6 Thoughts on a Thursday

It might sound simplistic to break it down this way, but so much of the game of offense and defense can be separated into early downs, third (or fourth down), and the red zone. Win those three areas and you’re very likely going to win a football game.

That’s one of the reasons why college football stats guru Parker Fleming tracks them, although he uses points per Eckel (which is the amount of points scored/allowed per quality possession) rather than just focusing on the red zone.

The teams who do well in those areas win a lot of games, which is why no one should be surprised that Notre Dame’s defense is great in all of those areas. They are sixth in early down EPA (expected points added), fifth in 3rd/4th down success rate, and 21st in points per Eckel (tied for 10th in red zone touchdown percentage).

Notre Dame isn’t 7-1 and ranked in the top-10 if they weren’t really good at capitalizing on scoring opportunities on offense as well. They’re 10th in points per Eckel (eighth in red zone touchdown percentage). Early downs and 3rd downs haven’t been as good. They are 48th in early down EPA and 51st on 3rd/4th down success rate.

Those rankings looked a lot worse before the first bye week, though. After the bye, they converted 18 of 36 on 3rd down (tied for ninth in the month of October) and converted seven of eight on 4th down.

A lot of that has to do with the improvements in the passing game. Notre Dame’s passing game was 82nd in EPA per dropback and 92nd in passing success rate after the first five games. Those numbers have Improved to 42nd in EPA per dropback and 53rd in success rate.

Riley Leonard went from averaging a yucky 4.7 yards per attempt on 1st down to 8.3 YPA after the bye week. (6.5 YPA on 1st down on the season). It’s highly doubtful we’re going to see this big of a jump by the passing game after this bye week, but there are plenty of reasons to believe they’ll continue to be better.

Leonard is more confident. Offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock is more confident in Leonard. The receivers are more confident and they may finally have a group of five offensive linemen they’ve settled on for the rest of the season.

They won’t face a great pass defense unless they see them in the College Football Playoff, so I think we’ll see them continue to get better throwing the football in the final third of the regular season.

2. It seems to be a consensus amongst most Notre Dame fans that Mitchell Evans is not the same as he was last season after coming back from a torn ACL. While the numbers would suggest that’s true, I do think the offense could use him a lot more and he should be a bigger part of the game plan every week.

He looked pretty healthy to me when he was doing this after the catch several weeks ago.

My friend Michael Bryan mentioned the difference in his average depth of target compared to last season in this recent piece and it’s pretty staggering.

Mitchell Evans is simply not being targeted downfield, leading to a massive drop-off from his 2023 numbers. The low volume as he recovers makes sense, but the ADOT at 3.5 yards versus 10.2 a season ago feels like a miss for Mike Denbrock. The efficiency is strong when targeted, but so much work in the flat and lack of medium-deep targets seems like a waste unless there’s physical limitations we’re not aware of.

17 of his 20 targets this season have been less than 10 yards down the field. Last season 24 of his 40 targets were 10 yards down the field or more.

I think MB is correct that this is partially on Denbrock. Tight end Mason Taylor ADOT at LSU last season was only 4.9 yards. He had 40 targets less than 10 yards and only seven more than 10. This year Taylor’s ADOT is 7.5.

I’m sure a lot of Taylor's ADOT under Denbrock was influenced by having two first round picks at receiver, Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas Jr. Those guys aren’t there anymore. I’m also sure that Riley Leonard’s progression in the offense and the level of the offensive line has something to do with less downfield targets for everyone at Notre Dame.

If Evans finishes with his ADOT around this same number, that would be a bad thing for this offense.

3. ESPN’s Max Olson published the stop rate rankings this week and Notre Dame is fourth. (Stop rate is the percentage of a defense's drives that end in punts, turnovers or a turnover on downs)

He added this nugget in the piece about Notre Dame’s stop rate in the last month as well.

“The best stop rate defense in college football since Oct. 1 has been Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish got stops on 83.3% of drives over their last three games”

Notre Dame is also fifth in points per drive, a top-five defense in DF+ (combined FEI and SP+ rankings) and you already saw those rankings I mentioned earlier. By pretty much every metric, this defense has played great and they’ve done it without three pretty important pieces in Jordan Botelho, Boubacar Traore, and Ben Morrison for a good chunk of this season.

I know we have some ball game left, but I don’t think it’s too early to suggest that Al Golden should be a finalist for the Broyles Award this season. Even without the injuries, he should probably be in the conversation as one of the top assistants in college football. With those guys not being available, he should be on the short list.

The graphics department has plenty of material to work with to hype up Golden’s case. They should get on that and not let ISD’s Instagram beat them to the punch.

4. Golden and the defense still have some tests to pass in these last couple of games. Army (17th in OF+) is going to present a challenge if quarterback Bryson Daily is presumably back healthy. USC is going to be interesting as well.

A lot can be said about Lincoln Riley and the job he’s done at USC, but no one can ever question his chops calling an offense. They are 12th in OF+ and yet they are making a change at quarterback with UNLV transfer Jayden Maiava replacing Miller Moss.

I think Moss is a bit of a scapegoat, even if he has thrown some untimely interceptions in recent weeks, but that doesn’t really matter. Riley made the change and Maiava is a different player to prepare for than Moss.

Moss is not a running threat. PFF has Moss charted with only one scramble all season. Maiava is more of a dual-threat and was a frequent scrambler at UNLV as a redshirt freshman last season. He can escape the rush and can really move well at his size (6-4 227).

He has impressive arm talent and put up good numbers in 2023 (63.5% completions, 3,085 yards, 8.7 YPA, 17 TDs), but I’m not quite certain he’ll add a dynamic element to their running game. He finished 70th in QBR last season and 94th in total rushing EPA. His numbers running the football aren’t close to what UNLV’s quarterbacks have put up in the same offense this year. He also finished 100th in PFF rushing grade for quarterbacks with 50+ attempts last season.

More mobility and more of a running threat than Moss? Definitely. The same kind of impact as Caleb Williams as a runner? Not even close.

This is a different offense with plenty of skill talent to support Maiava and he was committed to Georgia as a transfer before flipping to USC for a reason. The kid has a lot of talent. He might be the spark USC needs.

He also is stepping into a situation with a bad offensive line (111th in PFF’s pass block grade and 105th in run block grade). Three of the five starters have struggled this season. Maiava was third in the country in turnover-worthy play percentage as well in 2023 (10 interceptions). He tended to lock on to receivers.

That’s the kind of thing that usually goes very badly against an Al Golden defense. He and the staff will have three games to study Maiava, which is a lot better than going into a game where they just made the change.

5. Something I’m monitoring with the defense to close out the season with Leonard Moore as a starter will be the frequency of Notre Dame blitzing. Against Louisville and Georgia Tech, the Irish only sent extra rushers on 28.9% and 20.4% of dropbacks. That’s a lot less than they have in other games this season.

Maybe it had more to do with those specific offenses and quarterbacks they were facing, but we’ll see if they do rush four more than we’ve seen over these next few games.

It should be noted that Florida State has been playing two quarterbacks and while freshman Luke Kromenhoek has been the deputy Mayor of Struggletown against the blitz (2.9 YPA on 20 dropbacks), Brock Glenn’s three interceptions this season have all come when defenses didn’t send the blitz.

6. Notre Dame can’t get caught looking ahead to the College Football Playoff even though everyone else who is watching them is busy doing that. How could they not be with the initial rankings coming out this week? 

The Irish are 10th, which means a whole lot of nothing for where they might finish if they win out. Not only are there games remaining that will impact who moves up or down, but the reasons why Penn State is seventh and Notre Dame is 10th are going to change as well.

We’ve seen it happen every year with whoever is on the committee. What matters one week changes the next week because the story changes, which is exactly why putting out rankings before they actually matter is dumb. Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel did a great job describing the folly of the rankings show in his latest piece.

It made massive controversies out of issues that would naturally play themselves out — like ranking two teams that were set to play each other. Coaches and fans were left to try to figure out what the most important criteria was — head-to-head victory or number of losses or margin of victory or strength of schedule or strength of record or …? A week later, it would be something else.

The committee was trapped. These are 13 well-meaning and highly intelligent people trying to follow protocols and do an honest job, but trapped with an impossible — and pointless — task. The show became a public relations problem for the committee. It undermined the credibility of a group that needed to be trusted.

And as Wetzel also pointed out, the committee’s job is much harder now with 12 teams rather than four. The difference between the sixth seed and the 11th seed isn’t very big right now. It may be a wider gap when the season is over and there is more data to look at, but it’s still going to be brutal to decide what means more in terms of criteria.

Before it was just the teams who got left out who were angry. Now everyone is going to be angry about seeding because the difference between a home game and going on the road for teams is huge. Who teams might have to face in the second round is just as big.

I saw some people say that Notre Dame doesn’t have much of a path to move up if everyone in front of them wins. The problem with that is that everyone still has games left to play and that includes the teams who aren’t involved in the CFP top-12 discussion.

Louisville looks like a better win this week than last week because they beat Clemson. The Texas A&M win will look different if they win out and beat Texas at the end of the season.

Penn State’s win against Wisconsin helps them now. It won’t help them as much if Wisconsin loses its next three games against Oregon, Nebraska, and Minnesota. That would make them 5-7. If Notre Dame goes and beats USC on the road by a big margin, that might look a lot different to the committee than Penn State squeaking by them earlier in the season.

There are so many things that can happen between now and then that any discussion of Indiana being upset to be ranked where they are will sound incredibly stupid if they get blown out by Ohio State in a couple of weeks.

Notre Dame has to go out and take care of business in the next month, but where they are ranked could end up having less to do with how they play in November than how different wins look for everyone four weeks from now. We’ll all tune in next Tuesday to see where everyone is slotted, but there’s no use being upset by any of it right now because things will change a lot by the time the ranking actually matters.

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