Film Don't Lie | The Remedy to Notre Dame's Running Game

There was a lot to be excited about with the Notre Dame offense early in the season, but after the Ohio State game, reality sunk in.

They’re averaging 5.3 yards per play in the last four games. The step up in competition has been a part of that. Ohio State (5th in DF+, the combined FEI and SP+ rankings), Duke (16th), and Louisville (32nd) were better than what they had previously faced.

USC (69th) was not. Not having more success against them is an indication that it’s more than just who they were facing.

The injuries at receiver have limited what the offense can do with personnel and in the passing game. Even with healthier versions of Jaden Greathouse and Jayden Thomas, I don’t envision Notre Dame changing what they do on offense in any sort of drastic way.

At the same time, there is no reason why the offense can’t be closer to the version we saw during the first five games of the season. They need to do a better job of handling when an opposing defense loads the box against them, but they also need to force a defense to not load the box as well.

Some of it has to do with Notre Dame burning teams who are cheating to play the run. That means doing a much better job on play-action and incorporating more RPOs. I’m not sure why they don’t do more of the latter. They’ve been bad at the former.

Sam Hartman is completing only 46.3% of his play-action attempts this season and his PFF grade is 64.1. Last year at Wake Forest it was 61.9% and the grade was 83.8. There’s a disconnect there and it has to be improved or else teams will continue to cheat to play the run with less fear of getting burned.

They also can be more diverse with formations to run the ball. They don’t even have to evolve much in order to do this. They can simply go back to some of what they did early in the season.

This is against Navy and it is an RPO. Hartman is reading the outside backer and if he is staying inside to play the run, this is a screen to the boundary. The backer goes out and Hartman hands the ball off instead for a nice gain.

This isn’t 2017 where teams aren’t going to respect the RPO because Notre Dame’s quarterback can’t complete it. They have a quarterback who can make the right read and make the throw to take free yards if they are given them.

Here’s another instance in the Navy game on Jeremiyah Love’s first carry of the season where Notre Dame is in 12 personnel (one back, two tight ends), but they are lined up wide with “twins” to both sides. This is another RPO play where they get five on five in the box when defenders drop out and end up running the football.

They don’t need three or four wide receivers to use that formation. This is another example of why they were successful running the football against Ohio State. They played heavy (more on that later), but also spread them out and motioned Mitchell Evans back in to gain a numbers advantage inside.

That’s counter, a bread and butter run call for Notre Dame, but it’s them doing it in a way that presents differently than what they typically show.

I know there’s been a lot of talk about how Notre Dame is asking for opponents to load the box with congested formations that feature multiple tight ends. Though I would advocate for them to spread teams out to run more often like the examples I just showed, they can still play heavy and challenge teams physically inside. I think they just need to be smarter about it.

They need less pin and pull concepts with two (or even three pullers) and more of this. Here’s Duo out of the same formation they ran counter out of earlier in the Navy game. This is them winning at the point of attack and not allowing gaps to open with pullers getting outside.

Defenses know that Notre Dame wants to pull linemen and they are attacking it differently by getting upfield and disrupting the second or third pulling linemen often. A similar thing happened in 2017 when defenses keyed in on that from the Irish running game. I think they need to do less of that and more of physically bullying teams by running at them when they play heavy.

Here they are running against an eight man box versus Ohio State. They are in 21 personnel (two backs, one tight end) it’s just Iso with Davis Sherwood blocking the Mike linebacker and running right at them.

There is nothing cute about this. This is old school. This worked against Ohio State and should be more of a staple when Notre Dame plays heavy because they have the players who can win at the point of attack.

Here it is again with Devyn Ford as the fullback and he doesn’t even get a great block here (he rocked Steele Chambers on an isolation block earlier in the game), but Love hits this quick and it’s a good gain because the only way it wouldn’t be is if Ohio State’s defensive line dominated their matchups up front.

Rocco Spindler does a great job on the down block and then gets off the double to the linebacker and to help make this a successful play.

Notre Dame has 42 rushes of 10-yards or more this season. 32 of them came in the first five games of the season, seven of them came against Ohio State. That’s the same Ohio State defense that has only given up 12 runs of 10+ yards in their other six games.

Notre Dame is capable of running the ball against a really good run defense. They proved it. They need to get back to more of what they were doing then. They only have 10 rushes of 10+ yards in the last three games and three of those came on Hartman scrambles and a reverse to Jordan Faison.

They can remedy their running game without having to implement a bunch of different concepts. They can look back to some things they did earlier this season that were successful to counter how defenses have adjusted to them.

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