To get to six losses you’d have to lose to Cal, BC, and NC on top of USC, Clemson, and OSU. To get to 7 you’d have to also lose to Stanford, Marshall, Navy, or UNLV. It’s not even remotely possible to get to 7. 6 would be an epic implosion, torn up locker room, dozens of injuries, inept coaches. Unless you hate ND, have no idea what you’re talking about, or you really really don’t like MF. MFs first game was a loss, but he also went up by 21 on a should’ve been playoff team in Ok St. and laid an egg. That team isn’t losing 4 games with AG as DC and HH as OL coach.
First of all, you're leaving off BYU. That's a pretty losable game.
But more importantly, I think you have to look at this from the perspective of someone who has not been following Notre Dame religiously, does not care about secondhand reporting about how Merriweather and Buchner are looking in camp, and is working off a model that they tweak to be accurate across the board and not just specific to one team.
The facts are simply this:
- ND's head coach is a 36-year-old with 0-1 record.
- The model does not particularly care about Jack Coan putting up those 21 points in the game that Freeman lost.
- The model probably does care that we lost because one guy kept getting burned in the secondary, and oh, that guy is coming back, and starting.
- The model probably does care that we were a hair away from losing to FSU, Toledo, and Virginia Tech last year, and that our strength of schedule was actually rather middling, and that we lost to the only two teams on our schedule who finished the year ranked.
- The 2023 recruiting class was not yet born the last time Al Golden was a DC. HH is one position coach, for a position they're probably factoring as a strength anyway. It's not obvious either should factor that much in the model, and that Golden should even be considered a plus in the first place.
- Tyler Buchner is the presumptive starting QB and is, in their eyes, the 46th best QB in the country. His biggest flaw in the games he's played so far has been accuracy and decision-making, which is a pretty terrible combination with...
- Our returning WR depth is awful. No need to relitigate.
If we ND fans looked at this state of affairs for any team not called Notre Dame, would anyone blame anyone else for thinking an implosion could be imminent?
More importantly, even if you disagreed, would you reeeeally jump to "I see, you must be a racist!"