I thought Golson was freaking outstanding today. Easily the best QB performance of the Kelly era.
Moose just mentioned his running. He's definitely not a true dual threat QB, but his scrambling ability/ability to run if the play breaks down/QB draw ability will truly make it difficult for opposing coordinators to gameplan against ND, and more importantly, players to execute against ND's offense.
Honestly not sure what to think of the OL. Lax didn't like either Stanley or Elmer today. Not sure I'd go quite that far, but at least today, I thought the interior guys were much better than the edge guys. I hope some of the struggles of the OL today were merely new guys stepping in/first game of the season type hiccups. IF ND can beat michigan, I feel realy good about ND going 4-0 and then on to their first bye. So by 6 weeks in, the OL could start to look pretty good with ND 4-0 and getting into the meat of their schedule. I really hope this is the case.
No clue what to think of the D either. Many times, it almost looked like I was watching Diaco's defense out there today-- conservative and trying to keep things in front of them...bending, but not breaking. I hope this was a case of the staff trying to keep it vanilla in anticipation of michigan. I wasn't really impressed by anything or anybody on defense today, but at the same time, I didn't think anything or anybody was awful (yeah, the couple of big plays were ugly, but those are things that can be corrected). I was expecting to see more blitzes, pressure, and aggressive play today. Maybe we will next week and throughout the season? The D was obviously good enough to win today. But if what we saw today was the D's "scheme," it could be a long year on that side of the ball-- I can envision 7 or 8 teams putting up 400+ yards on them (and that doesn't even include Stanford whose style alone might make it difficult to put up a ton of yards on anybody, all while remaining highly effective).
The offense as a whole was truly a joy to watch today-- a ton of fun. Is what we saw today the actual high paced offense, or maybe just a vanilla look? It really doesn't matter to me one way or another (I've never been a believer that ND HAS to have a fast paced spread offense to succeed), as I personally would like to see them make it part of the gameplan each week. Some weeks, depending on the opponent, they run a faster pace, and some weeks they run at a slower pace. I loved seeing the decisiveness and ability to execute though. No infuriating timeouts as the play clock neared expiration. No delay of game penalties. Golson, the coaches, and the entire offense looked and executed like they knew exactly what they wanted to do...and did it. So refreshing to see that.
