6 Thoughts on a Thursday
Notre Dame had a season-ending injury at a position where depth was already questionable, had their 5-star defensive end commitment officially decommit, and had their best interior lineman suffer a foot injury that may or may not keep him out for a long period of time (we’ll see what Marcus Freeman says at his press conference later today). Oh, and there’s a Manti Te’o documentary that was released on Netflix.
It hasn’t exactly been a slow week for news about Notre Dame football. There’s the second open practice to the media tomorrow as well and that normally would have been enough to get people talking, but this avalanche of news had to hit before any of that happened.
I don’t think there is much to say about Jarrett Patterson until we get a bit more clarity on the significance of the injury. There really isn’t much for me to say on Keon Keeley either because the overreactions have been more than enough motivation for me to take a step back and not add anything more.
I do have some thoughts on Te’o, but I’ll get to that later.
My mind has been on the receiver position and the Notre Dame offense all week. The good news for Notre Dame, or bad news, is that lack of depth at receiver isn’t something that’s new. They weren’t exactly overflowing with options in 2019 and 2020 either.
The depth in ‘19 gets glossed over a bit because of the fantastic breakout Chase Claypool had as a WR1 and the emergence of Cole Kmet as an elite tight end. I think many have forgotten that projected starter Michael Young broke his collarbone in camp and then he transferred during the season. Kevin Austin was suspended that season and that left Claypool, Chris Finke, and no one else that was trusted very much.
Braden Lenzy eventually popped up later in the year, but mostly as a gadget player. For a good chunk of the season it was Claypool and Finke and...that’s it.
The ‘20 receiver group going into the season was worse. Javon McKinley was a fifth-year player who hadn’t done much in his career. Ben Skowronek was a transfer who didn’t put up big numbers at Northwestern. Davis was a player who had bounced around positions. With Austin and Lenzy being injured for a good chunk of the year, it looked pretty dire.
They pieced together a decent trio with McKinley, Skowronek, and Davis, but those two years show how the issues at receiver in terms of depth and top talent had been a problem way before Amorion Walker flaked out on his Notre Dame commitment.
The hole that Chansi Stuckey stepped into when he took the job as receivers coach is a significant one to climb out of. It got more difficult to deal with the hole without Davis, but he at least has a coordinator who is used to having to adjust to substandard circumstances at the position.
How can Notre Dame replace Davis and get through the season with what they’ve got at receiver?
It will require Lorenzo Styles to stay healthy and be everything the offense needs him to be. It will be about Lenzy offering that same big play spark he had against USC and Boston College in 2019. It will be about someone, maybe Jayden Thomas, stepping up on the boundary and being able to beat man coverage.
It will require that, some others receivers making plays, and running backs and tight ends helping to replace the production.
Chris Tyree should get even more opportunities in the passing game like Kyren Williams did the last two years. All of that depth at tight end, those players Stuckey compared to Greek gods, needs to come through because it can’t be just the Michael Mayer show. We know he’s the headliner. The supporting cast needs to do their part as well.
Tommy Rees can play 12 personnel (one back, two tight ends) with Mayer in the slot (49.1% of passing snaps last year). He can get into 21 (two backs, one tight end) and shift out Tyree there. He has to be creative with his personnel groups because he might not be able to play with three receivers as much as he would probably want to.
That’s okay because he’ll have some options in the slot who aren’t on the receiver depth chart. Individually they might not bring everything Davis could. In aggregate they just might be able to.
2. I’m going to shout from the rooftops again that an offense can still be explosive playing with multiple tight ends on the field. If people are worrying about that part of it, they don’t have to as long as Notre Dame runs the ball and sets up big play opportunities in the passing game.
Georgia won the national championship with a historically loaded defense that got most of the publicity, but their offense should have received way more credit for their success than it did. They finished fourth in yards per play. Despite being a run-heavy attack (56.9% run) and playing plenty of multiple tight end sets, they managed to be one of the more explosive offenses in college football.
They had 41 plays from scrimmage of 30-yards or more last season, which was eighth in the country. The Bulldogs were fantastic using play-action and quarterback Stetson Bennett finished second in the country in yards per attempt on play-action throws.
Defenses are going to be loading up to stop Notre Dame’s running game, especially with Tyler Buchner behind center. It’s time to unleash more play-action and create more explosive plays through doing so.
3. ESPN ranked the top-100 players in college football heading into the season. I know where some are ranked feels off (Syracuse running back Sean Tucker at 15 feels too high and North Carolina receiver Josh Downs at 26 feels too low in my opinion), but these kinds of lists are more to generate discussion than anything else.
It’s impossible to get it even close to right because there will always be players that slip under the radar. Maybe there’s a bit of bias as well when it comes to power programs, but I don’t think I could argue against the fact that 11 of the top-20 are from either Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, or Clemson.
What I have a bigger issue with is that these kinds of lists are always more about what the player did last year than what the players are projected to do this season. Ohio State’s version of the triplets on offense makes up three of the top-seven players on the list, but they have only two more in the top-100. Only one of them, defensive lineman Zach Harrison, plays defense.
Harrison might not even be the best defensive linemen on the team and OSU is going to rely on defensive ends like Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau and defensive backs like Ronnie Hickman and Denzel Burke to be elite. They probably will be.
Notre Dame has four in the top-40 (Michael Mayer at 16, Jarrett Patterson at 22, Isaiah Foskey at 31, and Brandon Joseph at 37). I don’t have any issue with any of those rankings, but people who follow Notre Dame know that so much of the team’s success is going to rely on Tyler Buchner, Lorenzo Styles, Blake Fisher, Joe Alt, Marist Liufau, Jack Kiser, Cam Hart, Rylie Mills, and Jayson Ademilola playing like they deserve to be ranked or mentioned.
The first four players for Notre Dame are the ones everyone is confident will be very good. It’s the next nine who have the ability to take the Irish up a level if they can meet or exceed expectations. If they do a top-100 at the end of the season, it would be significant to see a few of that group on an updated list.
4. OSU has five on that list and much like Notre Dame, they have several candidates who should be breakout players. I would have put receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. on there somewhere.
Clemson has seven, six of whom play defense. Four of them play defensive line. In case you were unaware, they should have the best defensive line in the country. Points are going to be hard to come by for any team against that Tiger’s defense.
USC has four on the list, three of whom are transfers. All of them play offense.
North Carolina has receiver Josh Downs and cornerback Tony Grimes on the list.
Syracuse and Boston College have one player each make the list.
These kinds of a lists are an extremely inexact way of determining who on Notre Dame’s schedule is good or not, but it does show the general idea that the Irish will play two teams who have more than a couple of elite talents to deal with and one team, USC, who has the potential to be great on offense. The rest of the teams on the schedule don’t have the top level talent, which makes taking Notre Dame over 8.5 wins this season a pretty solid bet even if the juice on the over isn’t great.
5. Before the beginning of last season, someone asked us on Power Hour to rank the top-five NFL prospects for Notre Dame on both sides of the ball. Doing that exercise proved that that 2021 team wasn’t exactly flush with draft-eligible talent.
That showed itself to be true with only two players getting drafted from Notre Dame. It also showed that Notre Dame probably overachieved by winning 11 games last season.
Making a top-five list for NFL prospects on both sides of the ball feels quite different this year. While they only have two obvious draft-eligible studs on offense, Mayer and Patterson, there’s rising stars like Fisher, Alt, Styles, Buchner, and the backfield has some young talent that look like they have futures at the next level. I was scrambling to find five last year and those six stick out to me in 2022, but they really need a receiver or two to be potentially included on this list with Styles and I think we may have a tight end join as the heir apparent to Mayer.
The defense has Foskey, Liufau, Kiser, Mills, Joseph, Ademilola, and Hart that could all be worthy of being in the top-five and all are draft-eligible. I would take Foskey, Joseph, Liufau, Mills, and Hart as my top group and there are several others who could be in consideration if I revise the list after the season. There may even be a freshman or two who cracks the list if they make a splash over the next few months.
Things are set up better from a talent and depth perspective on defense as opposed to offense at the moment and that needs to be more even. It can get there with another strong year of recruiting, but the defense is already there in my opinion and they’ll keep reloading the talent there to replace those that leave.
It’s a lot easier to win games in college football when your team has loads of NFL prospects on the roster. This Notre Dame team is stocked with more of that than the one that won 11 games in 2021 and I’m excited to see how these players will be viewed by the NFL a few months from now.
6. I wasn’t looking forward to the Te’o documentary on Netflix. Most of that was because I was tired of him being ridiculed for something that wasn’t his fault and I didn’t want to rewatch any of that.
I know that the vast majority of Notre Dame fans have always supported him. Of course they have. He’s their guy and always will be. It made me incredibly angry to see how he was treated by random people, some of whom liked being able to take another shot at Notre Dame and some of whom enjoyed the sensational nature of a story like that. I didn’t want those people, or even people who might be unfamiliar with his story, to make it all a big joke again.
It does seem like many who watched the documentary now have a different view on Te’o. He’s now, correctly, portrayed as the victim. There should be no doubt that he wasn’t in on the scam, but unfortunately the damage was already done by Deadspin using an anonymous quote to say that “they were 80% sure” Te’o knew what was going on and then ESPN using that on their ticker multiplied Deadpin’s mistake exponentially.
That painted him as some kind of mastermind who was using this to gain fame and that has been the perception of so many for years because of that misleading inclusion in the story.
Him talking about how he used to enter a room to people being in awe of him and then that flipping quickly to everyone viewing him as some kind of joke really stood out to me over everything. This person who had this incredible journey to surprisingly sign with and the flourish at Notre Dame had his legacy tainted by something that someone else did to him. It’s all extremely heartbreaking to think about that happening to anyone.
I hope as the years go on and more people see the real story that he gets recognized by everyone for what he accomplished at Notre Dame. I hope that Notre Dame fans can celebrate him more openly as well and make sure to let him know what he meant to the program.
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