Notre Dame Not Focused On Playoff Attention
The first College Football Playoff rankings were released on Tuesday evening, and Notre Dame came in at No.3. The Irish have been ranked in the committee poll before, and they showed great excitement watching the rankings come out.
There was a lack of excitement as Notre Dame captains Josh Adams, Greer Martini, Nyles Morgan and Drue Tranquill didn’t even watch the show.
Martini and Tranquill were doing classwork, Morgan was coaching a women’s flag football team and Heisman Trophy candidate Josh Adams was mentoring a foster kid.
“It's obviously exciting and things like that,” stated Morgan “But we're kind of just worried about beating Wake Forest.”
Martini had to actually be told about the rankings by a classmate.
“The guy I was working with at the time kind of showed me his phone, said, ‘You guys are the third team in the college football rankings,'" Martini stated. "It was really exciting.
“I don't think it really means that much to us. It's not going to help us win on Saturday. But it was really definitely a cool thing to see.”
Notre Dame's captains downplayed any type of true excitiement, but it might not be scripted. The team has been focused on a goal since January and they are well aware one slip up will cost them that shot.
"I feel like guys feel kind of like how I feel," explained Morgan. "Outside looking in, it's all hype. Heisman, Playoffs, yada, yada, yada. I'm serious, we're really just focused on beating Wake Forest. Like, that stuff isn't really relevant right now. That will be relevant at the end of the year. Right now it's about us as a team. Just worried about just doing our jobs.
"I would just say everything kind of feels like the same. It's an everyday process. Just have to work at it every single day."
The accomplishment of just being in the playoff discussion is quite the feat as the Irish were 4-8 a year ago. Notre Dame went to work in the offseason, and the Irish have flashed what they are capable of the first eight weeks of the 2017 season.
“it validates it a little bit,” Tranquill said of the rankings. “It's always exciting. You can't deny the emotions of it. The way I see it is if we lose to Wake Forest “on Saturday, we're out of that picture.
“Like Coach Kelly said, we've been in a one-game playoff since our one-point loss to Georgia. We continue to view it as that. It's exciting. But we have to be beat Wake. We have a lot of great opponents coming up, Miami, Navy, Stanford, then obviously Wake on Saturday. We got to continue to take care of business to achieve what we want.”
The next step for the Irish is to avoid the noise of being a highly ranked team.
“There's a different buzz around campus,” explained Martini. “You go to class, guys are always saying, ‘congratulations.’ That wasn't being said before Temple. It's like a different environment. You're going to class, people are saying, ‘You're No. 3.’ It's one of those things where you got to kind of say, ‘thank you.’ But you can't go that far with it. You got to, like I said, put your head down and keep going.”
For Josh Adams, it’s a little bit different as the team success is there, but he is right in the middle of a Heisman race. The Philadelphia native isn’t worried about his mindset or the team’s, as the Irish have prepared and handled everything correctly to this point.
“I don't think anybody is really concerned,” Adams said of the hype. “We're so locked in on our goal, we're so focused in on what we want to accomplish, that other stuff just flies right by us. We're so determined on what we want to accomplish, we know that we can't take anybody we play lightly, we can't take any moment we have for granted.
"We're continuing to do the things that got us here from the very beginning of camp to now. We're doing the same thing. We're sticking to our traits, our process of trying to be excellent, trying to reach for perfection. I think that mindset has brought us a long way, and it's keeping us focused.
“We were never worried about any outside noise. We're not going to let that stop us now because the only people that can stop us is us. We're holding each other accountable to staying focused on our goal and holding each other accountable for all things that we do.”