Dateline: Flint Lake, IN
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Quote of the Week
And judging by the number of dumb ass penalties that USC committed last Saturday night, intelligent life definitely hasn't been making any house calls to that football program anytime recently.
Word of the Week
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| Meanwhile in Va. Beach, other nocturnal creatures readied themselves |
Game 7 Thoughts
Okay, so USC is... not good. They probably won't be bad forever - they've got to get the head coaching thing fixed, sooner or later, right? Whether that's a good thing - for ND or college football in general, that they return to something approximating excellence - that's a conversation for another time. (Me, I'd personally love for them to remain the college football equivalent of the Detroit (football) Lions for the rest of my life.)
But I digress.
Factually, they're pretty poor right now. So judging any ND performance probably needs to be grounded in that tiny bit of reality.
2) Tailgate. Best Tailgate of the Year, for a variety of reasons - well attended and by people one wanted to see, a beautiful day turning to pleasant (if a tad nippy) evening - with grills going, Bloody Mary's being mass produced, and an IPO-like launch of Tools Beer (which was AWESOME).
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| Overheard at the tailgate... |
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- Coan until the Red Zone
- Buchner bringing it home
And you'll never convince me that the Buchner's threat of running doesn't make them 50% better in that area... but give the O-line their due last Saturday, they did give Coan an awfully clean passing pocket for almost the entire night.
Score one for continuous work-in-progress improvement.
5a) Kevin Austin. I don't wish to dump on the young man but it's beginning to be evident that he's just not as good as we hoped.
Not bad - just not The Saviour: the bad drops at super inopportune times are one thing but he doesn't appear to fight for balls particularly well, and seems to disappear for stretches...
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| Run, |
Not to be confused with Lorenzo Styles, who looks like a future stud - and the speedy WR that we all thought Braden Lenzy was going to be.
5) Defense. Evidently, the objective was "points, not yards" from what I read, post-game.
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| Preach the gospel, Chase. |
7) The crowd. For as much grief as ND has taken over the years for being overly gentile in its ambience, that crowd seemed pretty amped.
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| Where is the roughing, exactly? |
But man, there was some extremely questionable calls - at key moments - that went against ND where one had to wonder about Pac-12 officiating motivations.
That said, as the 2nd half calls started going ND's way, one also had to consider whether 'familiarity was breeding contempt' between those refs and USC. Which is to say, do they get tired of seeing the Trojans pulling the same shit every time they see 'em?
Buddy's Buddy
RE-PETE (A shameless, illegal lift of Pete Sampson's weekly mail-bag)
Keeping USC to 153 yards rushing and 16 points feels like a win defensively on paper, but USC’s miscues took a number of points off the board (Bo Bauer’s pick notwithstanding). Did this defensive effort feel more troublesome for you given what could’ve been, or was this a game plan (bend, almost break, but let USC go all USC on themselves) that worked pretty well?
Jonathon G.
More the latter, although watching the game live I wondered just how well the defense was playing. After watching the game back and charting it, I came away more impressed.
Here’s how I’d look at the performance. Notre Dame went into the game with nickel as its base defense. Of USC’s 69 offensive snaps, Notre Dame had at least five defensive backs on the field for 67 of them. With Kyle Hamilton, that’s no problem. Without him, Marcus Freeman had to roll the dice between scrapping the plan due to Hamilton’s injury and sticking with what the defense practiced all week. He went with Door No. 2.
Full credit to D.J. Brown, Ramon Henderson and Houston Griffith for holding down the safety position without Hamilton, but that group doesn’t match up with most Power 5 opponents. Going nickel and dime did not get Notre Dame’s best 11 on the field at the same time, but against USC’s personnel, there wasn’t much choice. Once you factor in Hamilton’s loss with the personnel choices Freeman made, the performance was relatively solid.
And yes, waiting for USC to do USC things is a strategy. It’s the point of playing bend-but-don’t-break. Most college offenses aren’t efficient enough to put together four or five 10-play scoring drives in a game. USC certainly wasn’t.
There were questions from Daniel I. and Ryan C. about the cornerback position in terms of recruiting and development. Right now Notre Dame is living with the recruiting missteps of previous cycles. The senior class was supposed to be Derrik Allen, Houston Griffith, DJ Brown, Noah Boykin and TaRiq Bracy. Allen is a reserve at Georgia Tech. Boykin plays at UMass. Brown has been a career reserve. Griffith entered the transfer portal before reversing course. Kelly joked that Bracy’s career has felt like nine years instead of four. The junior class was Kyle Hamilton (All-America), Isaiah Rutherford (starting at Arizona), Litchfield Ajavon (zero snaps on defense in 2021), KJ Wallace (28 snaps on defense) and Cam Hart (starting as a converted three-star receiver).
That’s two classes, 10 players and two hits. Not good enough.
There’s a reason why Notre Dame took Isaiah Pryor and Nick McCloud as graduate transfers last year. There’s a reason why the Irish went after Akayleb Evans, who chose Missouri after transferring from Tulsa. And there’s a reason you’ll see Notre Dame scour the portal again for defensive back help this offseason. This position has not been developed at College Football Playoff levels.
Cocktail of the Week
Schedule
Wager
Wins | Archetype (Embodies) | Domer |
 12 | Miracle On Ice To be clear, ND running the table wouldn't come remotely close to approximating the USA ice hockey victory over Russia in '80. Nothing in my lifetime will beat this. Nor will anything exceed the guilt I still have for ruining this for Castellini. Still ND going 12-0 seems similarly tough to envision with the little we know right now. |
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 11 | Kerry Strug One final vault. Hit it, basically perfectly, and your country wins the gold medal. No pressure. Oh and you just tore two ligaments in your ankle on your prior attempt - you can barely walk. But apparently, you still have one more sprint in you. Boom! Done. ND winning 11 games is not really analogous to this but right now, it's looking just as iffy. | Jay F. Bill B. Bob J. Dave G. Peter B. Jim S. Jim B. Daryl M. Dennis R. Mike C. |
 10 | Super Bowl III | Jerrence Sloane B. Raz Phillip S. Jerry P. Kevin M. Jim T. Tim S. The Dim One Ungie Lini Bob S. Blair R. Alex S. Ted C. Tom F. Randy R. Mike G. |
 9 | NC St over Phi Slamma Jamma | Brian W. Garrett R. Mike B. John L. Ward H. |
 8 | Villanova over Georgetown In terms of improbability, you could probably flip this game w NC State's victory - they were both pretty awesome in a vicarious way. These rankings all being relative vs. the others, it's feeling 8'ish even if it probably deserves better. | Albert B. |
 7 | ND over Miami, 1988 Was this improbable at the time? Depends on who you ask - and if they're honest. Miami owned ND in the '80s. And yet, Holtz & Co. made everyone believe. Impressive, definitely. But on a scale of 1-10 as unlikely, maybe a 7. | |
 6 | ND over Clemson, 2020 | |
 5 | ND over Florida St., 1993 After the '88 Miami win, with Holtz still in charge... while never a 'lock', beating FSU was certainly no great surprise. And ultimately tempered by spitting the bit the next week against BC. | |
4 | If anyone wishes to play down here... | |
3 | ...be my guest. |
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Schadenfreude of the Week
2) Penn State. Category 1. 18 points after nine OT's. Now you're just showing off, coach Franklin. (And with Ohio St. on the schedule Saturday, perhaps this wasn't the week to announce a change in agents.)
3) Oklahoma State. Category 3. As little regard as I have for the Big 12, celebrating your spitting the bit against Iowa St. isn't personal, just business.
Terry's Tools
In a moment of recent quiet reflection, I found myself wondering, "What is wrong with me?" How is that I so aggressively celebrate the Zippy the Pinheads of the world each week over, typically, a singular Buddy's Buddy?
What happened to that dewey-eyed, young Iowa hayseed I used to be - who saw every Solo cup as half-full and ready to be topped up with your finest PBR (or, if one could score some in the mid-to-late '70s, Coors?)
How had the world hardened him so - was it the steady interaction with the myriad of Long Island tough guys or running with The Pittsburgh Seven, each one weirder than the next and yet strangely magnetic in their own idiosyncratic way.
Maybe it has to do with falling under the seductive trance of all those Dillonites. So likable. So deviant.
More likely, the answer lies in this: Jerrence is just a content whore. A slave to tawdry click bait. But geez, there's just. so. many. idiots. out. there.
And with a week off since our last game, they came at him fast, furious and from all directions.
What makes you quite the douche, for moi, is your trying to play the religious exemption card in all of this.
Specifically, the Catholic card. Wait, what? You're resisting based on Catholic religion grounds? You are aware the Pope is pro-vaccination, yes? Or maybe there's a splinter group you're aligned with - Illuminati?
Yikes.
Part of me wants to be impressed with how they did it. Impressed, if one can put aside, entirely the complete lack or ethics or criminal implications to their marketing plan.
Spoiler alert: a lot of blame to go around beyond the Sacklers, starting with FDA.
7) WFT. Is Dan Snyder the worst person in the world? Not a rhetorical question.
The Magic 8 Ball says, "Signs point to Yes."
In any event, one sure hopes someone outside the NFL gets to see those 650,000 emails.
Congress on Line 1, Commissioner Goodell. Given he apparently made $128M over the last two years, one can assume he's going to be very motivated to keep his bosses clean, even a total tool like Snyder.
Understandable. But seeing how the way the NFL is acting like, "nothing to see here," you have to believe whatever is in those emails is gonna make Robert Kraft's indiscretions look like kindergarten.
Where is WikiLeaks when you need 'em?
Final Thoughts
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