6 Thoughts on a Thursday

After five games we might still be learning who Notre Dame can be on offense. We know who they are right at this moment, though.

Their strength is their running game. They have two elusive backs who are capable of turning negative plays into big gains. They also have one of the best running quarterbacks in the country. Jeremiyah Love, Jadarian Price, and Riley Leonard average 4.73, 5.6, and 4.07 yards AFTER contact.

They are 8th in EPA (expected points added) per rush despite having an inexperienced and banged up on the offensive line. The line has had a tough time against the best defensive lines they’ve faced, Texas A&M and Louisville, and offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock has had to adjust to that reality. They won’t see any other defensive lines as good as those two the rest of this season and with what we’ve seen from Love, Price, and Leonard, it would be crazy to think Denbrock won’t be leaning on that rushing attack for these final seven games of the regular season.

That’s who Notre Dame is and they shouldn’t stray too far away from it. At the same time, every defense they face knows that’s who they are.

That’s the lane that they are most likely going to stay in. That makes it a lot more difficult to have success running the ball when other teams expect it and will try and force Notre Dame to beat them by throwing the football.

This is why the next two games are going to reveal a lot about what Notre Dame did to improve during the bye week and if they can be more than they already are on offense.

They play a Stanford defense who doesn’t exactly have an elite run defense (71st in EPA per rush), but they’ve gone from 129th to 21st in PFF’s run defense grading. They’ve also only allowed 14 runs of 10+ yards all season.

Teams have put up points on them (102nd in points per drive), but they’ve largely been able to do so by taking advantage of their secondary and pass defense. They’re 114th in passing success rate and 115th in opponent passer rating. They’ve allowed 8.6 yards per attempt against their four FBS opponents this season. It’s a bad pass defense and teams have routinely taken advantage of that.

The question is, can Notre Dame do that? Can they mostly stay in their lane with who they are running the football, but also be successful enough passing the ball to take advantage of the weakness of an opposing defense?

That matters not only in this game against Stanford, but even more against a Georgia Tech defense that is 22nd in EPA per rush while being 117th in EPA per drop back. Their defense is 111th in passing success rate and 100th in opponent passer rating against FBS opponents.

No one needs numbers to know that Notre Dame’s passing attack has been mostly anemic this season. But what the heck, I’ll drop in that they are 82nd in EPA per drop back and 92nd in passing success rate. I know Irish fans might look at these like “get right games” for the passing attack, but Stanford and Georgia Tech might feel the same. 

Louisville is 103rd in passing success rate and 78th in EPA per drop back. The fact that Notre Dame had three passing plays of 30+ yards against Louisville when they only had two going into the game means something. They were able to win against Louisville in that way when they had to be cautious about protecting Leonard against Louisville’s pass rush.

If Notre Dame has big games throwing the ball in these next two weeks, it shouldn’t be viewed as a definitive sign that this is what we’ll see the rest of the season from them. However, it should be viewed as a good thing if it happens because that’s exactly what they should do against Stanford and Georgia Tech.

2. Denbrock doesn’t sugarcoat a lot of stuff when he’s talking to the media. He’s always been that way when he’s been on staff at Notre Dame.

He wasn’t lying when he said “We’ve been average as dirt on first down”. They have been pretty good running the football (5.24 yards per carry) and pretty gross throwing it (4.7 yards per attempt). They have produced only five first downs throwing the football on first down, which is tied for dead last in the country.

Woof.

Leonard is completing 65.2% of his passes on first down and the average of depth of target on those throws has a lot to do with it.

Marcus Freeman and Denbrock both talked about getting into better down and distance situations on third down to be able to convert more often. That’s definitely something that needs to improve. They also have to find more ways to gain yards after the catch and stress second and third level defenders more often so they aren’t playing downhill all the time.

It’s worth noting that Stanford is 97th (8.6 YPA) and Georgia Tech is 99th (8.2 YPA) in opponent passer rating on first down.

3. Notre Dame has had to deal with a tougher travel schedule than most programs for years. The programs in the Big Ten and ACC are getting a taste of that this season after they poached teams from the PAC-12.

Stanford is experiencing it right now and it’s been particularly brutal. Three weeks ago they had to fly to Syracuse to play them on a Friday night. The next week they traveled to Clemson to play them on Saturday night. They were back at home last week against Virginia Tech, but now they’ll be back on the road with another long trip to South Bend.

Just like Notre Dame, these players at Stanford actually have to go to class. They’ve never had to deal with this kind of travel before in the middle of the season. After their first game playing Hawaii, they only had to shift time zones twice all of last season. Both of those were from Pacific to Mountain time. 

I don’t know how much that extra travel is going to impact them, but I’m certain it’s not going to be in any way that’s positive.

4. I wasn’t surprised what I was hearing from the broadcast team covering the Texas A&M-Missouri game last Saturday. They made a big deal of the way quarterback Conner Weigman was playing and the growth of the A&M offense.

Weigman was great. He completed 81.8% of his passes, averaged 12.5 yards per attempt, and averaged 6.6 yards per carry. It was also Jordan Rodgers in the booth for ESPN and he was all-in on Weigman before the season. 

It might have been appropriate to mention that he had the misfortune of going up against Notre Dame’s defense in week one. The fact that he threw for more yards in the first quarter against Mizzou than he did in four quarters against Notre Dame might have called for something from the graphics people working the broadcast.

They didn’t mention anything, so I’ll just add that he managed only 40% completions against the Irish, 3.3 YPA, and threw two picks. His QBR against a clearly fraudulent top-10 Mizzou team was 93.7. It was 36.5 against Notre Dame.

It’s not Rodgers’ job to give flowers to Notre Dame’s defense while he’s calling a game without them playing in it. Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit offered plenty of praise for ND’s elite secondary during the A&M game.

Weigman is a good player. He could be a high pick whenever he’s off to the NFL. He got humbled going against a defense that is currently 1st in FEI, 4th in DF+ (combined FEI and SP+), 2nd in EPA per dropback, and 1st in passing success rate. He wasn’t the first who that’s happened to and he won’t be the last.

5. There’s no doubt that Notre Dame’s defense would be better with a healthy Jordan Botelho and Boubacar Traore. The pass rush can still be effective and maybe even very good without them, but it won’t be as good as it would have been with them.

I still think the defense will very likely get better this season and that’s largely because they have four true freshmen and four in their second season at Notre Dame who came into this season with a combined 345 snaps of experience. And 198 of those were from Christian Gray.

Gray and Adon Shuler are two first-year starters in the secondary who have been great to start this season and they will get better. Freshman Leonard Moore played more snaps against Louisville than he played in the first four games of the season. He’s going to get better.

Notre Dame closed out the second half against Louisville with three young linebackers who are all ascending. Drayk Bowen, Jaiden Ausberry, and Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa all played the highest single game snap counts of the season and flourished.

Injuries to Botelho, Traore, and Josh Burnham opened the door for Bryce Young and Loghan Thomas at defensive end and Vyper. Both of them have a long road of development ahead of them and like the others, there’s no guarantee that they are going to take a big leap from week to week. They will definitely be better later this season than they were against Louisville, though.

There’s those young players who are going to keep playing faster and then there are guys like Jason Onye, who is playing at a different level than he has before. He’s played 106 snaps in five games. He only played 155 all of last season. The arrow is going to keep pointing up for him.

There’s a bunch of players on this defense who should be much better by the time they play USC than they are right now. It’s going to be exciting to see what the Notre Dame defense looks like as most of them level up.

6. I’ve felt for a while that some sort of college football super league is inevitable. The television contract for the current College Football Playoff ends in 2031, but the current structure even lasting that long seems optimistic.

The SEC and Big Ten have all of the power. That’s why they are meeting today to discuss CFP access (more automatic bids for them) and scheduling. If they want to, they can ice out everyone else from games that matter.

Out of the top-20 teams in the F+ rankings (combined FEI and SP+), 15 of them play in those two conferences. Notre Dame and Miami are the only two in the top-10 who don’t play in the SEC or Big Ten.

There have been 13 games this season with five million or more viewers. Each one of them featured an SEC or Big Ten team. Notre Dame, Miami, Clemson, and Colorado played in four of those 13 matchups, but it was when they were playing a team from those big two conferences.

That’s why the notion of all FBS football programs breaking off into a separate entity doesn’t make much sense. It’s why the idea of Project Rudy, which essentially takes the Power 4 conference and breaks them off from everyone else, seems far-fetched to me as well.

The Big Ten and SEC don’t need to give Iowa State a piece of their pie when everything eventually breaks off. As The Athletic’s Ralph Russo pointed out in his piece on the topic, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey explained on a podcast why including a bunch of teams who don’t have the same value isn’t something that the SEC has to worry about.

“I don’t want to dumb down the Southeastern Conference to be a part of some super league notion with 70 teams that some people speculate would happen,” Sankey said. “They want to be us, and that’s on them to figure it out, not on me to bring myself back to earth.”

As Russo so deftly put it, “why would the SEC or Big Ten ever join a super league when they can just be the super league?”

The most likely scenario for Notre Dame in the near future seems to be joining the Big Ten if it’s a B1G vs SEC situation with them breaking away. It will be that or them joining with the biggest brands from those conferences leaving programs like Rutgers and Vanderbilt behind to try and eliminate bad matchups. 

Sorry to Clark Lea and Vandy after their big win over Alabama, but that could end up being the peak for the program. People love to see David topple Goliath, but they aren’t going to bet television ratings on the chance that this could be the time it happens. There’s a reason why that game was on the SEC Network and not ABC.

I never wanted the PAC-12 to disappear. I liked the Rose Bowl the way it was. I didn’t want to see Oklahoma and Nebraska end their rivalry. Texas and Texas A&M never should have stopped playing each other.

I also loved baseball and watching Rickey Henderson steal bases. Well, the A’s have left Oakland and no one is turning back the clock to bring back things in college football that never should have gone away.

The Big Ten and the SEC are the power brokers in college football. Notre Dame has the power to be included with them in whatever is next, but those two are the ones who will decide exactly what next is going to be.

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