Notre Dame Must Scale Things Back In Order To Focus On Execution, Playing Fast

Notre Dame needs to back off its schematic volume moving forward until its players can get more confident and execute at a higher rate

There are three words I've heard a lot the last couple of weeks, two from inside the program and one from outsiders: execution (or lack thereof), experience (again, lack of) and speed (lack of).

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman and his players have discussed a severe lack of execution the last two weeks. It turned two potential victories into an 0-2 start to the season. Freeman has focused a lot on the lack of game experience from many of his players, and in some ways he's right, especially on offense.

But that lack of experience requires that Freeman and his coordinators - Tommy Rees and Al Golden - need to rethink what they are doing on both sides of the ball and coach to that lack of experience.

That means scaling back a lot of what we're seeing and going with a more aggressive but limited scope from an implementation and game planning standpoint. When players that you know can run are playing slow, and are making too many mistakes - especially those on simple concepts - you have communication issues, but you are also likely asking them to do too much.

Freeman seems to be aware of this.

"When you talk about execution and you talk about really doing a self evaluation, we have to look and say okay, why aren’t we executing," Freeman said during his Monday press conference. "Part of that might be what we’re asking our guys to do, if they’re confused, and we have to ask them to do things they’re not confused about.

"(We have to) really evaluate what we’re asking our guys to do," continued Freeman. "Is it too much? I don’t think it’s too little, if anything it’s too much. How do we consolidate that and get it to where our guys know exactly what they’re doing and now they just have to physically go do it."

This is something every coach at every level knows. If the mind isn't confident it's much harder for the legs to run fast, and for the fundamentals to shine through. Players like Lorenzo Styles, Braden Lenzy, Marist Liufau, Ramon Henderson, Cam Hart and others didn't all of a sudden get slower than what we've seen from them on the field at Notre Dame in the past.

Isaiah Foskey and Jayson Ademilola didn't forget how to play football. Joe Alt and Blake Fisher didn't forget how to block all of a sudden.

Styles and Chris Tyree both torched the Oklahoma State defense in the Fiesta Bowl, and they did it with speed. Lenzy has a history of being a home run hitter. They didn't all of a sudden become 4.7 athletes during the offseason.

Things we have seen players do in the past, and things we've seen them do in practice, have been nowhere to be found on Saturdays in 2022. That's a mental problem, not a speed problem, or a talent problem.

Liufau and Henderson didn't lack speed when they turned a tight end loose on 3rd-and-9 in a situation where a stop might give the Irish offense a chance to put the game away. That's not a speed problem, that's a "I'm not sure what I'm doing" problem.

You can't play fast if you are uncertain of what to do and how to do it.

As the week goes on we'll have more and more about what specifically they need to do to get to this point, but big picture the focus needs to be about precision, speed and fundamentals. The coaches need to focus more and more on the talent of their players, on getting them to play sound and smart, and focusing less on scheme volume.

Then get your best athletes on the field.

Do those things and Notre Dame will look much, much different.

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