Notre Dame OC Mike Denbrock Talks CFP Prep

The Indiana defense certainly has the attention and respect of Notre Dame offensive coordinator heading into Friday night’s College Football Playoff first-round matchup between the Hoosiers and the Irish. 

“They're a veteran group,” Denbrock said on Monday. “They do a great job of the little nuances that make their scheme so effective and they execute them at a really high level. What I mean by that is like slipping to the edge of blocks and using the stunts and different things that they do up front, plugging linebackers.

“They do a good job of kind of messing with your combination blocks in the run game and force you to kind of block them one on one. Then they do a good job of getting off blocks and running to the football. They've been incredible this year with the ability to take the running game away from people. We know, headed into the game, that's how we're built. That's our foundation. So, we better figure it out before Friday.”

Denbrock feels fortunate to have the players his unit does, including Jeremiyah Love. The star running back left the USC game with a knee injury, but Denbrock expects him to be at full speed on Friday.

“Absolutely, my expectation is always for the best of the best to play their best,” he said. 

As head coach Marcus Freeman said earlier in the week, Denbrock wants to make sure his group is playing football and not “fit ball” against an Indiana defense that will throw a lot at them.

“You have to communicate to the guys around you, and you have to have some awareness to handle the multitude of things that they do to take the run away from you,” Denbrock allowed. “However, at the same time, you cannot lose your aggressiveness and attack mentality about how you're going to come off the ball and how you're going to go about doing that. 

“We want to make sure that we're trying to play football on their side of the line of scrimmage and not play lateral down the line of scrimmage. That's a huge deal when you're talking about all the different versions of what they do that they give you from snap to snap. So, it's a challenge to keep them aggressive, but also keep them mindful that they're working as a unit and have to kind of execute that way.”  

Denbrock is also grateful that he has Riley Leonard on his side and he trusts his quarterback to make the right decisions. 

“They're a team that kind of mixes up their zones and plays different versions and will jump into man from time to time,” Denbrock said. “We've got to be able to be really decisive. They do a good job of trying to make you indecisive with how they kind of flop their coverages and the different things that they do. 

“We’ve got to know where the ball is going. We’ve got to get it out of our hand, and we’ve got to be confident in doing that. If we do that, we're going to be in pretty good shape.”  

On the other side of the ball, Denbrock is well aware of Mikhail Kamara, who transferred to Indiana from James Madison, following first-year Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti from Harrisonburg, Va., to Bloomington, Ind. 

The defensive end leads the Hoosiers with 10 sacks. 

“They've got more than one really good defensive lineman, but he's obviously when you get into must-throw situations, when you get into two-minute, when you get into fourth-quarter games on the line, he's been their guy who's made plays for them — and big plays,” Denbrock said. “Put people behind the chains with the way he's been able to kind of get off blocks and manipulate linemen. 

“We're going to have to control him. We're going to have to find a way to limit his access, not only to third-and-long opportunities if at all possible, but nudge him and chip him and do some different things to try to help our guys out.”  

And, Denbrock will also be aware of the unknown, one of which is the weather in South Bend on Friday night. The current forecast calls for temperatures in the 20s and while severe winds and snow aren’t being predicted at the moment, that can change at any mome

“Any sort of extreme piece of weather affects kind of what you do. Whether it's really cold or whether it's really windy, or it's raining in buckets or it's in a hurricane. All that has to kind of be taken, obviously, into consideration. If it's a little bit cold and it's blowing a little bit but not that bad, I don't know how much that necessarily changes things. 

“When it gets extreme, you obviously have to have contingencies built into the plan that, ‘Hey, you know, if it's like this, then we've got to get to this stuff a little bit more.’”  

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