, the maelstrom that is Kyle McCarthy. This game was won by a 1-yard TD run in overtime by Robert Huuuuughes.

This game was won by the Fighting Irish of the University of Notre Dame.


Now, that said, and as sweet as it sounds (and savor it, because it is)—WHAT THE HELL, GUYS? FIVE TRIPS TO THE RED ZONE AND YOU CAN’T SCORE AN EFFING TOUCHDOWN? I can’t decide which is more ridiculous, Charlie Weis’s prolific (well, theoretically prolific), pro-style offense failing to find the end zone on five trips into scoring territory, or scrambling QB Jake Locker’s inability to punch the ball into the end zone on six different tries from the one-yard line.

We could have easily made this a fifty-point game. It should never have been this close. Never.

Most of the write-ups after the game give credit to Washington’s defense for Notre Dame continually stalling in the red zone, but I don’t buy it. Not entirely. I believe they have a good red zone defense, but I don’t think they’re nearly as good as we made them look.

For example, on Notre Dame’s first drive, they had three absolutely beautiful run plays (including an impressive, well-timed, well-blocked reverse to Golden Tate that picked up 31 yards), then they get into the red zone and Charlie called a dumbass play from the Wildcat that went NOWHERE (three things on this play: 1. If we’re running the ball just fine not using the Wildcat, why-the-F would you switch TO the Wildcat? 2. We only run approximately 3 plays out of this formation, and in every game, the first time we run it, it’s always the same play: a direct snap for a run. Not a reverse, not a crazy fake followed by a TD pass, but a run. Don’t you think defenses have picked up on this by now? Washington’s clearly did. 3. If you will recall, on our next scoring drive, we AGAIN tried to run plays from the Wildcat in the red zone, and these were also hugely ineffective and led to another FG, so, you know, I don’t really care what the Wildcat did against Purdue, I still really hate this formation), then we got tackled for a loss (which, again, I’ll give credit to Washington’s defense for), and THEN we just straight-up dropped two passes, which, with the receivers we have (yes, even with Michael Floyd out), is just flat-out inexcusable. Jimmy’s throws, as a whole, are too accurate for our receivers to fail to make plays on them. (Hot damn. That whole paragraph was only two sentences. Thank YOU, parenthetical statements.)

Speaking of JimmayJimmayJimmay, I do have to give credit to the little pustule. He’s playing like the player we recruited him to be, he’s coming off like way less of a tosspot in his interviews, and though I’m still not convinced he knows all the words to the alma mater, at least now he knows Charlie’s playbook. Occasionally he still makes bonehead plays, such as throwing backward passes that are picked up off the ground by the opposing defense and run in for an easy touchdown, but I’m glad to say that these are uncharacteristic.

You can tell he’s really in control of things in the pocket—for example, his successful evasion of a sack to complete a pass to Tate in the second quarter, which Tate then took to the HOUSE using his killer speed, giving us our first touchdown of the day. These are the moments that mark the evolution of both Jimmy and Golden Tate. And it’s exciting to watch, even if Jimmy still reveals how much of a tool he is during his post-TD celebrations. (What’s with all this nodding and wiggling various fingers in the air after you throw a successful TD pass? Can’t you just jump up and pump your fist in the air like a normal person?)



What Though the Odds

“What tho the odds be great or small, old Notre Dame will win overall…”
– The Notre Dame Victory March

So, by “the odds” here, we’re talking about the referees. Pac-10 officials always do an, erm, interesting job officiating Notre Dame games, but toward the end of this game, I found some of the calls they made particularly intriguing.

I, like the announcers, was surprised that they ruled Chris Polk’s apparent TD run down on the one-yard line. I mean, I’m not complaining or anything, but I agree with the announcers that there wasn’t really incontrovertible video evidence that he was down before the ball broke the plane of the end zone. If they’d ruled the ball down on the one yard line and then had it challenged, I would agree with them upholding their call, but this way…. Well, like I said, I’m not complaining. It’s almost like football karma making up for the Michael Floyd TD they (not the Pac-10 officials specifically, but officiating crews in general) refused to give us against MSU. (Almost.)

But then it seemed like the refs felt like they short-changed Washington with that ruling, because then they tried to screw ND over. After our defense managed to pull out an absolutely STUNNING stop right on the goal line, the refs called a BS personal foul (“roughing the snapper”??? SERIOUSLY? I, like the commentators, did NOT see this happen) to give the Huskies another set of downs starting at the half yard line.

And, because the Irish defense apparently morphed into some sort of superhuman, ball-stuffing behemoth midway through the game—like an impossible mutant progeny of The Hulk and Optimus Prime—we stuffed them AGAIN.

Take THAT, Pac-10 Officials.

However, I thought the most intriguing call of the game came on that Hughes 2-point conversion run/shoving scrum-fest into the end zone. The officials looked like they were thinking about calling a penalty on that play (they even threw a yellow flag and everything), but apparently they decided they’d like to leave South Bend alive, so they thought better of it and ruled that whoops, sorry, that flag-throwing was just an accident. It’s like they were trying to give us our very own “Bush Push” play to take home and treasure. (*snort*) This, of course, in no way makes up for the bullshit ending of that 2005 USC game WHICH WE TOTALLY EFFING WON, but whatever. At least the Pac-10 officials still value their own lives, so that’s something.

Now, on to brighter and happier things.



The South Bend Cyclone Maelstrom

“A cyclone maelstrom can't be snared. It may be surrounded, but somewhere it breaks through to keep on going. When the cyclone maelstrom starts from South Bend, where the candle lights still gleam through the Indiana sycamores, those in the way must take to storm cellars at top speed.” –Grantland Rice

Okay, so I know I said yesterday’s game was nothing worthy of a Grantland Rice article, but there’s one exception to that rule, and that exception is the human maelstrom known as Kyle McCarthy.

This kid is sickeningly good.

Manti Te’o shined yesterday, racking up 10 tackles during his first start all season—and this still wasn’t enough to keep up with Kyle McCarthy. McCarthy finished the day with 12 tackles, 7 of them solo (which only 2 of Manti’s were).

How can you stop a beast? How can you contain a maelstrom?

You don’t. It contains you.

It contains you by wrapping up and tackling like nobody else on the team. It contains you by having a freakish sense of where the ball is going to be on almost every single play. It contains you by playing behind a defensive line that buckles down in the trenches on key plays. It contains you by stuffing your run game on the one-yard line over and over and over again. It contains you by leaping for interceptions (and near-interceptions) late in the game. It contains you by slamming into a receiver with enough force to jar the ball loose on a crucial 4th-and-19 OT play (with the help of Harrison Smith). It contains you by leading the team in tackles every single week for months on end.

And if the world were fair, and the voting for “the best player in college football” hadn’t become a glorified quarterback trophy, Kyle McCarthy should SO be on the Heisman Watchlist right now.

But no, apparently just being a maelstrom isn’t enough. Even if the Heisman committee did care about defensive players, he’d probably have to start running back all his interceptions for touchdowns and forcing more actual fumbles (instead of plays that are ruled not fumbles) and doing something visually thrilling on special teams, too, like blocking kicks or returning punts or something. Because it’s not enough to be good to win the Heisman—you have to be good with pizzazz.

Sigh.

But that will not stop Kyle McCarthy from continuing to be a human maelstrom, so I guess I can’t complain.



Rise and Strike

“Oh it’s a hike, hike, hike to victory
The call to rise and strike…”
—Hike, Notre Dame

So, it’s nice to see the motto on the front of The Shirt this year actually amount to something.

I know I’ve been maligning our defense these past couple weeks, but, you know, for the past couple games, they deserved to be a little maligned. This week, however, Jon Tenuta and his defensive staff, along with a truly awe-inspiring effort by the players, came through for us to make the win happen. Apparently all their work on fundamentals is paying off—-not so much with the whole wrapping-up-and-tackling thing (if our performance against Washington running back Chris Polk is any indication), but definitely with the fundamentals in the D-line, as evidenced by the previously-mentioned goal line stands. When push came to shove, we shoved back harder. I watched our defense do some things I truly did not think they were capable of. And in overtime, when we needed them to shove it down Washington’s throats—to rise and strike, essentially—they did. In a big way.

Now, if only this game would propel them to more consistency with, you know, TACKLING, I’d be really pleased. Maybe it’s just me, but after you run into a guy, he shouldn’t keep churning down field with the ball. He should be on his ass wondering what hit him. (1967. Stars and flowers and acid-trippy birds.)

Overall, though, our defensive play was light-years ahead of last week. Washington scored on their first drive, sure, but after that the Washington offense did pretty much NOTHING until the second half. Well, okay, they had that field goal right before halftime, but really, if it weren’t for the anemic play of our offense, including that one really unfortunate backward pass play by Jimmy, that wouldn’t have mattered at all—and there would have been no freaking overtime!!! (Oh, the possibilities….)

Enough of that, though. “What if”s don’t matter in football (just ask Michigan!), so moving right along…


Onward to Victory

“…while her loyal sons are marching onward to victory.”
—The Notre Dame Victory March aka The Legendary Notre Dame Victory March aka The Greatest of All University Fight Songs

And by this, we mean GO IRISH BEAT TROJANS!

Next week’s a bye week. This means I’ll be in football withdrawal, which means I’ll be writing a preview for the Notre Dame/USC game as a means of therapy. (And also possibly a pissy rant about how screwed up the Heisman voting has become.)

So until next week, kids…. $*@# IT, TROJANS – GO IRISH GO!

This Week's Extended Metaphor: Harvey Dent

Notre Dame 24, Purdue 21

“Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
–Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight




In Notre Dame football, there’s a pretty easy litmus test for whether you go down in the record books as a hero or a villain.

1. Did you lead the Fighting Irish to a national championship?
If YES – congratulations! You will go down in the annals of ND Football history as one of the greats, be commonly referred to by just one of your names (Rockne, Ara, Lou, etc.), stay in the consciousness of Irish fans for generations to come, and eventually have a bronze statue erected in your honor in the vicinity of Notre Dame Stadium.
If NO—please proceed to question two.

2. Is your name Bob Davie?
If NO—congratulations! Your name will be dropped out of the average Notre Dame fan’s cultural memory in ten years or less.
If YES—Don’t you wish members of the media would stop mentioning your affiliation with Notre Dame? Me too. It would be great if, the next time someone brings it up, you could just stop pretending like you know what the hell you’re talking about. K-thx-bye.


Obviously, the heroes are the ones we like to remember. Notre Dame won at least one national championship in every decade in the twentieth century except for the first and the last. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Notre Dame was still learning how to play the game. And in the last…well, you could make the argument that ND should have won another national championship in the 1990’s. When speaking of that 1993 season, Lou Holtz certainly does. (If they ever invent time travel, I’m going back to that ’93 Boston College game and making sure their kicker has a case of blistering turf toe the likes of which Jimmy has never imagined.)

But as much as I’d like to agree with Lou, that’s really neither here nor there. What matters—what’s frustrating—what’s been eating Notre Dame fans alive pretty much since the end of the 1993 season—is that we are in the longest dry spell in Notre Dame history. We’ve failed to win a national championship for twenty years, we coughed up the all-time win record to Michigan (and then watched as the two winningest programs in college football history suffered through back-to-back 3-9 seasons), and we lost our chance to assuage some of the pain with an 8th Heisman Trophy to some chump quarterback from Ohio State whose name nobody even remembers anymore. (Screw you, Whatsyourname, Jr. Are YOU a starting quarterback in the NFL right now? NO!)

And as the worst decade of Notre Dame football in a hundred years comes to a close, everybody seems to have the same thing on their minds….



Charlie: The Weis Knight

That ten-year contract is looming large in the psyche of, oh, pretty much every Notre Dame fan ever. Widely regarded as a Really Stupid Move by everyone with 20/20 hindsight and also most human beings who do not have the initials CW, KW, or JJ (why not try actually WINNING a bowl game before you decide to renew your coach’s contract?), the 10-year deal has been an object of intense scrutiny over the past couple seasons as angry fans and rich alumni have debated just how much it would actually cost to buy the contract out. (My estimate? Three times the annual GDP of Haiti, multiplied by how many times Jimmy has complained about turf toe this season, divided by the percentage of yellow-seat ticket holders who would actually pay out of their own pockets to see the Offensive Guru go.)

Regardless of how you felt about the contract when it was first signed, you may recall that, in his first two seasons, it was pretty hard to hate Charlie. What kind of insults do you throw at a guy with 4 Superbowl rings who molds a 50% passer into a Heisman candidate in one season flat (Brady finished 4th in Heisman voting his Junior year, just in case you have forgotten) and takes his team to BCS bowls two years in a row? For two seasons, jokes about hamburgers were pretty much the worst we got…and those kinds of jokes are pretty weak and easy to ignore when your team is ranked in the top 10 and taking you to New Orleans for New Year’s.

And then came the beginning of the end. A 3-9 season followed by a 6-6 season that only barely managed to redeem itself with a long-awaited bowl win. And now, some fans would have you believe, it’s a BCS bowl or bust for Charlie.

It’s funny how quickly Notre Dame fans can go all Harvey Dent on your ass.


Being Two-Face

So, for those of you unfamiliar with the film The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent is the dashing D.A. of Gotham—its public face of good, its White Knight. Through a series of dire and tragic circumstances, he develops into the villain Two-Face—so called because half of his face has been burned off and disfigured, while the other half remains quite normal and dashing-looking.

Two-Face carries with him a coin, which he flips to make important decisions, like whether to order eggs or pancakes for breakfast, or whether he should blow his archenemy’s brains out.

Anyway, the point is that I feel like, as Irish fans, we all play the role of Two-Face. At the beginning of a coach’s career, we show our good side and throw our coins into the air, hoping for the best. We watch eagerly as our coins glint in the sun and wait for a verdict—having thrown the coins high enough so that it’s a season or two (or three) before they land. As football fans, which way the coin lands is hopefully being influenced by something with a little bit more gravity than…gravity…but even so, it seems like when the coin lands, that is it.

If you’re a Lou or an Ara, or a Rockne or a Leahy, you’re a coach who’s managed to take the Irish to a national championship victory in his third season. Your side of the coin will be forever shiny.

If not…you’d better give us a reason to re-flip our coins pretty fast (i.e., put your team in a position to win a championship or at least a BCS bowl game), or we’ll run you out of town with pitchforks and burning shillelaghs.

Personally, at this point, I agree with the gurus over at Blue-Gray Sky—I wouldn’t be sad to see Charlie go, but unless we’ve got a truly talented coach waiting in the wings, there’s simply no point getting rid of him. Now is not the time to be buying out million-dollar contracts—not unless we’re sure there’s another coach out there who’s truly worth the check.



Other binaries

Sometimes I feel like there’s a cosmic coin toss going up before each game. Which team will show up to play today? The team that was practically perfect (in terms of penalties) as it trounced Nevada, or the team hobbling and wobbling with yellow flags and turf toe as it tried really hard to lose to both Michigan State and Purdue? Because, among other things, this is a team that’s just not meeting its potential.

You know, you don’t have to be a team oozing with talent to win football games. Talent makes a difference, as players in this decade like Michael Floyd and Julius Jones and Shane Walton have certainly proven. And it’s hard to be really good without talent.

But even without slop buckets full of talent (and I’m not saying we don’t have talent—I’m just saying we’ve got no excuses), you can still be good. It doesn’t take talent to go to the weight room or the training field and properly condition yourself for the season. It doesn’t take talent to study the playbook and know what you’re supposed to do on the field. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of talent to have fundamentals drilled into your head until your brain turns to mush and you react without thinking. All it takes to accomplish that is grit and determination and passion.

And that’s most of football, isn’t it? Grit and determination and passion? Sixty percent mental, forty percent physical—or so says the movie Little Giants?

It seems to me like potential’s one of the worst things to have. Potential means you’ve got all this pressure and all this expectation and, at the end of the day, nothing to show for it but frustration if things don’t pan out the way you know they could. But in football, as in life, could haves/would haves/should haves mean absolutely nothing—unless, next time, you turn a “coulda woulda shoulda” situation into a “dude I just totally f*%$-ing smoked that shit” situation.

And frustration over all this wasted potential is what’s got me Harvey Dent-ing it up in the stands. At the end of the Purdue game, I swear to you, I did not react when they scored that final touchdown. At least not right away. I was too busy being a gloom-and-doom girl, convincing myself that we were going to lose and steeling myself for the crushing sense of defeat and long night of heckling that was sure to follow.

But eventually, after all the players on the sideline pumped their golden helmets into the air and began rushing toward that end zone like a river bursting through a dam, it hit me--oh hey, maybe you SHOULD be cheering right now. So I jumped up and down and screamed and tried to pull the euphoria out from beneath my sense of temporary paralysis. But it didn’t quite work as well as usual, because I was still standing there with my knees shaking thinking OMFG we had this thing sealed up in the second quarter What The F happened? And I was too busy being pissed off at our team for playing the same damn sloppy-ass game three weeks in a row to even really be happy that we won. And thinking to myself, dear God, if we’re 3-1 right now, why does it feel like we’re 1-3?

And then I wondered—when did I get this way? I mean, if you know me at all, you know I’ve been a complete psychopath about football since high school, so that’s not what I mean. What I mean is—when did I become such an effing DOWNER? There was a time, I do recall, when no matter how badly we were losing, no matter how badly we were playing, I would calculate the likelihood of miraculous fourth-quarter comebacks in my head and cheer until the final whistle blew. Of course, I still always cheer until the final whistle blows, but so far this season it’s been slightly more debatable whether I’ll make it to the final whistle alive, let alone cheering.

Which is, you know, not good.



And now for the main event

All of this waffle aside, let’s talk about the actual football game.

It’s obvious that this team is not the team it has been for the last two seasons. This is a team that can win close games. This is a team that is not going to cough it up to 3-9lameduckcoach Syracuse on Senior Day and make David Bruton cry. This is not a team that’s going down without a fight.

However, this is also not a team that’s going to win the hearts of America—or, more pertinently, save Charlie’s job—anytime soon.

Noticeable progress in the O-line aside, the main improvements in the team this year don’t really have anything to do with blocking, tackling, catching, or stripping the ball. Instead, the main improvements are in team unity, maturity, and leadership. Golden Tate saying he loves having the pressure on him, because that means he gets a chance to help out his team. Jimmy Clausen campaigning for the chance to lead the team on a last-minute 4th quarter touchdown drive, should the need arise. Kyle Rudolph looking at his quarterback in the huddle on 4th down and saying, “Jimmy, give me the ball.” Pretty much everyone in the offensive depth chart saying, “hell yes, we are prepared to step up and make plays in the face of Mike’s/Armando’s/Jimmy’s injury.”

And they did. For three quarters or so.

You want to hear an interesting stat? In the third quarter, when it was all Dayne Crist & the Second-String Superstars (would be a really bad name for a rock band), we kicked the shit out of Purdue in the time of possession battle, 11:40 to 3:20. You remember how many drives Notre Dame had in the third quarter? Two. Yep, that’s right, it took us nearly twelve minutes of game time to engineer two drives downfield. On the first drive, it took us five and a half minutes to get from our own twenty-two yard line to the fifty yard line, and then we had to punt the ball away. On our second drive of the third quarter, we kept the ball for six and a half minutes, and this time drove from our own seventeen yard line to the Purdue forty-one yard line before turning it over on downs.

The third quarter was the only quarter of the game in which neither team scored.

And you’d think, after all that rest we gave our defense, they wouldn’t have choked up two more touchdowns to Purdue—both through the air, and one on an astonishing breakdown in our secondary that left Jaycen Taylor so wide open he could’ve been a barn door.

I think we’ve got good players in our secondary—Robert Blanton was second in tackles this week to the usual team leader, Kyle McCarthy, and our other corner, Darrin Walls, intercepted the ball in the fourth quarter, which unfortunately amounted to nothing—but Purdue threw for 289 yards on Saturday, and there’s NO WAY Purdue’s last touchdown should have happened the way it did. (Somebody screwed up BIG on that play.) At the very least, our pass rush leaves much to be desired. And you’ve got to ask yourself—what GOOD does Tenuta’s aggressive, blitz-happy play-calling do when none of the players seem to know how to make a proper tackle? How about drilling that instead of schemes for a change? And what about stripping the ball? I mean, when is the last time one of our defensive players forced a fumble? Can you even remember that far back? My heart bleeds remembering a time when this was a very real and palpable possibility:




Sigh.

On offense, we got some good production out of the Wildcat formation—which makes my heart bleed, because you all know how I feel about the Wildcat formation. I thought our second string played pretty decent, all things considered (re: chewing up the entire clock in the third quarter), though it was monumentally frustrating that we didn’t manage to convert a fourth down until the fourth quarter.

Also—WTF Charlie on the short-yardage situations??? What, a 4th-and-1 doesn’t seem like a good time for a QB keeper to you? If you’re worried about Jimmy’s toe, direct snap it to Tate or Hughes or, gee, I don’t know, DAYNE CRIST or someone and have them barrel it over the line. Deciding to go for it from the SHOTGUN on a 4th-and-1 is basically like slapping your oversized, supremely experienced offensive line across the face with the white glove of arrogance and saying, “Puh! I spit on convention! Opposing defensive coordinator, I challenge you to a DUEL.”

A duel which you promptly lose, because WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND calls a play from shotgun on a 4th-and-1??!?!??!?!? I don’t CARE if your starting running back is out and your starting QB’s toe is injured—that’s what you’ve got a big, all-day-tough Brady Quinn-sized quarterback for! A quarterback who (you said it yourself, I believe) brings something to the table Jimmy doesn’t—he can actually scramble.

You know Charlie, sometimes I think to myself, damn, that man is good at his job. It’s just too bad you still think your job is to be an offensive coordinator in the NFL, because that’s how you run your offense. And the rest of the team suffers—special teams, defense, fundamentals, mental conditioning to avoid the sea of yellow flags in every game—because once again you’re too busy scheming to fulfill all of your duties as head coach.

I mean, I’m not saying I know what it’s like to be a college football head coach, I’m just saying…it still doesn’t feel like you’re working to figure out the college game here; it feels like you’re still intent on implementing all the fancy-ass crap you had in the NFL. Which only works, you may have noticed, when you’ve got a quarterback who’s mature enough to handle the pressure. Jimmy’s getting there, sure, but even so—it took him almost three years. You can’t play successful college ball in a system that requires a Tom Brady / Brady-Quinn-as-an-upperclassman level of maturity from Day 1. This is still a team sport, you may recall. If your solution to take the pressure off your starting QB when he’s injured is to go to the Wildcat formation as much as possible and remove the quarterback from the game entirely, this may be a sign that your offense, as a whole, puts too much pressure on the quarterback.

I’m not saying it’s not a good offensive system. I’m just saying it’s a stupidass move to try to hold on to this kind of system in college.

And by now, for serious, you should know better.



Heads or tails?

So…where is the rest of this season going to land? We keep playing sloppy, keep playing like we don’t deserve to win, even though in all three of our previous games, we were clearly the team that should have won, with a way wider margin of victory. We failed to run the clock out against Michigan. We escaped from the MSU game with a stunning interception by Kyle McCarthy. We let Purdue claw their way back into a game that should have been slammed soundly shut in the third quarter, and we barely fell across the touchdown line to make it a last-second win.

If our defense would bone up and we could get rid of the excessive penalties, we’d be in a lot better shape. That, combined with a healthy Clausen and a healthy Floyd, would put us in really good shape to take on USC.

As it is, however, I’m worried about us scraping past Washington. Do I think we can beat Washington? Why, yes. But then, I think we could beat any team on this schedule if we could just manage to play to our effing potential. Sometimes our defense stuffs the other team and forces them to three-and-outs…it would be great if they could do this more often. Sometimes our offense executes brilliant last-minute drives down the field…it would be great if they could do that with more consistency and less desperation. Sometimes our special teams plays like they were the #1 kickoff coverage unit in the country last year…but it would be great if we could get some more hangtime on our kicks and some better blocking on our returns.

And as for me? I’m putting away the dark side of the coin. We could be 1-3 right now. We could be 4-0. But we’re not—we’re 3-1. We’re playing sloppy, but any day now that could all go away, and we could go out there and kick the ever-loving shit out of a team in a way that no one’s expecting but everyone’s hoping for.

All of that is entirely out of my hands, of course, so I’ve got nothing left to do but watch the shiny side of my coin glint in the sun, waiting to see if its optimistic flashes are hints of glory—or just a fancy, scheming, Charlie-shaped mirage playing tricks with the light.

In the Operating Room

Notre Dame 33, Michigan State 30

I need 40 CCs of Run Game, STAT. No, not that, not a handoff! Are you crazy, man? Can’t you see we’re going for a First Down here? Our quarterback’s toes are on the line! Give me the Wildcat—the WILDCAT! What do you mean, it didn’t work the last time? Are you in charge here? Inject it! Now…NOW!

>>……>>……………>>…………………




Come on, heartbeat…come on…COME ON...

…>>…………………>>………>--

YES! Touchdown! Now we just need to—

What do you MEAN, they called it a Broken Collarbone? You can’t call a touchdown a Broken Collarbone, that’s absurd…that’s………







NO! Not another holding call!

More penalties?

All right—all right—third-and-fifteen—run it! Run!

>>………………………………………………………

Fine. Let the Defense handle it.


+`+`+`+`+`+`+`+`+`+`+`+


Doctor—doctor, there’s yellow oozing everywhere! There are too many penalties—we can’t possibly—

I don’t need your excuses! BLITZ!

But doctor, they’re burning our secondary like it’s a southern California wildfire! We can’t keep sending our linebackers up to—

There’s too much time left! We have to force the run! BLITZ, I say, BLITZ!

But doctor, the first downs are spreading! You know we can only stop these things in the early stages—if they get a first down, this drive will just keep going, and—

BLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!



Surgery

Every football season is like performing a long and complicated surgery. At the beginning, you cut the season wide open, and after mopping up the mess of nerves, depth charts, and asinine media coverage, you’re ready to begin. You know what’s waiting down the gullet—you just don’t know how the operation’s going to proceed.

This isn’t a routine colonoscopy, men! This is triple bypass surgery! At the end of the day, it’s not your asses [excuse me. your butts.] on the line—it’s your hearts! And the tortured hearts of those around you, waiting to see if you come out of the operation still beating.

We started out this season relatively clean—a routine incision, if you will, and a particularly accurate one at that. No response at all from Nevada the body. No excessive bleeding.

On the second one, though, we may have done some damage to the nerves. Fifteen stitches to Floyd’s knee. An unexpected air pocket through the hands of the offense. A wave of yellow pus that set us back nearly a hundred yards. A defense crucial operating instrument that bent and broke. A failure to adjust. A loss of control at the last possible second.

And this week, complications continued. More pus. More injuries. More frustrations.

But at least, this time, we managed to hold on.


The surgeon

I would just like to take this opportunity to say to you, Charlie, how much I hate the Wildcat formation. I find it frustrating, and I have never enjoyed watching it be employed by any team ever. It’s like slapping your quarterback in the face. (Not that Jimmy doesn’t need a good slap in the face, but that’s another matter entirely and has nothing to do with football.) I understand it’s different when your quarterback is, you know, injured, but if your QB can still play, give him the damn ball. Or, you know, give the backup QB the ball. But don’t go with this fancy direct-snapping shit and don’t put your QB on the field as a fake wide receiver and don’t keep running the same damn play out of the same formation.

And no—no, I DON’T care if we got a touchdown out of that formation, and I don’t care if Armando Allen’s pass to Robby Parris was successful or not, I will always hate the Wildcat, on pure principle. Alwaaaaaaaaaays.

(See, this is just one of those weird things. Probably the Wildcat helped us more than it hurt us, but I still hate it.)

I would also love to know why we ever, ever, EVER decide to run the ball on third-and-long. I’m not talking about 3rd-and-7 or something, I’m talking 3rd-and-15. Or 3rd-and-25. Or whatever the case may be. It’s stupid, and does it ever work for us? Not really. I don’t care if you think the defense won’t be expecting it—if they’re blitzing, there will be too many men up front for the running back to successfully evade all the linebackers (unless we have Julius Jones back on our team—do we have Julius Jones on our team? NO!), and if they’re not blitzing, the handoff will come soon enough for the linebackers to realize we’re not passing, so unless the defense is idiotic or we’ve got some spectacularly perfect blocking going on, our opponent will still have WAY too much time to shut the play down before it makes it past the first-down marker.

So what’s the strategy here, really? Cross your fingers and hope for good blocking technique on a team that seems to be lacking in certain fundamentals (i.e., catching the ball [Golden Tate :-( ], wrapping up & tackling [SERGIO BROWN])? Or are we maybe just vying for better punt position? (Laaaame sauuuuce.) I'd hate to accuse you of that, though, since you seem such a big proponent of Going for It all the time. Which I appreciate.

Anyway, look. It’s not that I don’t love Armando Allen or anything. Our run game / O-line has improved dramatically, and Armando’s gotten WAY better at breaking tackles, but even so, he’s not a superstar. He’s solid and dependable, but he’s not, you know, Adrian Peterson or anything. (Sigh.) And we’ve got a quarterback with a good arm. And we NEED the first down. So why run the ball? Why? WHY??????

It’s the same kind of WHYYY I have to ask late in the game when we’re at third-and-not-so-very-long and we need to run the clock down and we decide, just for shits and giggles, to THROW the ball. And it falls incomplete. (Re: our second-to-last drive in the game against Michigan.) Now, of course, I know the idea is for the receiver to CATCH the ball and all, but if what really matters right now is short yardage and running the clock down, why would you EVER throw the ball downfield???

This did not work for Peyton Manning in the AFC title game against the Steelers in the year Jerome Bettis got his Superbowl ring, and it will not work for you.


Here’s another thing I have also never understood about coaches—if you’re doing something, and doing it well, why stop? We dominated through the first quarter. Our offense was going, we were firing on all cylinders, we were scoring practically at will—

And then we changed things up. We said good-bye to our hurry up / 2-minute drill / whatever-you-want-to-call-it offense. And then we started doing stupid things like going for the Wildcat formation. And we lost our rhythm. And we started to draw penalties. And in the second quarter we started to crash and burrrrn.

Direct quote from the press conference:

Q. As a play caller, do you have to amp up your aggressiveness going into the game if it appears your defense isn't going to be able to shut people down?
COACH WEIS: You have to be ready for it. I'm always ready for it. We started off the game in no huddle, spread 'em out. It was a very easy explanation for that. For four years I've been here, we started off slow against them every time, just playing normal football. Then we've rallied. When we have rallied, we've rallied spreading them out. So I just figured we'd take the opposite tack and spread 'em out early. You have to be ready in case that's the way the game plays out.

Okay, so, I respect that strategy. But what I don't get is...if you’re playing an opponent like MSU and you have every reason to believe the game’s going to go down to the wire, why not rack up as many points as you possibly can until the defense starts making you pay? If you know "spreading 'em out" is what's going to work--WHY NOT KEEP DOING IT?

Because we didn't--we changed our scheme up. Even the commentators remarked on it. And, okay, maybe this had something to do with our offense reaching the end of the 15 or so “scripted plays” Charlie prepares for the beginning of every game, but come on. Show me what you’ve got, Mr. Offensive Guru. Surely you can think faster than that.

I mean, I know I’m no head coach or anything, but isn’t part of the strategy of the Weis offense to run the same plays out of many different looks? And to run many different plays out of the same looks? You don’t actually have to change it up to make the defense think you’re changing it up. And if you’re ramming it down their throats, don’t decide to just sit on your heels and take what the defense gives you. Keep ramming it down their throats until they knock you back on your heels.

And if you’re worried your offense can’t keep up the pace for four quarters, then I guess you didn’t condition your offense well enough.

You’re killin’ me, Petey, you’re killin’ me.



Scalpels and other instruments of precision

Dear Golden,

Ripper of a weekend! My pancreas spontaneously burst on Saturday & they rushed me to the ER & doctors were in a frenzy trying to figure out what was wrong! Eventually they settled on a diagnosis of dropped passes and inexplicably incomplete running routes resulting in near-interceptions, & they told me to cut down on the stress & stop letting secondaries stick on me like I was the Usain Bolt to their Tyson Gay. I’m sure you know the feeling.

Anyway, doctors say to take it easy, but if you could pick me up some more TD passes && smoking punt returns while you’re in West Laf. this weekend that would be great. Sorry to hear about Floyd’s collarbone—try not to let the pressure get to you now that you’re Mr. #1. You know what stress does to a pancreas!

Miss you!! Come back soon!!!!

XXXXXOOOOO,
Lisa


(Note: To be fair to Golden Tate, he did lead the team in catches for 127 yards. He made some mistakes, but he did play a better this week than last week. However, if his leap into the MSU band is any indication, his head's still not quite right. He said in his postgame interview that he forgot it was the MSU band--so I guess that means heads-up, ND Band. Be prepared to catch Golden Tate the next time he catches a TD in the North end zone.)



Sooooooo…the health of our offense does seem to be suffering a bit, doesn’t it? Floyd’s out with the broken collarbone, Golden’s brain has gone to la-la land with some sort of mysterious pass-dropping disease that we can only hope isn’t infectious, our Right Guard (Trevor Robinson??) went out late in the game with an injury we can only hope wasn’t permanent, Sam Young keeps tossing yellow flags everywhere like he’s some sort of Ukrainian ambassador, and Jimmy, apparently, hurt his toe.

That was a pretty bonehead move of Jimmy’s, I thought—kneeling down when it became clear that that defender was going to sack him. Couldn’t you have at least slid or something, Jimmy? It’s not like a guy that big is going to be able to change his momentum in a flash. And to go down on a knee—do you realize it only takes fourteen pounds of pressure to bust a kneecap?

Thankfully, that seemed to be the only real boneheaded move Jimmy made all day. Even playing with some sort of hobbling toe injury, he put up big numbers-- 22-of-31 for 300 yards and 3 TD passes.

I’m curious to see how our passing game goes with Floyd out. Even Kyle Rudolph dropped a key pass or two yesterday, and the jury’s still out on Duval Kamara, Robby Parris, and that one freshman tight end who dropped a first-down pass near the end of the game—and um, WHY was that kid out there playing TE again??? Did one of our actual TE’s get banged up while I wasn’t paying attention? (It’s possible. I seem to remember spending the last five minutes of that game lying prostrate on the floor with my face pressed into a pillow. Sister Mary Rae came in, said “oh my goodness!” and left. She did not smile at me when she saw me later and asked about the score. I think perhaps she disapproves of my zeal. I may have to work on convincing her that football is not actually my religion.)

Sigh. So here’s hoping Purdue’s run defense is as breezy as the back of a hospital gown—otherwise we may have some issues trying to get our precision passing game to work in a pinch come Saturday.



Sometimes those clogged arteries can still produce a miracle or two

This is kind of a weird header, perhaps, but I am, of course, talking about our defense.

And by defense, I mean Kyle McCarthy.

Kyle McCarthy makes tackles. Kyle McCarthy bashes heads in. Kyle McCarthy reverses the fate of entire seasons in a single bound. Kyle McCarthy is a human maelstrom. Kyle McCarthy makes ball carriers weep like little puppies left out on the side of the road. Kyle McCarthy can save your job, file your income tax returns, and help your grandmother cross the street with the same amount of effort normal people use to LIFT THEIR LITTLE PINKIES INTO THE AIR.

So basically, when he leaves, we’re F*ing screwed.




I can’t believe the amount of bulls*t we let those interns get away with

And by interns, I mean referees. Please explain to me how THIS is not a touchdown:

I’m still waiting.

Also, that stupid onside kick recovery—no way. The ball has to go ten yards and REMAIN TEN YARDS before it’s eligible for play.

Thanks a lot, you li’l effers.




At least our kicker’s doing better

Nope, couldn’t think of an extended metaphor for this one. Oh well.

Anyway, after a pretty poor initial kickoff and that missed PAT, Nick Tausch seemed to settle in, and hopefully we’re going to start seeing some of the kick production we recruited him for. The hangtime and distance on his kickoffs improved toward the end of the game, and he recovered from the missed PAT with a very nice field goal later in the game.

As far as other special teams units are concerned—we didn’t choke up any returns for a TD this week, though it does seem like our kick return unit is a little weaker now than it was last year. Or perhaps that has more to do with the initial weakness of the kick-offs, and our coverage will improve with greater hang time.

In other happy news, our own kick return units seem a bit stronger, and/or MSU’s kicking game was weaker than usual—Golden managed to get his hands on a couple of punt returns, which is impressive considering MSU’s punter is apparently known for his ability to force fair catches.

Theo Riddick—apparently the fastest guy on the team now—did pretty good on his kickoff returns as well; I’d love to see him break out and take one to the house by the end of the season. I haven’t scouted the special teams on our upcoming opponents, so I don’t know the coverage units fare, but I’m not going to hold out for any miracles against USC or BC or even Washington at this point…so maybe when Washington State rolls around? I guess we’ll see.



Continuing the operation

So, speaking of our opponents….

WASHINGTON BEAT USC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know this is old news but, you know, it’s still exciting. Washington should be a verrrrry interesting game now. I think we’ll win, mostly because unlike arrogant-ass USC v. the PAC-10 (much like Michigan v. Appalachian State - hahahaha), we don’t overlook games. We’re currently big fans of shooting ourselves in the foot with penalties, but we don’t disrespect our opponents. I think we’ve fallen far enough and hard enough to have at least learned that much.

And there’s no way in hell USC is going to look past the Notre Dame game, so get ready for a bruiser on that end as well.



I’m most worried about our defense right now. With the usual exception of Kyle McCarthy and some occasionally good coverage from our secondary, we played pretty poorly against the Spartans, giving up over 400 yards of offense. Blitzes were largely ineffective, except on those three drives where we forced the Can’t Read / Can’t Write crowd to three-and-outs, and of course on that last play when McCarthy intercepted the ball. Run defense was mediocre at best. And the biggest problem, of course, was penalties.

I honestly couldn’t tell how good the Spartan offense was. Could you? I feel like we pretty much handed them at least two of their touchdowns by driving down the field for them. So, kudos to you, Sparty. It’s nice to know you can score once your opponent marches down into the red zone for you.

Against Nevada, we did SO well with penalties that this is just disheartening. Last week, it was chiefly our offense driving us into the ground. This week, it was our defense. Maybe next week we’ll be back to square one again? Let’s just hope the yellow fever doesn’t spread to our special teams, too, or we might be seeing some really unfortunate turnarounds in field position against the Boilers.

As for our offense…life is going to be tough without Floyd, but I think we can swing it. We have got to just start settling down and playing with consistency—aka NO MORE FREAKING PENALTIES, and no more injuries, if we can help it. At least until the USC game. I don’t think Purdue or Washington are going to play us as nastily and physically as MSU always does (seriously—was it just me, or did like EVERYONE get injured in that game?), so we should have a relative respite from injuries (we hope) before we face Southern Cal. (Though ideally, of course, we won’t have any injuries in the SC game either. I’m just saying—USC is the next time we’ll be playing a game wherein the players launch themselves at each other like they’re trying to bring down concrete parking garage supports instead of human beings.) We also have a bye week before the USC game, so unless all the players come down with some sort of mysterious illness between now and then, we should be in reasonably good shape by the time the Trojans roll into town.

The biggest plus I can say for this team is that they have the right attitude. They have the confidence and the swagger and the ability to hang tough in close games. And that kind of attitude changes EVERYTHING about how a team makes it through a season, especially after that stunner against Michigan last weekend. But the team's not hanging on to that--they're moving forward.

So…drink some orange juice. Slap on some band-aids. Bask in the sweet anesthetic of a hard-fought win.

Get ready for the next stage of surgery.

It's Football Season and Everything is Beautiful

Notre Dame 35, Nevada 0

I am a cream puff. Squeeze me, and happy sugary-sweet fluff will come out. It’s lighter than air, it’s creamier than custard, it’s sweeter than Brady’s biceps. (Well…almost sweeter than Brady’s biceps.)

35-0.

Can you taste it? Can you feel the rush? It’s almost enough to make you sick.

But, you know, the best kind of sick.



Hom nom nom…tasty

So, according to Coach Weis, the players kept the momentum rolling from their Hawaii Bowl win eight months ago because they were “hungry.” (Which, let’s face it, pretty much everyone in the Irish fan legion has been since Charlie came to town waving his four Superbowl rings like an epileptic trying to eat a cheeseburger at a rave party.) For a win? For respect? For vindication? All of the above?

Well…nom. Nom. Nom. *burp*

I think it’s safe to call this a really satisfying appetizer. Possibly accompanied by a tasty beverage (Michigan?). And then perhaps followed by a nice, crisp salad (Michigan State?). And then perhaps a warm basket of bread (Purdue?).

And then we can see how the main course—the month of October—goes down. We face a shockingly improved Washington team, followed by a bye week, then USC (56-3 in their opener against San Jose State) and BC (54-0 this week against Northeastern) stacked right on top of each other.

So how much has this game whet our appetites for the rest of the season?

Well, the South Bend Tribune’s already hopped on the bandwagon, declaring the win over Nevada to be “Like Notre Dame of old.” Which is nice to see, but, you know, doesn’t always mean a lot considering Saturday morning the South Bend Trib ran a five hundred word article detailing what Bob Davie thought about the chances for the Irish this season. (Although I have to say, two points to the South Bend Tribune for capturing possibly the greatest image of Jimmy Clausen ever…unless they happen to have a picture of him in his parka stashed away somewhere. If you saw the front page of Sunday's SBT edition, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't...I can't find a link to it online anywhere, I'm SO annoyed.)

However, they do have a point with the “old”—the last shutout posted by Notre Dame was before Charlie’s time. It was, in fact, during my sophomore year of high school. They beat Rutgers, 42-0, and I remember this distinctly because (make way for a personal anecdote) it was my first game inside Notre Dame Stadium and I was sitting behind the north end zone, but the team somehow managed to score all 42 points in the south end zone. (True story. This makes more sense if you will recall that in the 2002 season, the Notre Dame defense scored more than half of the points.)

Anyway. So even though the win over Nevada was super-tasty in many ways, we’ve still got some lingering question marks that we won’t really be able to wipe away until the season is over. Such as…

How far has the team really come since last year? Can they win a close game? How will the recalibrated Irish O-line fare against a real pass rush? Is the running game here to stay, or just here to flail its arms wildly before sliding into the abyss of the Desperate Passing Game?

First things first.



Jimmayjimmayjimmay (and other offensive things)

Still not tasty. Sorry, Jimmy.

But 15-of-18 for 315 yards and 4 TDs followed by a 303.67 NCAA passer rating…that’s, you know, not bad.

Okay, fine. I’ll give him the equivalent of at least one jimmy (you know, the sprinkle) in sugar content. At least while he’s got his helmet on and he’s throwing touchdown passes to Michael Floyd and/or Kyle Rudolph and/or Golden Tate. And also playing well enough so DAYNE CRIST can make an appearance.

That’s worth at least one jimmy. Maybe two, if the actual Jimmy promises never to make a speech at a pep rally again.

So, my biggest concern with Jimmy right now, really, is whether he’s going to fall into the trap of making Floyd his Favorite Target. Our passing game really suffered at the end of last season when Floyd was injured, and I’d hate to see a repeat of that if either Floyd or Tate gets injured this year (if if if if if if….let’s hope there is no if). Happily, however, it seems as though favoritism is not (yet) quite as big a danger as I feared—thinking back on the game, it just seems like Floyd got more attention because three of his four total catches turned into touchdowns.

Looking at the stats, though, the ball was pretty evenly distributed—4 catches and 3 TDs for Floyd, 4 catches and 1 TD for Kyle Rudolph, 3 catches and 59 yards for Golden Tate, and 3 catches and 25 yards (plus 72 yards and 1 TD on the ground) for Armando Allen.

Speaking of Armando Allen, the 4.3 yards-per-carry we averaged in this game is an improvement from last year’s 3-yards-per-carry average. So that’s good to see. We had a lot more success running the ball up the gut, but our run game still isn’t what you might call explosive. The longest run of the day was a 19-yarder by sophomore Jonas Gray late in the game, while Armando Allen’s longest sprint was 14.

Now, I don’t want to be overly critical of an offense that out-rushed its opponent and put 35 points on the board and was nearly perfect in the passing game, but allow me to bring up the image of a cream puff again as we consider that Nevada put up a pretty weak pass rush and had the worst-ranked secondary in the country last year. Yes, we scored on our first three possessions and later topped off the score by completing a successful 99-yard drive from end zone to end zone (which shouldn’t have been necessary because, you know, the refs were blind and CLEARLY that Nevada player had his foot in the end zone when he fielded that ball at the less-than-one-yard line, but…whatever). And yes, the offense looked dreamy and creamy and executed very well, and Floyd and Tate are going to continue to be a nightmare for any secondary.

But.

I am very interested to see if this delicious cream puff of an offense will pop and ooze everywhere under real pressure, as they have in past seasons, or if they will come out and prove that the last two years have in fact hardened and staled the offense, turning them into less of a cream puff and more of a tasty confection that has been baked and solidified in the sun and will break your teeth off if you try to bite into it too hard. (Yes Michigan, I am thinking of you, because you are next week and RAWR.)



Special Teams…?

Last year, we had the best kick coverage unit in the country. While that still looked pretty solid, I was slightly disappointed with some of our other special teams play. And/or I was really impressed with Nevada’s punter/punt coverage unit. Nevada’s Brad Langley averaged six more yards per punt than Eric Maust, but the yardage didn’t make the difference so much as the height; it is a sad day indeed when Golden Tate is forced to fair catch a whole bunch of times before finally catching the ball and being tackled for a 2-yard loss.

I’d like to see some more pressure on the punter in the next game. It'd be nice to see our punt returners actually have a chance to return one more than once during a game (the only positive punt return yardage came from John Goodman's 24-yard scamper later in the game). The jury's still out on this year's kick return unit, considering Nevada only kicked off to the Irish once the entire game, and that resulted in a pretty decent 23-yard return by Theo Riddick.

Also, it looked like scholarship kicker Nick Tausch is going to be pretty steady on those PAT's, but a couple of his kickoffs were less-than-stellar, and I'm very curious to see how our recruited scholarship kicker (FINALLY...seriously, how hard is it to recruit a kicker?) handles field goals under pressure. Possibly we will be able to find out next week, although of course if all goes according to plan, any field goal he attempts will be icing on the cake, and not a game-winning thriller.


Defense Defense Defense / Why thank you, Nevada offense

So, the general consensus among the Nevada players and head coach after the game didn’t seem to be so much that the Irish defense was monstrous, frightening, and likely to be the sole cause of their nightmares for the next three months, but that Nevada basically took its pistol offense and shot itself in the foot a bunch of times.

I sort of have to agree.

I think there is, you know, at least SOME credit due to a defense that kept Nevada off the scoreboard for only the third time in coach Greg Ault’s 25-year career (I believe it’s that long, anyway). Colin Kaepernick is a good quarterback (normally, so I hear), and Nevada’s offense averaged 37.6 points a game last season. Notre Dame’s defense made some pretty key plays to keep the Wolfpack scoreless—like Toryan Smith’s huge tackle for a loss against Vai Taua when Nevada was trying convert a fourth-and-inches. Or how about Robert Blanton’s interception in the end zone just before halftime? Or Kyle McCarthy’s interception in the second half, in addition to his 9 solo tackles?

However, the concern here is that the misfiring of the pistol offense did not seem to be caused by a wham-bam, stuff-the-run, rip-off-the-heads-of-the-offense-and-make-babies-cry style of defense. Not that they didn’t, you know, blitz successfully and sack the quarterback 4 times, or intercept the ball twice and recover a fumble once, but we also didn’t contain Vai Taua, who managed to have a 114-yard rushing game despite Nevada's total lack of scoring. This is going to be a problem later, when we go up against more talented running teams like, for example, the Trojans, who manage to simultaneously suck at life and have a running attack with more depth than the bottom of the beautiful briny sea.

Our secondary I’m not incredibly worried about; we have a lot of talent back there. The problem, I think, will be in forcing the other team to throw the ball, and even then we can’t count on everyone having as shitty a game in the red zone as Colin Kaepernick. Nevada moved the ball 307 yards, but they never quite moved it past those last crucial ten yards or so. Coach Greg Ault chalked it up to “first-game jitters,” and perhaps that’s true. They certainly did a good enough job of getting themselves in a position to score--there were just a lot of botched plays that prevented them from getting a TD. The high compliment to our defense here is that when Nevada screwed up, we capitalized on it and made them pay for it--which, if you will recall the last couple seasons, wasn't always something our defense was able to do.

Now I’m just itching to see how we slam down against a team that doesn’t have the jitters.



Which appears to be, you know, most of our opponents for the rest of the season

Very exciting opening weekend—not only for ND, but for almost ND’s entire schedule. Here’s a quick rundown of how our opponents fared in their season openers:

W - Michigan vs. Western Michigan (31-7)
W - Michigan State vs. Montana State (44-3)
W - Purdue vs. Toledo (52-31)
L - Washington vs. LSU (23-31)
W - USC vs. San Jose State (56-3)
W- BC vs. Northeastern (54-0)
L - Navy vs. Ohio State (27-31)
W - Pittsburgh vs. Youngstown State (38-3)
W - UConn vs. Ohio (23-16)
W/L - Stanford vs. Washington State (39-14)

Eight of Notre Dame’s future opponents won their openers. Purdue, USC, and BC all scored over fifty points; MSU scored over forty; Michigan, Pittsburgh, and Stanford scored over thirty; and the only close/weak sauce victory was UConn’s 23-16 decision against Ohio.

Granted, these were mostly cupcake games, but even so, almost all of Notre Dame’s opponents not only looked good but kicked some serious ASS in their season openers. Even the losses were kind of pretty—two of the three teams who came up short on Saturday lost in extremely impressive fashion. Unless you happen to think there’s nothing impressive about Navy nearly upsetting (*coughcough* OVERRANKED *cough*) #6 Ohio State, or WASHINGTON pulling ahead of #11 LSU before tossing up a couple of interceptions to lose 31-23.

The weakest links on our schedule appear to be UConn and Washington State, which isn’t really surprising—but I have to say, looking at the rest of our opponents, I am unusually pleased. It looks like our strength of schedule rating might be on the rise.

But, of course, that’s just Week One and the cream puffs talking.



Other pleasing cream-puff thoughts

So, I hope you're all really enjoying this extended food metaphor, and that I have given at least one person an intense craving for cream puffs.

Anyway, my favorite thing about this new, improved Irish team is their attitude. Everyone seems to have gotten over the fact that Jimmy Clausen is basically a spiky-headed jerkface, and they're all getting along. They appear to have bonded through adversity, rather than letting it drag them down and down and down into another terrifying death spiral of 3-9 doom. Which says good things about the overall character of both the players and the coaching staff. You learn more from losses than from wins, they say, so this year we have not only one of the most experienced, but one of the best-educated teams in the country.

And they all seem to be on the same page, saying the same sorts of things. At the pep rally, everyone who spoke mentioned how close the team had gotten, how hard they'd been working all summer, how focused they were--and, most importantly, how they decided after the USC game that they were going to take a step forward and never look back. They showed it against Hawaii, and they showed it again against Nevada.

The change in attitude is the biggest, best, and most important change in this team from the last two seasons. For the first time since Brady left, this is a team that's talking like they have their fate in their own hands.

According to Michael Floyd, "You have to show the nation what kind of team Notre Dame is and how we are going to do everything." If that's not confidence, I don't know what is.

Coach Weis has apparently been appealing to Teddy Roosevelt for inspiration--encouraging his players to speak softly and carry a big stick. "We were tired of looking at ESPN and watching ourselves get thrashed," linebacker Toryan Smith said. "We're not talkin' it, we're walkin' it--carryin' a big stick."

All the post-game press comments had a similar feeling of solidarity. "Jimmy showed a lot of trust in me," Kyle Rudolph said, and in turn, Jimmy said of his receivers, "Those guys are playmakers. All I have to do is give them the ball."

And they have their hunger back. They're not going to walk onto their home field and let another team want it more than they do. The defense is not going to let the offense sink or save the game, and vice versa.

"Guys out there getting rowdy, not just offensive guys with offensive guys, defense with the defense, but the team collectively. We had each other's backs," said linebacker Brian Smith. "Whenever the offense was in a bad situation, the defense put us in a good situation. We kind of fed off of each other today."

It's just about enough to make your cream puff ooze.