Notre Dame Faces A Program Defining Period ... Again
Last weekend changed everything.
The blowout loss to Michigan - and the disturbing reasons why Notre Dame lost - didn’t completely eliminate the tremendous growth we’ve seen at Notre Dame the last three seasons. But they certainly raised questions about which direction the team is headed, and it made it impossible to continue ignoring the red flags that existed before that dreadful night in Ann Arbor.
The game cannot be so easily dismissed as just a bad night. We have seen this before, and the reasons why Notre Dame lost show a disturbing lack of leadership with this football team.
I’m sure this statement will bother those inside the program, but it’s hard to argue with the record, the statistics and the film.
We have seen Notre Dame play inconsistent football all season. What we learned during the first seven games this season is that this Notre Dame is talented enough to beat most of the teams on the schedule, but it was also not prepared to handle success. As an outsider, it is hard to identify the specific reasons why this was the case, but we have seen a group that has struggled to live up to its potential on both sides of the ball.
It would be one thing if Notre Dame wasn’t playing to its full potential because it wasn’t getting production in areas where it lost its top players. That excuse wouldn’t be valid to me, as every team loses top players, but it would at least be understandable.
Notre Dame’s issue through the first seven games is that many of its experienced players have regressed. The Irish aren’t getting good play from the vast majority of its captains. That shows a deep problem within the program.
Does anyone who has watched Ian Book, Chris Finke, Julian Okwara, Alohi Gilman, Jalen Elliott or Troy Pride Jr. really think they are seeing even the same version of what we saw from each player last season? Forget improving on last season, they are playing below the standard they set from themselves in 2018.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m biased? Fine, let Pro Football Focus make the case for me.
Only three of Notre Dame’s 13 returning starters currently have a higher PFF grade than they did during the regular season in 2018. All seven of Notre Dame’s captains have a lower PFF grade this season than they did last fall, and all but right tackle Robert Hainsey have a significantly lower grade.
Those aren’t small dips either. Outside of Hainsey and Kraemer, the dips we are seeing from the players listed are substantial, especially the dips in production and grades from the captains.
There has been no accountability for those performances. For example, Finke's play has seen a dramatic drop off, and at times his play has hurt the offense in a big way. Yet his snaps per game (49.2) are almost identical to last season (49.1). We could have the same conversation at quarterback.
Okwara’s grade has gone down just six overall points, but his run defense grade is down 17.3 points. It’s down 9.4 points from his sophomore season, and it’s just 0.1 better than his freshman season.
Where is the development? Where is the accountability?
When that is happening to your best players there is a lot more going on than something that can be fixed by just “coaching better and playing better,” which is what Brian Kelly said the team needed to do.
I will be the first to admit I missed the signs. And the things I was told during the summer and during fall camp I brushed off; no way that could be true based on what we saw last season, and the energy on the practice field early in camp was good. I saw a group playing with swagger, so I was skeptical of the sources that expressed concerns.
But it didn’t take long this season to see the warts start to show.
Notre Dame clearly wasn’t ready to handle success, but now the program has an opportunity to see how it handles failure, and there is no way to express what happened against Michigan as anything but a complete failure.
We now get a chance to see what kind of football character this football team has.
How Notre Dame handles the next five games will go a long way towards determining if this team has the fortitude to bounce back from failure and finally show itself to be the team it should have been all along.
If the Irish continue going about business the way they have the last month, the Irish will likely drop another game. At the very least there will be some ugly wins, and the warts will continue to show. That would result in the program undoing a lot of the good we’ve seen over the last three seasons.
If Notre Dame is able to right the ship and show greater top-down accountability, the Irish should be able to not only get a win today against Virginia Tech, but it should go on an impressive run over the next month and set itself up for a strong offseason.
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