Irish Take Down Trojans
SOUTH BEND, Ind. – They warmed up, many of them anyway, without their shirts Saturday night as wind chills dipped into the 40s inside Notre Dame Stadium.
As part of offsetting unsportsmanlike conduct penalties at halftime, they were called the wrong team name.
And by game’s end, the USC Trojans, not the UCLA Bruins, as referee Michael Mothershed had said, were defeated a third straight time, this one 30-27, in their annual rivalry with Notre Dame before a largely green-clad crowd of 77,622.
Though the Trojans (3-3) scored first with a 40-yard Chase McGrath field goal, it was Notre Dame that seized command with the final 17 points of the first half and first three of the second in a scoring barrage that charged just 11 minutes, three seconds from the second and third-quarter clocks.
Ian Book hit Cole Kmet for the Irish’s first touchdown, Braden Lenzy vaporized the USC defense on a 51-yard end-around for six and Jonathan Doerer booted a 45-yard field goal as Notre Dame (5-1) forged a 17-3 halftime lead.
Notre Dame then held off the rally attempt by the Trojans, whose coach Clay Helton was dealt a likely lethal blow for his tenure atop the USC program.
The flurry of Irish second-quarter points prefaced a halftime skirmish between both teams on the field after USC tepidly ran into the teeth of the Notre Dame defense from its 40 on the half’s final play. A sea of Irish and Trojans’ players and staffers scuffled to the degree that both teams were issued the unsportsmanlike penalties and warned an subsequent violation would be an automatic ejection for any offending player.
After it had punted on its opening three possessions, Notre Dame got the offense untracked when tailback Tony Jones Jr. began to gash the Trojan defense. The 5-foot-11-inch, 224-pound St. Petersburg, Fla., native used his offensive line’s push and his cutback-vision to dash through USC for 120 first-half yards and had blown beyond his previous-best 131-yard effort early in the third quarter.
Jones’ 43-yard run on a quick-toss established the Irish deep in USC territory to facilitate their first touchdown; another first-down run early in the next possession helped set the stage for the speedster Lenzy’s end-around, which saw Lenzy snag Book’s handoff and race untouched 51 yards to the left corner of the end zone for a 14-3 lead.
Doerer’s 45-yard triple provided the halftime margin, and the junior kicked pushed Notre Dame’s scoring spree to 20 unanswered with a career-best 52-yard kick on the opening possession of the third quarter. The field goal marked the Irish’s first converted kick from 50 or more yards since Justin Yoon connected from the same distance in 2015 against Navy.
USC initially could only muster a meager response, when it took the ensuing possession and marched to the Irish 9 before it settled for another McGrath field goal and a 20-6 deficit.
But after the Trojans coerced a punt from the Irish, they struck quickly with uptempo offense that saw Kedon Slovis slice the deficit in half, 20-13, with a 38-yard scoring strike to Amon-ra St. Brown.
More from the Notre Dame ground attack, as well as a critical personal foul penalty by Palai Gaoteote for a late hit on Book that kept alive the drive and then Doerer’s third field goal from 40-plus yards --- this one 43 --- helped steady the Irish with a 23-13 edge.
With the score 23-20, Notre Dame engineered a workmanlike touchdown-march again on the strength of its overpowering ground game.
The Irish saw Brock Wright recover a final onside-kick attempt to preserve the 30-27 final.