6 Thoughts on a Thursday

In six games this season, Notre Dame scored an average of 48.3 points.

No one’s complaining about those results. It’s the other four games that have people clamoring for change.

Against Ohio State, Duke, Louisville, and Clemson, they averaged 19.5 points. Unsurprisingly, they were 1-3 in those matchups.

I’m tired of writing about the Notre Dame offense. I’m tired of talking about the Notre Dame offense. But I don’t think I can stop talking and writing about it because everyone knows that the reason the Irish aren’t 10-0 or 9-1 and being discussed as a College Football Playoff team is how the offense played in those four games.

All four of those teams have defenses that are ranked in the top-25 in DF+ (the combined FEI and SP+ rankings). I’ll have more on that below, but in addition to going up against some good defenses, there are other reasons that can be pointed to outside of game plan, adjustments, structure, and who is calling plays.

Everyone who follows the team knows them well. Disastrous depth at receiver came back to bite them. They haven’t had good enough play from the interior of the offensive line. They also just lost their one breakout receiver, tight end Mitchell Evans, for the season.

Those aren’t excuses. They are reasons that have contributed to Sam Hartman not playing his best, the lack of success on 3rd down, and not putting enough points on the board.

But this isn’t anything new for Notre Dame. These kinds of things have happened to them many times in recent seasons.

In 2015 they lost starting running back Tarean Folston and starting quarterback Malik Zaire in the first two games.

In 2016 it all started off on the wrong foot without a clear quarterback decision that probably cost them the Texas game. Throw in number one receiver Torii Hunter Jr. getting concussed in that game and that wasn’t anything close to ideal.

In 2017 they had a quarterback with the yips and all of the drama surrounding Kevin Stepherson.

In 2018 they had Dexter Williams being out the first four games of the season, were forced to make a quarterback change, and lost their best offensive linemen, Alex Bars, in the fourth game.

In 2019 they started out with Cole Kmet and Michael Young suffering collarbone injuries in fall camp on top of Kevin Austin being suspended. Then they eventually had to deal with Tommy Kraemer and Robert Hainsey being lost for the last ¼ of the season.

In 2020 they had the foot injury with Austin that ruined his season and had no depth at receiver with pretty much no production returning. They lost starting center Jarrett Patterson late in the season as well.

In 2021 they had to play four different players at left tackle due to injuries and had a bad situation at guard that forced them to reboot the offense at the halfway point.

In 2022 they had Patterson playing hurt, quarterback injuries and limitations, Lorenzo Styles got the yips, and Avery Davis tore his ACL in camp.

On one hand, someone could say that’s a lot of bad luck on one side of the ball. The reality is that this is football. It happens on defense too. It happens everywhere.

Alabama’s offense looked like a disaster scoring 17 points and averaging 4.8 yards per play against South Florida. USF has the 126th ranked defense in DF+. This wasn’t exactly not moving the ball against Clemson.

No one was predicting Alabama was going to get significantly better, but now quarterback Jalen Milroe is 8th in ESPN’s QBR and no one in the country has a higher passer rating on 3rd down. Alabama found a way to get it fixed and they should have when one considers how good the material they have to work with.

Notre Dame doesn’t have the same material. The talent and depth is not the same as it is at Alabama. Anyone who is analyzing the offense with a critical eye understands that and has to be fair about how previous recruiting misses, injuries, and youth have contributed to the product on the field in those four games.

That doesn’t mean that the offense shouldn’t have performed better than it has, though. Notre Dame is currently 41st in points per drive, which would be their lowest finish since 2016 (42nd). Strictly when it comes to the offense scoring points, that’s where they are at right now.

Even with all of those issues in those other seasons, they managed to finish in the top-30 in points per drive in each of them.

(That current ranking is likely to go up after these last two games because Stanford’s defense is 129th in points per drive, but Wake Forest is 42nd and they have at least a few guys who can play on Sundays.)

Notre Dame fans don’t want to have to sweat whether or not they can score enough to comfortably beat a 4-6 Wake squad. That’s really what it boils down to. There’s a lack of confidence that Gerad Parker and the staff are going to find solutions and do a better job of controlling what they can control with the personnel.

All of the injuries and other things not breaking their way made it pretty much impossible for the offense with this roster to be elite, but there’s a big gap from elite to not good enough. The 2023 offense has been way closer to the latter, which is why I’m probably going to be stuck writing and talking about the offense until we see them move towards being elite.

2. ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky tweeted this during the Louisville game.

Notre Dame offense is way way way too stagnant and static pre snap. Very little help to players go win/get open

That observation is something that could have been relevant to the entire season and not just that night. Yes, it’s much easier to do more pre-snap with experience at receiver, but this is the kind of thing that even doing a little bit more of it leads to better things for those young receivers and their quarterback.

There’s no reason to believe this is going to change all that much for these last two regular season games or even for the bowl game, but ask any defensive coordinator if they’d rather prepare for a team who does more pre-snap than less and that would answer any questions about Notre Dame’s offense needing to do more of it. 

3. Timing is everything when making decisions.

Brian Kelly’s first season at Notre Dame was disastrous in many ways, but he didn’t make any major staff changes because he didn’t have to. When year two didn’t go as planned, he was forced to make some adjustments.

Kelly was deep enough into his tenure in South Bend when everything went wrong in 2016. If that had happened in year one, I doubt he’s going the reboot route at that time, but he didn’t have much choice after his seventh season.

Freeman didn’t rush to make any changes on defense despite Al Golden’s first year not meeting the same standard most had come to expect from a Notre Dame defense. That patience has obviously paid off. I can’t imagine the Irish being a better defense than they’ve been this season if Freeman elected to go a different direction.

I think it’s important that Notre Dame wins their final three games, but regardless of that, there is going to be some heat on Freeman for many different reasons.

There’s the historical year three piece with Notre Dame coaches. There’s the fact that he’s lost games he shouldn’t have in his first two seasons. There’s the simple fact that everyone will be expecting the program to take a step forward given that he has upgraded the talent comparatively to what he inherited.

There’s all of that and the fact Freeman can’t point to a track record with Parker to make people feel more positive about where things will go on offense next season. At best it will remain unknown and for many people, they’ll be expecting the worst and ready to pounce if things don’t go well early at Texas A&M.

I’d say there’s a large majority of people who don’t fault Freeman for what happened with the OC hire last offseason and I wholeheartedly agree with them. How it went down had nothing to do with him.

However, they will see it differently if things don’t work out on offense next season. That’s why whatever decision is made, the current timing makes it a critical one.

4. We mentioned on Hit & Hustle this week that the gauntlet Notre Dame faced in terms of top defenses was pretty much unprecedented.

That’s partially true. They have faced five defenses that ranked in the top-25 in DF+ this season. Four of them happened during a five week period.

NC State’s defense is 16th, Ohio State is third, Duke is 24th, Louisville is 20th, and then a few weeks later they faced a Clemson defense that is ninth.

They have played against five top-25 defenses in the same season before, though. In 2017 they faced Boston College (20th), Georgia (fifth), Michigan State (10th), Miami (13th), and LSU (18th). In 2016 they had to play USC (22nd), NC State (21st and in a freaking hurricane), Miami (10th), Virginia Tech (18th), and Stanford (13th).

No one should be surprised that it’s a lot more difficult to gain yards and put up a lot of points against better defenses. The problem is that other than against NC State, Notre Dame couldn’t put up points, couldn’t move the sticks, and turned the ball over too often against the four other good defenses they played.

Sure, it was a slog against Georgia and Miami in ‘17, but despite having serious limitations in the passing game, the Irish put up points on BC and Sparty and found a way to create enough big plays to win against LSU in the bowl game.

Even in ‘16, they had 30 against Miami and Virginia Tech and were over 6.1 YPP in both games. (The NC State game shouldn’t even count because that game should have never been played in the first place.)

It’s going to be rare for any offense to light up a good defense, but teams are more than likely going up against good defenses in the College Football Playoff, so these results do matter.

5. Woo, boy….I’d love to break things up with some more praise for the Irish defense, but how about some positives for next season’s offense?

In terms of returning production, ESPN’s Bill Connelly’s weighted formula places returning snaps on the offensive line as the most important (worth 47% of the overall number). The next most important thing in terms of production is wide receiver/tight end receiving yards (24%).

That adds some necessary perspective into what Notre Dame didn’t end up having this season. They lost all of Michael Mayer, Lorenzo Styles, Braden Lenzy, Kaleb Smith’s Virginia Tech production, and pretty much only got four games of Jayden Thomas and less than that of Deion Colzie.

Mitchell Evans, Tobias Merriweather, and Holden Staes brought back their combined five catches from last season.

Next season there’s a good chance they could have their eight leading receivers back plus anything they may add from the transfer portal. This isn’t Notre Dame bringing back Will Fuller, Chris Brown, Corey Robinson, CJ Prosise, and Amir Carlisle leading into the 2015 season, but it's a massive difference between how it ended up in terms of returning production at receiver and tight end this fall.

6. Jimbo Fisher getting fired by Texas A&M would have been interesting even if Notre Dame wasn’t visiting College Station to kick off next season, but obviously that adds to the intrigue of what might happen.

Could it be Mike Elko going back to run things after his run as coordinator there? He knows all about the resources he’d have that are close to unmatched. He also knows all of the headaches of working there as well. I heard he wasn’t a huge fan of that, so it may not be a slam dunk for him to want the job.

He should be in demand at other programs as well and if he’s truly happy at Duke, he can stick around a bit and will be in line for a huge raise. Whatever happens with that opening, it will be interesting to see if things end up differently than other big coaching changes. This tweet sums up how this is a bit different than most other circumstances.

The new coach could inherit a roster that has one of the best recruiting classes ever (in terms of rankings) entering year three in the program. The number one class A&M signed in 2022 is primed and ready with many of the players from that class playing prominent roles this fall.

They are 4th in 247Sports’ team talent composite and they have other top players who have the option to return if they want to. A&M has the money to entice them to stay.

The defense is 14th in DF+ and is second in havoc rate. It will likely be the best one Notre Dame faces in 2024…if they get enough of them to stick around.

Elko is one of the biggest dominos that needs to fall during the coaching carousel. If he leaves, it impacts his new program and his old one. There are players on Duke who plenty of programs would love to add to their roster as well. And if he’s going to leave, it’s probably going to be right after Duke’s last regular season game.

There’s basically 10 days until chaos hits all of college football, which is why A&M already made their move and UCLA sounds like they are going to make their move after this weekend. It’s all going to happen quickly, which means if Notre Dame is going to make changes, they won’t have much time to think about it because programs are going to move quickly to make hires and also hand out raises to coordinators, which also will raise buyouts.

Everyone learned a lot about that part of things during the last offseason.

No matter what happens with a coaching staff staying intact or not, no one can sit out and be a spectator when these coaching dominos start to fall because as soon as it happens, rosters start to shift as well. Men's Comfort Wash White Notre Dame Fighting Irish Great Outdoors T-Shirt