6 Thoughts on a Thursday
For most teams in college football, the regular season is over.
It being finished just means it’s time for the transfer portal and coaching carousel, though. The season is what everyone lives for, but this part of the year is even more wild.
We’re already seeing a ton of names pop into the portal every day. ISD’s Matt Freeman has you covered with everyone that has entered so far. There will be a lot more to come before things open up on December 5th and then close again on January 18th. Since they are limiting that to a 45 day window before the next opening in May, it could very well be six weeks of chaos.
We don’t exactly know how Notre Dame is going to approach things during that window. It’s safe to assume that Marcus Freeman and his staff are going to be aggressive when it comes to improving the roster because that’s how they have approached recruiting.
What we don’t know is how aggressive they can be because it’s unclear how open they can be when it comes to pursuing undergraduate transfers. That’s going to matter. There will be plenty of graduate transfers out there that can fill a need on the roster next season, but how many at the positions Notre Dame will be looking at?
Quarterbacks might not be as difficult as other spots. If they want to find a guard to compete for a starting position after losing two starters, it might be more likely they find a good one who has already graduated. But if they’re looking for a pass rusher to fill the void once Isaiah Foskey leaves, that could end up being a lot more difficult.
The list of impact transfers who project to play Vyper is short, period. The list of impact graduate transfers who project to play Vyper is even shorter.
Penn State hit a home run with Temple graduate transfer Arnold Ebiketie (18 TFLs and was a second round pick) in 2021, but there haven’t been many who have turned out as well as him. It’s going to be difficult to find another who can make that jump like he did.
A potential Vyper did pop up in the portal as a graduate transfer that is intriguing to me, though.
Stanford graduate transfer Stephen Herron camped at Notre Dame for Irish Invasion once upon a time. He was there as a rising sophomore in high school. He left without an offer despite a strong day, eventually committed to Michigan and then flipped to Stanford.
Herron didn’t put up prolific sack numbers at Stanford. He led the team with 5.5 this season and never had more than three in any other. I thought he rushed the passer better than those sack totals would indicate and he certainly had a day against Notre Dame with two sacks and a forced fumble.
PFF had him with 40 pressures on the season and his 90.1 pass rush grade on true pass sets (no screens, play-action, roll outs, no quick game) was 8th in the country. He had a breakout season on a bad team and if he was surrounded by better players around him, I think those sack numbers could shoot up.
There are going to be a lot of names who pop up in the next week or two and people will ask the question “Any interest from Notre Dame?” Some of them might be a no simply because the transfer policies for undergraduates may still be inflexible.
Herron shouldn’t have that issue and if they are going to explore adding a graduate transfer to play Vyper in the portal, he could be a prime candidate.
2. Do stats lie? Yes and no.
The numbers are the numbers when it comes to Drew Pyne and him having the fourth highest single-season passing efficiency of any Notre Dame quarterback.
It can’t be argued against. It happened and the numbers are real.
There’s always more context to the numbers that matters when measuring that kind of thing, though. There’s film and what we actually see from someone on the field (missing reads, how much they are pressured, etc). There’s also how the numbers came together and who they came against.
Pyne only faced one pass defense in the top-48 in EPA per pass as a starter (Clemson). He wasn’t seeing a bunch of great pass defenses and that matters.
It wasn’t just that he was facing bad defenses either. He was facing some of the worst in the country. His performance in those games absolutely skews how his overall stats this season look.
Pyne vs USC (83rd in EPA per pass), Cal (108th), BYU (117th), North Carolina (129th), and Navy (131st) put up monster numbers. He wasn’t the only one as you can see by those rankings. He threw for 15 touchdowns against only two interceptions, averaged 9.8 yards per attempt, completed 78% of his passes, and had an NFL passer rating 138.9.
Woo, boy. Gimme those numbers all day long.
The numbers against everyone else were…well…bad.
He threw seven touchdowns against four interceptions, averaged 6.0 YPA, completed 51.3% of his passes, and had an NFL passer rating 75.4.
It’s not just that he was up and down this season. He was clearly UP vs the horrendous pass defenses and down against everyone else. In addition to Clemson, Syracuse and UNLV were the only ones who were above average too (49th and 58th respectively). Those were games where he should have been better.
On the other hand, Tyler Buchner had the misfortune of playing against Marshall (1st in EPA per pass) and Ohio State (12th). I’m not saying he was going to light the world on fire if he got to play against the rest of the schedule, but he clearly got the short end of the stick when it came to sample size with his two games coming against teams who played much better pass defense this season.
I don’t think there are a lot of Notre Dame fans who are stumping for Pyne to be the starter next season. If there are, then they will probably point to his great games as the main reason why. I would bet they haven’t taken into account the pass defenses he had those great days against.
3. Here’s some more interesting numbers from Pyne this season that speak more about play-calling than anything else.
Pyne is 10th in play-action passing grade according to PFF. He averaged 10.9 YPA and the other Power 5 quarterbacks who ranked near him are Chance Nolan (Oregon State), Anthony Richardson (Florida), Hendon Hooker (Tennessee), Michael Penix Jr. (Washington), Bo Nix (Oregon), and Drake Maye (North Carolina). That’s pretty good company to be surrounded by.
Buchner has that very limited sample, but he finished with 14.2 YPA and 80% completions off of play-action before his injury. That’s pretty dang good.
Pyne was 77th in percentage of play-action drop backs in 2022 (29.3%). I still feel that number needs to go up, especially with Notre Dame being 60.2% run with their play selection (14th).
Defenses were all about stopping the run against the Irish and I think they could have taken more advantage of it with play-action opening up things up.
4. I think everyone was surprised that we got an announcement from Cam Hart this week that he was staying at Notre Dame. It was the timing as much as anything else.
Typically that call isn’t made before the bowl game, but I guess with him being out for that and possibly being out for the testing portion of the NFL Draft evaluations, likely made the call a lot easier to make for him.
With Hart back, that answers an important question at corner for the Irish. They’ll now have four of their top five back at the position. Add in a couple of talent freshmen and that should be a pretty good group. Now we have to see who else will decide to come back or leave for the NFL (or possibly the transfer portal).
There really aren’t a lot of guys making NFL decisions this year outside of the obvious ones with Michael Mayer and Isaiah Foskey. The other is Brandon Joseph, who would probably be best served by staying in college, but I would be shocked if he didn’t declare he was leaving eventually.
The only player who might leave that Notre Dame has to try and convince to stay is Justin Ademilola. It would be for his sixth year (Jayson has already played five).
There is an obvious hole at Vyper with Foskey moving on and there will be plenty of questions on who can fill that void if Justin ends up going to the NFL. If that happens, then a transfer becomes an absolute neccesity.
I don’t believe Justin is going to be selected in this NFL Draft if he decides to leave. That’s not to say he won’t make a team or get on a practice squad after being a UDFA, but he’s an undersized edge rusher who is built more like an off the ball linebacker. Even if he had a ton of production on his resume, it would be difficult to have enough to impress NFL scouts.
His pass rush win percentages were right there with Foskey this season (14.9% and 24.2% in true pass sets). He just hasn’t finished as well (not many have in college football) and he still can get better versus the run.
If they can convince him to stay, he’s not going to play that many more snaps (he was second on the defensive line after Foskey in 2022). He will get a chance to enhance his game to make him a more attractive prospect, though.
If he decides to leave, then adding a Vyper via the portal might be as important as adding a quarterback.
5. After Michigan beat Ohio State for the second year in a row, I saw some talk about Notre Dame following the Michigan formula (excuse me, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth) to beat teams like Ohio State and USC.
The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman had a tweet that summed up the supposed Michigan formula.
“Out-culture” and “out-physical” when you can’t “out-personnel” the opposition sounds like a pretty good plan and I won’t dispute that culture and physicality are going to be important for Notre Dame or that they haven’t been important for Michigan when you can see how good they’ve been on both the offensive and defensive lines the past two years.
As for the personnel part of it, any notion that you can beat a team like Ohio State without that is ridiculous. It ignores the fact that Michigan had the eventual second pick of the NFL Draft on their team in 2021 who had 15 (!) pressures and three sacks against the Buckeyes last season. That’s a good season for some players.
They also had another second round pick at the other edge rusher spot and a former 5-star nickel back who went in the first round.
This year Michigan had defensive tackle Mazi Smith (number one on Feldman’s Freaks List) and the offense was led by a former 5-star at quarterback, JJ McCarthy, and a former top-50 recruit, Donovan Edwards, ran for 216 yards.
That’s not just culture. That’s top end talent.
The other problem is that eventually teams run into a program like Georgia or Alabama (in most seasons) where they typically check the” all of the above” box.
Notre Dame has good culture. I don’t think they lack physicality, but they can get better on both sides of the line. They would have had a better shot at beating Ohio State and USC this season if they had more 5-stars, future NFL first round picks, and “freaks”.
6. This leads into what’s missing on Notre Dame’s defense.
I don’t think the scheme is bad and I don’t think the players are bad, but outside of Foskey and the late-season emergence of Benjamin Morrison, they lack “dudes”.
They didn’t have a play-maker at safety. They didn’t have any game-wreckers against the run at defensive line or linebacker. They had only three players with double digit Havoc play totals this season (Foskey, Morrison, and JD Bertrand).
They had nine in 2018.
I think the staff can coach better and put some of the players in better positions to make plays, but this is more about the talent not being as good. That group of edge rushers that Keith Gilmore recruited are gone; this team didn’t have a game-wrecking 3-tech like Jerry Tillery. This team also didn’t have an Alohi Gilman and Jalen Elliott duo at safety (or even one of them). They certainly didn’t have a Tevon Coney and Drue Tranquill at linebacker this season.
That comes back to recruiting and that declining on the defensive side of the ball. Clark Lea was a heck of a coordinator and Mike Elston is a good defensive line coach. Terry Joseph landed Kyle Hamilton. They didn’t recruit at a level that was necessary to sustain the same level on defense.
Marcus Freeman and company have upgraded the recruiting, but it’s going to be very important for some of these young guys from the 2021, 2022 and the class they are about to sign to make an impact next year. I think they have some playmakers on the roster that will eventually produce on the field. They need that to start happening in 2023.
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