WARNING - INSANELY LONG RANT TO FOLLOW:
Right about now, like many, many Irish fans, I am finding myself sorely tempted to start worshipping the golden calf. Charlie Weis was supposed to be Moses! He was supposed to lead us out of bondage and into the promised land again.
Things started off so well too....like Moses, Charlie spoke "Let my people go!" 2005 and 2006 saw ND beat the teams they were 'supposed' to beat, lose to teams with better 'talent' and actually give hope to most of us that the years of futility were behind us at last. And like Pharoh, the BCS acquiesced, consecutive births in the 'big bowl games' becoming our own latter-day manna. ND Nation was freed from bondage; but, now we find ourselves collectively wandering through the proverbial desert again. Is it time for a good old-fashion loss of faith? Should we really be ready to melt down our jewelry and create graven images already?
I want to keep the faith, really I do....its just that calf is soooo shiny and soooooo tempting.....
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The defense is improved vastly over a year ago (they have gone from the worst phase of the game for ND to its best, so that alone is surprising, but they are also showing a lot more competence and week-over-week improvements as well) - especially in limiting big plays. They may not have the numbers or the exact athletes to wreek havoc on an opposing offense quite yet, but the signs are promising.
Brian Smith, Kerry Neal, Darrin Walls and David Bruton form a very, very solid core for the future - one that seems to have guys destined to play on Sundays at many positions and absolutely a core that can be augmented and developed into a formidable group as early as next season. I think the defense this year has been hung out to dry by inept offense, bad special teams play and stupid penalties way more than any defense deserves. Their scoring average is bad, but given the holes they have been in and the fact that they have almost as many TDs as a unit as the offense does, I think the future of the defense is encouraging.
Freshmen QBs (or QBs who have never played meaningful minutes) will look very, very bad at times...that is to be expected and that does take more than 7 weeks to fix. (Even if our QB's seem to show more proclivity for regression than anything else this year. Clausen seems to be getting visibly WORSE, making me wonder if the surgery to his elbow and lack of training pre-season left him woefully unprepared to play at the D1 level this year at all; and Sharpley is not the answer either. Sharpley comes in and is a house of fire for ONE DRIVE Saturday and after that he was really no better than he was against GT. The average gain per play? Clausen = 33 plays, 68 yards for 2.02 per play. Sharpley = 38 plays, 169 yards for a whopping 4.45 yards per play. Neither one is exactly making people forget the '99 Rams or '07 Pats.)
Setting aside the whole QB controversey for a moment, neither player has been even remotely serviceable for a winning team this year and the results speak for themselves, but in defense of both QBs, I don't think Brady Quinn or Tom Brady could do much more than 5 yards per play behind this offensive line either.
Freshmen RBs and WRs are frequently overwhelmed - as are their sophomore counterparts. They don't do very much, except in spurts, and that is exactly what we have seen this year. There is some promise there - Kamara looks a lot like Mo Stovall, drops and all, Parris is doing a hell of a Samardzija immitation - right down to the post-catch theatrics; and there have been flashes from Golden Tate as well; but collectively, there has been a whole lot of inconsistency as well and a noticeable lack of a reliable gamebreaker or emerging go-to guy (although Parris seems to be getting closer than anyone else yet).
That WR is one position of need for ND was already well-established heading into the year, and I don't think any of us believed a true game breaker or dominant receiver was going to emerge from the current roster. They are what they are, and thats an exceedingly average group at the moment, but that is not exactly shocking either. The type of players on the team already could be a serviceable corp if not for the downright failures of the O-Line.
What is shocking is the depth of continuous ineptitude shown by the offensive line from the first series against GT to the last series against BC.
The absolute failure of this offensive line to generate anything remotely resembling run blocking (and barely able to improve the pass blocking from attrocious to sub-par), or to sustain any kind of improvement in-season, is the most horrifying aspect of this train wreck of a season.
And yes, I understand that chemistry and experience make O-lines play better AS A UNIT - but our O-Line woes extend to the simplest of things - men getting beat one-on-one by other men. Our O-Line does not look confused, they look incompetent and incapable of anything better at the moment. Seven games into the season and the blocking is marginally better at best. THAT is disheartening in a way that QB errors, HB missteps and WR drops or inconsistency are not. Seeing supposedly talented O-Line players get dominated week after week after week is the core problem of this team.
Can we honsetly say at this point that the O-Line is even remotely as promising as other areas of the team? I can't. I want to. I want to believe in their "potential" and their advance billing (speaking mainly about the O-Line class of 2006, the sophomores, the "best O-Line recruiting in the country" from two years ago), but I just do not see it on the field. Coach Weis is very big on "seeing it on the field" and to date, this offensive line has shown exactly nothing (unless in the Paul Newman Color of Money sense they have shown their ass).
At this point in the season,
I am reaching the end of the Willingham's fault bandwagon and I am jumping off. Too many games have been played THIS season to continue to point to inexperience as a major factor any longer. They were never going to be a dominating unit this year, that much was expected....what was not expected and is not acceptable is the fact that they simply are NOT getting any better either.
We need to start measuring this coaching staff and this offensive line by a different metric than total starts, we need to be looking for quantifiable and qualitative trends of week-to-week improvement. Sadly, there is no building momentum for the offensive line play. There is precious little to look at and say, well at least THAT is getting fixed or getting better or dare we dream getting good....
I know about the lack of depth on the lines, I know about the lack of seniors on the team, but we are no longer in week 4 of the season here...
Ty Willingham did grave injury to ND by his own lack of actions, but this current staff's demonstrated inability to TEACH and COACH these "highly tauted recruits" (Sophomores mainly on the O-Line, but there are others too like Sullivan) into ANYTHING resembling Division 1 football run blocking is not in any way on Ty.
(And for the record, I do not believe that Ty was railroaded, bamboozled or cheated - he earned his pink slip one fairway bunker at a time; and the program is ultimately better for it, even though it is really hard to see that at this point on the O-Line.)
The rushing yards gained is just unbelievable for the SEASON; so poor as to almost strain credulity. Had someone told me in August that NOTRE DAME would average under 40 yards a game rushing, I would have asked which one of the three HB's is that? Christ-crucified already,
Julius Jones had more yardage, by himself, in one freaking game under the Coach Who Must Not Be Named....that is numbingly bad. The yards per game and yards per carry averages are insulting if the intramural teams were playing in Notre Dame Stadium each week instead of the scholarship varsity squad!
Running the ball, as has been said many times in other places and by people infinitely more qualified than me (a lousy HS QB on a team of lousy players being the depth of my actual football field experience), is all about attitude and desire.
See the man in front of you, hit that man, and drive him backwards (or at least direct him to one side versus the other) and repeat 40 - 50 times a game. These are intelligent young men, all of them at least smart enough to gain admission to ND, yet none of them can understand a concept that my 3- and 4-year boys seem to inherently understand when fighting for a toy?
(BTW that concept is "low man wins" and has leverage to move the other guy and my boys, while grossly undersized and weighing in at a mere 48 and 37 pounds have figured out all on their own that teamwork and combined levergae can help them move a couch several times their combined weight.)
The offensive line fire off the ball about as enthuasiastically as my grandmother for her morning meds. They hold blocks (legal ones anyway) about as long as the guy who inadvertantly grabbed my hand on the Tower of Terror ride in Florida (instead of grabbing his own hand hold, before immediately letting go and recoiling in some strange pseudo-homophobic reaction). They are pathetic with a capital P in all phases of run blocking - they do not engage their man, they do not exert any kind of will on the defense and they do not have good or even passable footwork. In short, they are a extremely poorly coached unit, and they have been all season long (as if the previous 2 years were much to write home about in the first place).
Who is at fault for that?
Willingham? Not his guys in the sophomore class of football follies on the O-Line...although Ty's guys would be SLIGHTLY less effective because of the gaps of missing bodies, leaving defenders unblocked and free to the ball carrier....oh, wait a minute, that is exactly what is happening anyway....shit, did I miss a post or a memo? Is that really why we are seeing such a historically inept team? Silly me. I thought it was because the O-Linemen we see in those jerseys were just poorly coached, over-rated, slow to react, unable to adjust and just plain lousy....I did not realize it was due to the fact that Willingham's final revenge was to force us to play this season without actual linemen but rather with strawmen in uniforms that are able to give the illusion of physical weight but disappear in the ether as soon as the ball is snapped....
Weis? Well, the guys I am talking about here are mainly HIS guys....recruits from the sophomore class (or what remains of it). This was supposedly a top-8 or top-10 class of talent. HUH?!~?~!~?~!~? Did I get the wrond issue of Irish Sports Report when that was discussed? Did they actually mean it was the top-8 or top-10 Division III schools? Ultimately as the head coach, it IS his fault; but also being the head coach, he has the authority and responsibility to change it before we lop off his head and skewer it on a pole.
(Interesting, or at least somewhat odd, side note....on the recruiting trails this year, Blaine Gilbert of St. Louis is rated as the #20 OVERALL player by some people - heading to Nebraska on scholarship next season - yet he was benched in a recent game and has put up stats that make MY High School career numbers look respectable...which is to say they stink to high heaven. Now, if this guy is the be-all and end-all of HS players and one of the top 20 PLAYERS in the country, why in the name of god is he NOT good enough
to finish games for his own HIGH SCHOOL TEAM???
The whole "measurables" thing I guess...here is a guy who was a 'star' at the QB camps in the off-season - and whether or not anyone should EVER be able to describe a HS junior's summer as an 'off-season' is another story entirely - but when the game starts he can't seem to produce very much this year at the high school level. So obviously, the star-system and HS evaluations can go astray; but what did ND do in the last three years, corner the market on over-rated prima donnas?)
Latina? Well, unless Charlie Weis and EVERYONE else who evaluates high school athletes for their football potential (CSTV, Lemming, Rivals, Scout, ESPN, CNN-SI, etc.) are complete blubbering fools,
then the finger of blame has to point at the man most directly responsible for their development. Now, I will not completely discount the idea that some of highly touted sophomore O-Linemen may be overrated - (after seeing Carufel pack his bags and quit, possibly due to being passed on the depth chart by classmate Olsen after 3 starts, I have to wonder who is rating HS players for HEART instead of measurables); but even so, at this point in the season, it is not really a stretch to say that the players are no longer as green and inexperienced as they were against GT. Yet the results on the field do not reflect it too much - unless you think that simply being out of the business of LOSING YARDAGE every play is progress.
As a matter of fact, take out Aldridge's 43 yard run against MSU and the entire SEASON for ND is averaging LESS THAN ONE YARD PER CARRY. I kid you not, I could find 5 really fat guys at the local all-you-can-eat-buffet and a blind HB and stumble my way to a few inches per snap...yet here we sit with HS All-Americans and blue chip recruits at every position (OT - "5 star" Sam Young, G - "4 star" Eric Olsen along with several other "4 star" guys, C - "5 star, 5th year senior, pre-season AA, John Sullivan, HB - "5 star" James Aldridge, QB - "5 star" - Jimmy Clausen), inexperienced or not, this collection of Keystone Kops can't find a way to average better than 3 FEET per run?!?!?!?!?!? Maybe if we looked at it in terms of inches gained (wooo-hooo, we are getting nearly 36+ of those every try!!!) we might feel better...until we realize that most decent running teams would STILL have more YARDS than we would have INCHES....
At any rate,
Latina is just not getting it done, not even remotely close; and the improvement is no where to be seen, as week after futile week the ND running game is more likely seen on more milk bottles (as "missing") than on fields leaving cleat marks - or at least painful looking bruises - on opponents faces. He better be checking the real estate market and lining up future employment because his days on the staff at ND are numbered, and the count is rapidly reaching zero remaining. I don't think there can be any doubt at this point - I would expect that players probably see him come in for practice and either mutter or think in their heads - DEAD MAN COACHING. (Ironically, this is not because they still have visions of Joe Pa and Unhappy Valley either...)
I have been watching this season every single week hoping to see a glimmer of hope; looking for a nugget of improvement, anything that makes me believe this season of woe will pay off in the end, that this is our collective time in the wilderness before the land of milk and honey and MNC and Heismans is reached.
I have seen glimpses, tantalizing and teasing of the offense with Golden Tate and Duval Kamara. I have seen Armando Allen seem soooo close to breaking free, but not managing to do so just yet.
I have seen a defense that played with real heart and emotion and dare I say results for 10 straight quarters (from 3rd quarter at Purdue through the BC game), even when their offense and in particular their offensive line has totally submarined their best efforts with incompetence to match any gains the defense has made so far.
What I have not seen, is any tangible signs of life from the offensive line.
I still believe that Charlie Weis is leading ND out of bondage (or permanent lower-class status in D1 football anyway); but this time in the desert, the time before we reach the promised land we all hope to see, is what tries men's souls.
