Concerning. Uninspiring. Frustrating. Ugly. Forgetful.
Take your pick to describe Notre Dame’s 25-10 win over Boston College on Saturday.
All of the above? Probably.
The good thing for the Irish is the last one - forgetful - is actually encouraging in a sense.
Notre Dame’s 2025 season won’t be defined by Saturday’s game in Chestnut Hill. However the season ends, it didn’t end at the hands of BC, to the great pleasure of Irish fans of a certain age.
And while Notre Dame won’t be sending the tape of Saturday’s win to the College Football Playoff committee, it wasn’t the kind of performance that will be held against them in any meaningful way either.
The question moving forward is whether the first adjective is actually the most apt. Was Saturday the proverbial canary in the coal mine?
There are reasons to see the game as a one-off.
Are there big concerns about Leonard Moore, who allowed the defense’s only touchdown, moving forward? No.
Should the Irish be concerned about questionable flags at the worst possible times? Many fans would say, ‘Absolutely,’ but there isn’t all that much Marcus Freeman and his staff can do about that.
Although, he will certainly address the needless penalties that weren’t questionable, especially the uncompetitive ones like pre-snap and post-play.
“Those are ones that we have to clean up,” Freeman said after Saturday’s game. “It's not a PI. PI and aggressive penalties are ones that you live with, but the ones that are undisciplined; jumping offsides is undisciplined, and pushing a guy out of bounds is undisciplined and so we've got to clean those up.”
Of course, there are some other questions that very well could be concerning.
Jadarian Price lost his third fumble inside the opponent’s 10-yard-line in the last 13 months. Freeman isn’t sticking his head in the sand with regard to Price’s ball security issues near the goalline, but he also made it clear he has a ton of confidence in the runner and will continue to give him chances.
“We're going to play him a lot,” said Freeman. “We're going to give him the ball. We're going to let Jadarian be him. We've got to attack it in practice. We can't be insane and not say anything about it.
“We've got to continue to work on it in practice and focus on ball security. But we're going to give him the ball and let him go.”
The kicking game was so bad - two PATs and a 35-yard field goal missed by three separate kickers; Noah Burnette, Erik Schmidt and Marcello Diomede - that Freeman was reduced to sarcasm when asked about the issues.
“The issues were every time we kicked the ball, it did not go in between the field goal posts and so that's the issue,” he said.
“We're going to keep putting guys in there until we consistently have somebody put the ball through the field goal posts. We have three kickers, but if you rotate three kickers, you don't have one.
“We'll figure out physically what it is with Noah (Burnette), but we've got to do what we do in practice better in the game, and so that's the situation. We've got to figure this thing out because our team deserves for us to be able to make extra points in field goals, and so for us to reach the potential that we believe we have, we better fix it with urgency.”
As impressive as Notre Dame has been over the last two seasons, especially in throttling almost all of the lesser opponents it’s faced, Saturday’s game was encouraging for earning the win in ugly fashion.
“We worked really hard to achieve the outcome that we achieved, so you’ve got to remember that, right?” Freeman said. “You’ve gotta remember it's really, really difficult to achieve the outcome. That's the only time we're outcome-driven, is in the game.
“The challenges will get tougher. That doesn't mean the ranking of the opponent makes something tougher. It's understanding that, again, as you move farther in the month of November, everything is magnified.
“We’ve got to continue to play and execute at a higher level. I'm proud of the way they battled, and found a way to finish when we needed to.”
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