Creating Consistency Is A Must For Gerad Parker And The Offensive Staff

Notre Dame must eliminate the wild ups and downs that have plagued the offense in past seasons

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has hired Gerad Parker as his offensive coordinator, which has placed the burden of building a championship offense on someone he has known for some time.

Freeman and Parker worked together for five seasons, including four years at Purdue and last season at Notre Dame. The moral of the story is Freeman knows what he is getting in Parker, and there is little doubt that Freeman believes he is someone capable of taking the offense to the next level.

Make no mistake, Freeman is very aware that the offense must get much better than it has been for years if Notre Dame is going to compete for a championship. 

There are many important tasks that Parker and the Irish staff must accomplish, but there's one over-arching principle that has been lacking from the offense for years that must be built into Parker's offense ..... consistency.

Notre Dame has not put a championship offense on the field in a very long time, and a lack of consistency has been a big issue. That's overall, in the pass game and in the run game.

Last season Notre Dame had a dominant run game at times, but they couldn't put it together consistently. Notre Dame had one of the best run games in a decade when it ran around and through Clemson. Two games later, Notre Dame obliterated Boston College to the tune of 281 yards (7.4 YPC), and the season ended with a 265-yard (5.8 YPC) rushing performance in the Gator Bowl victory over South Carolina.

In between the Clemson and Boston College wins was a 66-yard (1.9 YPC) performance against Navy, and between the Boston College win and the Gator Bowl win was a 90-yard (3.5 YPC) performance against USC in a loss.

Notre Dame scored 41.3 points per game in those three wins, but just 28.9 in its other 10 games. There was just no consistency in the run game, and don't get me started on the pass game.

In 2021, Notre Dame's offense was outstanding at times, but it struggled mightily in half the games as well. Notre Dame scored 39.5 points per game during a 6-game win streak that began with USC and ended with Stanford, but just 31.6 points in the other seven games.

In 2020, the offense went through a four-game stretch of outstanding football that began with a 47-40 win over Clemson and ended with a 45-21 win over Syracuse. During that stretch Notre Dame went for at least rushing yards and 279 passing yards in each game, and the Irish averaged 530.3 yards of offense, 7.0 yards per play and 42.0 points per game.

The problem is Notre Dame scored just 29.1 points per game in its other eight contests.

No consistency.

We saw the same story written in 2019, 2018, 2017 and beyond. 

Parker and the new-look staff must fix that. Notre Dame must become a more consistently effective offense if the Irish are going to push for a championship. 

Look, every offense is going to have an off day or two. LSU's dynamic 2019 offense, the one that averaged 48.4 points per game, had just 23 points in a win over Auburn, and had an off day against Mississippi State. 

Consistency isn't about scoring 40 points every time you take the field. It's about playing at a high level week after week, and even in those moments where you aren't on your game, your offense is good enough to make winning plays when it matters most.

It's about being a balanced offense as well. Part of the consistency issues at Notre Dame have been about not being good enough in one phase of the game. When Notre Dame's 2021 and 2022 offenses struggled it was because it was often too one dimensional. The Irish couldn't run the ball early in 2021, and couldn't throw the ball for much of 2022.

When teams can take away what is the strength of the Notre Dame offense, the other aspects of the offense simply weren't good enough to still beat good teams in those instances. Whether it was coaching, poor quarterback or injuries, there were always reasons and excuses for the struggles.

That must change, and Parker and the staff are tasked with fixing this issue.

If Parker can develop an offense that is balanced and consistent the Irish should finally be able to put a championship caliber offense on the field in 2023.

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