Notre Dame Overcomes Sloppy Play To Take Legend's Trophy Back From Stanford
Fortunately for Notre Dame, style points don’t matter. The Irish were simply looking for a win against an inferior team entering Saturday’s regular-season finale against Stanford. But with three losses, they were doing it without the need to impress the CFP selection committee and that’s a good thing.
The Irish ultimately won 56-23 but their four turnovers made for another sloppy road game look along the way. They led 28-16 at halftime, while looking far from impressive in the process.
"I wasn’t upset about the effort that we played with to start the game,” Irish head coach Marcus Freeman said after the game. "But we’ve got to take care of the ball. We have to take care of the ball.”
Notre Dame committed three first-half turnovers. The first was a fumble by Sam Hartman and the second was Hartman’s seventh interception of the season. The message at halftime from the head coach was simple.
"Just take care of the ball,” Freeman remarked. "Hand the ball to the official is what we say. That means don’t turn the ball over.”
The third turnover of the first half was a fumbled kickoff return by Jadarian Price.
"Special teams have got to be special,” said Freeman. "You can’t turn the ball over on special teams. So, don’t beat Notre Dame. That’s something you’ll hear me say often. As long as we don’t do that we’ve got a chance to be really successful every game we play.”
Stanford turned Notre Dame’s four turnovers into 17 points. The Irish had allowed just 16 points off turnovers in their first 11 games of the season. After an error-filled first half, Notre Dame was largely able to clean things up over the final 30 minutes of the lopsided victory.
"We had to make some changes,” said Freeman of his staff’s halftime approach. "It was here’s the corrections, now go execute.”
Steve Angeli threw an interception on his first pass attempt when he entered the game in the fourth quarter. It was Notre Dame's fourth turnover of the game and its 13th turnover in its last three road games.
Stanford’s offensive success came mostly in the first half. The Cardinal scored on four of their first six possessions. Three scores were field goals and the other was a touchdown.
Starting with a Jack Kiser interception on their last possession of the first half, they went five straight drives without points. Meanwhile, the Irish rattled off 42 consecutive points before Stanford’s final score with 7:16 to play in the game.
"They did some things on offense that we had not seen and they made some big plays but our guys were able to regroup, come out of the locker room with the intensity that we needed and finished this game off the right way,” Freeman said.
Stanford committed two turnovers of its own that Notre Dame turned into seven points. Javontae Jean-Baptiste also returned a blocked punt 60 yards for a touchdown.
In the end, Freeman’s Irish left Palo Alto with the hardware they went there to get back after last year’s home loss to Stanford.
"We put a huge emphasis on finding a way to get that Legend’s Trophy back,” Freeman explained. "I don’t care if you were here last year or you weren’t, I wanted to remind this group how important this rivalry is to both institutions, to everybody that’s associated with Notre Dame and how much we wanted to make sure that Legend’s Trophy got returned to South Bend.”
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