Category: Coaching Changes

Resurgent Notre Dame rides a 5-1 bubble that has fans and click-hungry media thinking big. Yet strength of schedule is about to go from padded to rock solid.

Heading into the season Notre Dame was a 4-8 ball club, diving into a 12-game regular season featuring 11 teams that made bowls the previous year. The one opponent who had missed bowl season still beat Notre Dame last year and went to the College Football Playoff just two years ago.

So, absent improvement, the Irish did not necessarily have much of an argument as to why, in particular, they could win any one of their 12 games.

What happened next was that, in the first half of the season Notre Dame ended up playing four teams who currently have losing records … only one team ranked when the Irish played them …  and one more team with a winning record, unranked at the time, yet ranked now.

At 5-1, Notre Dame fans and the media have lapsed into a predictable blend of overhype and “hope-springs-eternal,” “sky’s-the-limit,” starry-eyed optimism.

(There is even the cringe-worthy habit of celebrating the right kind of loss. The gushy, almost non-apologetic trumpeting of Notre Dame losing by one point to Georgia might be the most head-scratching celebration of defeat since the institution gave Charlie Weis a massive contract extension for losing to USC.)

Looking at it another way, Notre Dame is 0-1 against ranked opponents, 1-1 against teams with winning records, 1-1 against teams currently ranked and 4-0 against teams with a losing record. (To be fair, one of the latter was sitting at .500 until Notre Dame beat them.)

So Notre Dame has played four teams that went from being a bowl team in 2016 to having a losing record. After the fears of a 4-12 Notre Dame potentially going winless, the Irish ended up with a surprisingly well-padded first half of the season.

(Now, to be fair, Notre Dame never pads its schedule as much as a lot of other programs. For example, Notre Dame is one of a very small number of Div. I-A/FBS programs that has never played an opponent from Div. I-AA/FCS. And it is not even that common for Notre Dame to play a team from outside the “Power 5” conferences, mostly with the exception of service academy teams, whom the SEC, of all people, usually rates as Power 5-quality.)

In a big mid-season pendulum swing, Notre Dame, in the second half of the schedule, faces six teams with winning record, including no fewer than four nationally ranked opponents out of six.  A fifth team was ranked just last week, and another unranked team has a strong record.

While the Irish deserve some credit for strengthening their quality of play on multiple tracks, they are about to confront a stunning about-face with regard to strength of opposition.

And one pesky detail from the highly-touted defeat to Georgia was that Notre Dame’s supposedly vaunted rushing attack was limited to 55 yards rushing, by the only ranked opponent that was ranked when they played them.

Notre Dame showed that they do not, in fact, have an elite running game.  By comparison, when Notre Dame had an elite running game decades ago under Lou Holtz, they would rip off solid yards per play against most elite opponents.

There are a few other problems.  One is that Notre Dame does not really have a quarterback.  They have a rookie starter in Brandon Wimbush who is inconsistent and plays more like an all-purpose athlete with strong-armed heaves, whose main virtue has been the ability to avoid turnovers.  Ian Book showed himself to be a better quarterback, yet failed to avoid turnovers.

The ground game showed itself to be good enough to pad its stats against weaker opponents.  But even there, there were issues.  The running backs do not have blazing speed, or they would not have been run down from behind by Boston College.  The offensive line is not dominant, or they would have had strong production on every down.  Instead, Notre Dame padded its stats with individual plays where everything came together in a perfect confluence of events, but their averages on most other plays were not that great, after taking out the big plays.  Are some of the players “taking a play off” here and there, a terminology NFL scouts sometimes use?

Historically, one can recall Notre Dame having opponents with similar stat-padding, such as service academy teams.  In the past, when Notre Dame was an elite program, it was not unheard of for a service academy team to have huge rushing stat numbers, and be among the nation’s rushing leaders, as Notre Dame is now, but then came up against an elite Notre Dame and see the stats come down.  That, of course, is what happened when Notre Dame played Georgia.  Except a Navy or Air Force seeing their top-5 rushing stats come down against a Lou Holtz-coached Notre Dame team did not get limited to 55 yards, like Notre Dame did in their impotent performance against Georgia.

If the early season pattern holds, then Notre Dame would lose half their games against remaining opponents with winning records.  That would mean, at best, finishing 8-4, a decent turnaround, and on track for the trademark Brian Kelly 8-5 that threatens to make him the Mike Brey of Notre Dame football, if — and it’s a big if — Brian Kelly can improve his performance in the post-season to be as strong as Brey’s has now become.

If Notre Dame continues to be winless against ranked opponents, if the 0-1 turns into 0-5 against ranked opponents, then they would finish, at best, 7-5, Ty Willingham territory.

One interesting added twist is that the unexpectedly padded early season, the unexpected front-loading of easier opponents, combined with the massive offseason coaching staff upheaval, made it harder to envision a scenario in which Notre Dame might announce at mid-season that Brian Kelly would be replaced.

These days, elite programs, or programs with the desire to return to elite status, do not engage in the last-minute firing-and-hiring spectacle that Notre Dame followed with the transitions from Bob Davie to George O’Leary to Tyrone Willingham, the transition from Willingham to Charlie Weis, or the transition from Weis to Kelly.  The idea of firing a coach at the beginning of December and scrambling to back their way into hiring a George O’Leary within days or weeks is just not part of the big time.

Following the patterns set, from time to time, by schools like LSU, USC or Florida, Notre Dame would have to start transitioning at mid-season, or earlier, with an interim coach, coach-in-waiting, or some other arrangement with a longer lead time.

Historically, by comparison, one of Notre Dame’s best coaching hires, Ara Parseghian, reportedly took the initiative to call Notre Dame because Hugh Devore had been given an interim status, to serve as a bridge to a new hire.  So, a half-century ago, Notre Dame showed some initiative and innovation with their coaching transition, gave themselves a long lead-time, and it paid off.

Of course, it is difficult to envision Notre Dame doing what USC did to Lane Kiffin, when A.D. Pat Haden drove to the airport to fire Kiffin on the tarmac next to the team bus after a late-night loss. That move, of course, was followed by elevating Ed Orgeron, who already was on staff, and already had head coaching background, in the SEC no less.

Yet it still bears noting that, presumably as an unintended side effect, Kelly’s revamping of the assistant coaching staff meant there no Ed Orgeron’s on staff at Notre Dame, no assistant coaches of experience and stature suitable to being an interim head coach for half a season on so big a stage.

Be that as it may, the padded schedule earlier in the season was a pure gift for Brian Kelly.  Unless Notre Dame can show strong improvement, and unless they demonstrate the ability to beat ranked opponents, one might surmise a different scenario had the two halves of the season been flipped.

If the final six teams had come first, would Notre Dame be looking at something like a 2-4 record right now?  Would the same team, with the same coach and the same players, be sitting at 2-4, just because the schedule was different?  Coming off the 4-8 meltdown, then going 2-4, would have meant coaching change war drums beating loudly.

Yet now, even if Notre Dame has yet another Big Skid under Brian Kelly, they lose just a little bit of the current PR fluff at a time, then end up in a minor bowl again, like when they hung tough with Florida State then went into the tank for the entire second half of the season several years ago.

The situation presents a test of character for the Irish, and time will tell whether, or how much, they get exposed for being a little less elite than the wildly inflated College Football Playoff talk might suggest.

The gift of an inflated 5-1 record should inspire much-needed improvement and greater playing intensity, to seize the tremendous opportunity that the inflated record presents.  Yet the program still has yet to demonstrate that it can actually turn the corner and return to elite status, and they might simply not have the personnel or the character to do what they need to do, to avoid the skid.  Time will tell.