1) If you want to live on the knife’s edge with a rickety offense and defense that hasn’t totally patched up the passing explosiveness holes from last year, you absolutely can’t turn it over three times in the first half and stake your more-than-capable opponent to a lead. If you’re going to try and rotate quarterbacks, you can’t misread the situation this badly, waiting until the second half to play the guy who was best last week (and then pulling him for one play in the middle of his first successful drive for some reason?). A profoundly frustrating game in which the Irish had a chance to notch another win over a Top 10 team, where you can point to a dozen different coaching decisions and player miscues as reasons for the loss. It’s tough to swallow and…actually kind of how this works a lot of the time when you lose, albeit on the extreme end of number of obvious things going wrong.
The Irish haven’t lost many close games (this technically was not a one-score game but it was 17-13 in the fourth so we can call it close) of late, but generally in college football if you are losing you are either A) Getting blown to absolute hell B) Playing in some supremely annoying game where you can point to any number of things that if they had gone differently you could and perhaps would have won but fate had other ideas. (Occasionally you also get “Played well against a superior opponent and can hold your head high while the tears come,” but those are awful in their own way.) Notre Dame has been on the right side of the ledger so much more often than not you can forget how awful this feels and I have to say I am not a fan of this level of disappointment, the earliest the playoffs have gone poof since 2016. By three key advanced metrics (Don’t Lose, Don’t Let The Home Win Streak End and Certainly Don’t Give The Opposition Their Biggest Win In School History), Saturday was a failure. Whether the season is considered that or not is still very much up for grabs.
2) One of the reasons Notre Dame won against Wisconsin is because they had Kevin Austin and Chris Tyree, a different caliber of skill player from the opposition capable of breaking a game. Against Cincinnati, both of them broke the game but in a bad way, with Tyree putting the Bearcats in position for a score and Austin failing to come through on some big targets. On the plus side, Kyren Williams was a beast, as always, Michael Mayer powered through injury and Braden Lenzy finally was able to connect with a deep one after a season of being mistargeted or missed completely when he broke open. (Lenzy also climbed the ladder on a big conversion.) The coaching staff also turned to the true freshmen of Deion Colzie and Lorenzo Styles late and the youths came through, but it just adds to the murky offensive identity (or more accurately, lack thereof).
Drew Pyne pretty clearly has to start going forward, and maybe that doesn’t work but you have to try it and go from there. (Negative one-thousand points to Tommy Rees for continuing to call plays that require a quarterback-run threat to fully unlock with Jack Coan in the game.) The concerning issue is we’re almost halfway through the season and we don’t really know what this team is good at on offense. In 2019 they could go to Ian Book-to-Chase Claypool, and in 2020 it was the run game behind a sweet offensive line and Tommy Tremble, but now it’s, what, trying to power the ball to Mayer or Avery Davis in the middle of the field before pressure gets through? Pyne seems like the best combination of knowing the full playbook (Coan) and some scrambling prowess (Tyler Buchner) and now it’s on Rees and company to maximize his abilities. Unfortunately for us, the better Pyne plays the more this game and the misappropriation of quarterback snaps against the Bearcats will sting, but unless anyone knows some sort of loophole to get a redo we’ll just have to live with that reality.
Offensive line was…slightly better, maybe? Still not nearly good enough. There was some push early in the game up the middle, but whether it was performance or playcalling they couldn’t sustain it. Hopefully they can find something with Andrew Kristofic and Joe Alt getting more snaps, which all bodes well for next season but doesn’t help the problems for this year, and now whatever combination they use will have to deal with major crowd noise for the first time since Tallahassee. Also this isn’t offensive line specific but could have used a bit more urgency on those fourth quarter drives.
(Considering Brian Kelly’s reputation as a curmudgeonly hard-ass, it’s interesting to note some of his biggest personnel misfires have been due to loyalty to an injured quarterback. Following Dayne Crist’s injury in 2010 and Malik Zaire’s in 2015, Kelly didn’t just hand the keys to the program over to their successful replacements but instead held competitions, decisions that helped lead to disappointing seasons. He didn’t want to move on from Coan after an injury and perhaps cost his team a win on Saturday.)
(I wonder how much of the quarterback situation was the staff hoping that Coan could be a smooth one-season fix before transitioning to Buchner without too much of a spring derby. If Pyne is as good as we hope he can be, you’re looking at another messy competition in 2022. I also wonder if they just wanted to try and make sure Coan stuck the season out, because if he didn’t get the job and peaced out before four games
a la Charley Brewer at Utah, the depth chart would have been Pyne, an injured Brendon Clark and two true freshmen. This is all rank speculation but just working through various theories that have popped up in my broken brain when the reality is probably just “Coan looked better in practice.”)
(Also does everyone properly appreciate Ian Book now? He almost certainly wins that game, between his turnover minimization and ability to pull out just enough big plays.)
3) The defense put Notre Dame in position to have an early lead again, with Cincinnati starting the game with drives of 15, 18, zero, 9, 12 and 18 yards. Desmond Ridder then started to get loose, continuing to target Clarence Lewis — after one lovely breakup deep — to much success. There are some real questions about the non-Kyle Hamilton and Cam Hart parts of the secondary, and even Hamilton got got on a touchdown Saturday. Monster play by Isaiah Foskey and Drew White to spark some life with the fumble, and Foskey has been what we had hoped this year despite a quiet camp. Unfortunately, when the Irish needed one last big stop after making it 17-13, J.D. Bertrand had his worst series of the year, getting worked over as Ridder iced things. This defense is really good but it’s not at a level where it can just carry a team on its own, particularly with the level of offenses the Irish are about to face elevating from the tepid September slate.
Ridder is a fun college quarterback for a team with this type of defense: Inconsistent for stretches, but capable of uncorking just enough deep balls and hair-pulling scrambles over the course of the game to do the needed damage. He would be a nightmare to stop on NCAA Football and we begrudgingly tip our cap to his ability to come through with a couple of dagger drives at the end of both halves.
4) Winning Is Hard/Schadenfreude Round-Up: I’ve preferred to do this only after Notre Dame wins, as obviously I do not have to remind you, the person who just watched your favorite team lose, about the difficulty of achieving victory. But this season is crazy thus far, this section is fun to write and people enjoy it I’m going to just do it in full the rest of the way. Talking about everyone else’s failures doesn’t excuse all the holes in this Irish team but it is nice to know that our misery has so much company.
No. 3 Oregon went down early at Stanford, rallied back for the lead and then let David Shaw fade route them to death, eventually falling in overtime, so we reset the Days Since Mario Cristobal Did Something Disappointing Counter. The Irish and Ducks weren’t the only Top 10 teams to lose, as Arkansas got sent to the moon by Georgia and Florida fell as a road favorite in Lexington via basically one long Kentucky passing touchdown, a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown and a lengthy interception return. The Wildcats won with just 224 yards of offense, but Gator penalties (15 for 115 yards) proved too damaging.
Did Texas A&M fall at home to Mississippi State as a touchdown favorite, already earning the second loss for what was a Top 5 team last year? Yes, but at least they don’t have to play Alabama next - ah I’m being told they play Alabama next. Speaking of the Tide, they gave Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss their first loss of the season in violent fashion. And while we’re on the SEC West, LSU lost at home to Bo Nix and Auburn. Is Coach O gonna get fired? Probably! Central Florida lost to Navy while Memphis lost to Temple. Northwestern lost to Nebraska 56-7.
4-0 Maryland had an opportunity to take a step into the national spotlight hosting Top 5 Iowa at home but they were shattered into tiny pieces, their high-flying passing offense turning it over at a wild clip. Remember how exciting the UCLA and Fresno State game was and how they were both ranked? Well, they both lost, with UCLA getting handled at home by Herm Edwards’ Arizona State team and Fresno losing at Hawaii. Jimmy Lake’s tenure in Seattle took another hit as Washington lost to Oregon State. Clemson needed multiple botched snaps to survive at home against Boston College, and Oklahoma narrowly avoided another scare, this time against Kansas State. Wisconsin and Miami — the preseason No. 12 and No. 14 teams, respectively — already have their third losses. There are a lot of really, really disappointing teams and a slew of carnage still to come.
5) It’s easy to discuss how good a team’s chemistry and culture is when they’re winning, as seldom do you see features talking about how strong the locker room is for a last-place squad. If Notre Dame’s program is what we think it is, then the big test comes on Saturday in not letting this disappointment carry over. The Irish have not lost consecutive regular season games since 2016, and coincidentally the last time they dropped a regular season contest at all the next team they played was the Hokies, albeit in South Bend. Between that last second escape by Book and embarrassing the hosts on Metallica Intro Night in 2018, Virginia Tech will be pining to get this one and smelling blood in the water off their bye week.
Looking at SP+ and FEI, this is the toughest defense the Irish will play the rest of the way, and it’ll be in primetime in Lane Stadium, where North Carolina fell victim earlier this year. There are a few minor questions about the offense, including who will be quarterback, is Mayer healthy and will Austin be able to bounce back like he did after a poor performance against Purdue? On defense, mostly feel good, but did Ridder’s success put something on film that can be exploited by others and/or are the linebackers starting to wear down a bit with the limited depth? This coaching staff and the captains need to keep the wheels on for another week and get to the bye at 5-1.
If you look to national media for your validation for a Notre Dame season, these next couple months aren’t going to be fun because the Irish are going to be well outside of the conversation save for people checking in on Cincinnati’s best win. (It is grimly funny that anyone who wants a Group of Five team to break the playoff status quo must now root for the Irish along with us. Welcome to this terrible club, friends!) With the unhinged chaos throughout the country this season even Notre Dame is capable of flying under the radar if they just string together some nice, boring, nondescript wins that keep them comfortably ranked and in New Year’s Six contention. It’s perfectly okay to take a slight step back when you lost as much talent as Notre Dame did after two playoff runs in three years, but the key word there is “slight.”
Keeping the losses to a minimum continues on Saturday. Go Irish, Beat Hokies. Don’t let the Bearcats topple you twice.
