Only one of Notre Dame’s first three opponents is ranked, while Notre Dame enjoys an arguably inflated top-10 ranking. Even so, the Irish face a curious gauntlet their first three weeks, with a huge asterisk next to each game. They could set the tone for a curious season.
With vastly inflated expectations, and Notre Dame having a big pendulum swing from “everybody staying” to everybody going, among their elite personnel, 2016 could be even more of a roller coaster than usual.
Up to this point, Brian Kelly probably has received a lot more credit than he deserves. This year, he might receive a lot more criticism than he deserves.
Rebuilding Year
Before getting to the opening gauntlet, the context is that, despite their ranking, Notre Dame essentially is in a rebuilding year.
That does not mean that Notre Dame will not over-achieve, or develop quickly. Yet Notre Dame has had a wild pendulum swing with their roster, putting them in a rebuilding year that makes their top-10 preseason ranking a bit dubious. Unless it’s some kind of lingering mercy ranking for being embarrassed by Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, a game in which Notre Dame was really never going to pull out a win, even if some fine individual plays prevented it from getting too ugly.
A year-and-a-half ago, Notre Dame had virtually nobody at the NFL combine, and almost nobody taken in the draft. It was not because the program lacked talent. It was because, of the most talented players in a position to do so, so many were staying, and so few players were leaving, all at the same time.
All at once, there was sea surge of people staying for a fifth year, or staying for a third or fourth year who otherwise might have thought of taking the leap. “Everybody” was coming back, and some observers could be heard musing, out loud, that if Notre Dame was going to do anything, they had better do in 2015, because everybody was there.
This past spring, it was the opposite. Everybody was leaving all at once; there was a boatload of Notre Dame players in the combine, and there was a great showing in the NFL draft.
The program did not somehow become a powerhouse over night. What happened was, the sea surge of people staying all at once became a sea surge of people leaving all at once. The guys who all stayed for a fifth year were done; plus there were guys in their fourth year who were done or decided they were done; plus guys all leaving early instead of all staying.
It would have been easy to think, and a predictable misnomer, that Notre Dame was just sort of in the thick of things with the actual elite. They went to a major bowl, had a decent ranking, had a good showing in the draft, and Head Coach Brian Kelly got a contract extension, so things seemed to be humming along, to the casual eye.
But in reality, there was that big pendulum swing, leaving them in a rebuilding phase. In reality, they also lost the major bowl by more than two touchdowns and have not won a major bowl in a quarter-century. Brian Kelly has never won a major bowl in his career, with slightly more than a decade in Div. I-A/FBS; and he has been blown out in two of the three major bowls he has gotten into. (There was a fourth year when he got a team into a major bowl, where they were blown out in his absence.)
Some sources talked about a certain number of returning starters this year justifying this year’s preseason ranking. But one has to wonder how many of the “returning starters” were actually “Next Man In” replacement starters during last year’s injuries. And the Notre Dame depth chart itself does not designate that many players as returning starters.
The Brian Kelly extension is a bit of curiosity in itself. Notre Dame has a track record of giving extensions to coaches for simply getting into a game they lost, or, in one instance, losing well in regular season game. And in recent years, Notre Dame football coaches with extensions have ended up getting fired.
Notre Dame gave an extenion to Bob Davie just for getting into a Fiesta Bowl, a game Notre Dame would lose in a rout. A year later, he was fired. Notre Dame gave a massive extension to Charlie Weis just for losing well in a regular season game, to Southern Cal on the Bush-Push. A few years later, Weis was fired, after a couple of seasons of Notre Dame administrators allowing the media to turn Weis’s final few years into a kind of HR death vigil.
Brian Kelly has now joined the club of coaches who got contract extensions for losing. He got one after being blown out by Alabama, and he got one after being embarrassed by Ohio State.
The only other head coach staying longer than five years at Notre Dame, who also has not won a consensus national championship is Hall of Fame player, former Four Horseman Elmer Layden in the 1930’s. Layden neverthless did have a higher winning percentage as a Notre Dame head coach than Lou Holtz or Dan Devine.
Knute Rockne also failed to win a national championship in his first five years, or at least he failed to win a championship that the school is willing to claim; yet Rockne is the winningest coach in history, and did have a few early seasons where he was undefeated and probably would have won the national championship by today’s standards. And Rockne won multiple national championships later that Notre Dame is willing to claim.
But back to the pendulum swing, and the way things unfolded.
When the boatload of NFL-caliber talent stayed for 2015, that was the year when people mused out loud, they better do it that year, because everybody was there.
Instead — to be fair, due, in part, to injuries — they limped and backed their way into a decent record and Fiesta Bowl berth, where they lost by two-and-a-half touchdowns to an Ohio State team that was left out of the playoff.
Perhaps it shows how far Notre Dame has fallen, and how Notre Dame is still not quite big-time again, that Notre Dame has been left to take solace in losses to elite teams. A few years ago, when Notre Dame was blown out by Alabama, such an occurrence should have been easily forgotten as a negative; yet they were able to latch onto the ambitious branding of the bowl as an unofficial would-be “national title” game; they could so for no other reason than the fact that one of the unofficial polls agreed to not even vote for a national champion, but instead allow the poll to be used as branding for the bowl game, rubber-stamping the result. By comparison, there was a year in the modern era when BYU won the national title in the Holiday Bowl, and the only team they could find as an opponent was a Michigan team having an off-year; imagine if Michigan had gone around boasting how great they were that year, simply because they lost handily to somebody else who was #1, saying they were good because they lost in a bowl game that determined somebody else to be the champion.
And it shows how Notre Dame is not quite “back” yet, that an embarrassing loss to Ohio State, left some people, perhaps, feeling like Notre Dame was back in the mix, just because they got into a big bowl and did not lose by 30 points.
To put things in perspective, Lou Holtz had a similar performance in the Fiesta Bowl, losing by a similar margin, with a team that finished 6-5-1 but still got an automatic bid to a major bowl. Holtz was so strong in major bowls, that Notre Dame was slated for an automatic major bowl bid if they did better than 6-5. After some close losses to strong or decent teams, Notre Dame took a 6-4 record (sort of like a 6-4 record with close losses for a pretty solid SEC team today) into a game at a then-top-20 Southern Cal. After Notre Dame played Southern Cal to a tie, they finished 6-4-1, better than 6-5, and therefore got an automatic bid to a major bowl under the rules in place. They got sent to the Fiesta Bowl to play a top-5 Colorado.
The result was similar to Brian Kelly’s game against Ohio State. Notre Dame never had a chance, but they hung in and played reasonably okay, punctuated by some good individual plays, including a long touchdown bomb. The final was 41-24, remarkably similar to Kelly’s 44-28 loss to Ohio State in last year’s Fiesta Bowl.
In the Holtz era, losing the Fiesta Bowl by 17 points to a top-5 opponent was, perhaps, shrugged off by fans as simply an off year for a team that finished 6-5-1. For the Kelly era, losing the Fiesta Bowl by 16 points is the high-water mark for both the program and the coach himself, when it comes to major bowls. And they did it in the year that was supposed to be the year when they would “do something” because “everybody was there.”
And now a big chunk of that “everybody” is gone, waiting for rebuilding by the next wave.
What would have been an off-year result, by historical standards, becomes the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” result, for a program that still has not returned to the elite of college football, and now has a personnel hiccup, with the need to take a breath and step forward with a rebuilding year.
With the big pendulum swing, the program might be in trouble this year, if they want to continue their quest to return to the elite with a major bowl win. Maybe not, but it’s going to take a heroic effort and the ball bouncing their way to get moving to over-achieve.
Against that backdrop, Notre Dame faces a curious gauntlet of unranked Texas, unranked Nevada, and top-15 Michigan State, who probably have a better chance than anyone is willing to admit of leaving Notre Dame 1-2, or even 0-3.
Notre Dame vs. Texas
For the first time in a decade, Notre Dame starts the season with a true road game, and does so in a match-up at Texas that could dial up a perfect storm of a fiasco for Notre Dame.
The Longhorns are only a few years removed from the Mack Brown era.
They have a strong talent level. They have some good talent coming back, including young talent that already got some seasoning.
Their coach, Charlie Strong, in some respects, had a stronger showing at Louisville than Brian Kelly did at Cincinnati, given that Strong won a major bowl game, something Kelly has never done in his career of more than a decade in Div. I-A/FBS. In fact, it was in the same bowl season as when Kelly was being humiliated by Alabama in a major bowl that Strong secured a strong win over Florida in another major bowl, a Florida team not far below Alabama in the rankings at the time.
Yet a fairly solid Texas team that knocked off Oklahoma and Baylor in 2015 has struggled to stay above .500, with Strong slightly below .500 in his Texas tenure.
So their game against Notre Dame is a make-it-or-break-it game, in what could be a make-it-or-break-it season, in Strong’s third year. In recent history, major colleges have been willing to boot a coach after three seasons, even a coach with elite or otherwise prominent experience.
To top it off, Texas has some familiarity with the Irish, having played them last year at Notre Dame.
It was an embarrassing loss for Texas, so that they have even higher motivation.
And the game is at Texas, in a home opener, in the middle of a holiday weekend, at night, in a football-crazy state, before what should be an absolutely rabid crowd, hungry to see the Longhorns turn the corner and break loose.
Meanwhile, Texas is introducing an up-tempo offense with new coordinator, against a Notre Dame team that has had issues with up-tempo, that sometimes rolls the dice a bit and gets gashed on defense, even when offenses are more plain vanilla.
Despite Texas being unranked and technically coming off a losing season, already there have been curious little rumbles across the internet ether, about Texas posing some problems for the Irish, including at least one sports media analytical tool giving Texas a better-than-even chance to win.
Meanwhile, Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame program, while showing some strong character at times, at other times also has developed a nasty habit of coming out flat in key games, both at home and on the road. There was the season-opening loss to South Florida at home that launched Notre Dame into an ongoing plague of turnovers; the underachieving game against Alabama where Notre Dame was supposed to be defending a #1 ranking but came out flat; a primetime loss to Lane Kiffin and Southern Cal where Notre Dame came out flat; the game in the rain at Clemson, where it took a while for Notre Dame to show life; the blood-lettings at Arizona State and Southern Cal a few years back; and others.
The point is not just that those games were disappointing losses.
The team came out flat.
Another problem, on a completely different note, is that in at least some of the games where Notre Dame pulled out close wins, they were playing teams that were supposed to be weaker, they played down to the level of the competition, and they allowed a dogfight to develop. And, as with South Florida, they also lost some of those games.
Then there’s the weather. Indiana is perfectly capable of having scorching heat in the summer, and late summer, at times in the 90’s or even over 100 at the height of summer. Yet Indiana has had some milder weather of late, in the 50’s at night and, perhaps, the 70’s during the days leading up to the game at Texas. Meanwhile, Texas is in the 90’s. In a road trip to Arizona a few years ago, Kelly’s club seemed extraordinarily ill-prepared for the heat.
The heat index right before game time is set to be 100 degrees F, with actual temperatures in the 90’s. One saving grace for Notre Dame is the possibility of a shower right before kickoff, the might cool things a bit, but also add humidity. The sun will set in the second quarter, and it should be dark at half-time, bringing temperatures in the 80’s. However, the heat index should remain in the 90’s the entire game.
This author gives Texas about a 40% chance of upsetting Notre Dame, worse if Notre Dame comes out flat or has trouble with the heat.
Now here’s where things start getting weird ….
Notre Dame vs. Nevada
Notre’s Dame game at Texas is on a Sunday night. In addition to would-be Catholic Notre Dame violating the Sabbath, that means Notre Dame also will have slightly less than six days to prepare for a Saturday afternoon game against a solid Nevada team who won their bowl game last year.
Notre Dame has been notorious for red-eye flights back from long-distance road games played at night. Multiple studies, including by the military, have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation, through bio-indicators or otherwise, linger on for a number of days. That’s despite whatever spin somebody might try to put it, such as claiming that the players will lean back and rest their eyes for several hours on the flight.
So unless Notre Dame administrators had the foresight to set Notre Dame up with some good hotel rooms, or a Catholic retreat house, to stick to a good training regimen with a good night’s sleep after the game, the Irish will be setting themselves up for renewing a bad habit.
There’s an old expression from football coaches that “nothing good happens after midnight,” that, admittedly, relates more to getting into trouble. At the same time, there also is an age-old nugget of wisdom from old-fashioned coaches, and old-fashioned parents, that one hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after midnight. Try extrapolating that to what it would mean to at least start getting some sleep at midnight, as opposed to traveling all night and getting to sleep at 5 a.m.
Try asking some athletic trainers whether the optimal way to train for an athletic contest six days later is to ride a bus to the airport at midnight, get on a plane, wait to take off, then sit back in a reclining airplane seat for several hours in the wee hours of the morning listening to music, then deplane 1,300 miles away and ride another bus at 3 am across town, then walk a mile across a large campus at 4 a.m. and try to turn in at 4:30 or 5 am in a dorm room, in an all-male dorm that is going to start buzzing with raucous activity several hours later on a late-summer holiday.
Given that practices probably will taper off in intensity later in a game week, it is possible that Notre Dame literally might not have a single good, intense practice in the short week leading up to Nevada, that is not marred by the lingering biological after-effects of sleep deprivation.
Add to that, that if Notre Dame loses to Texas, there will be a big temptation to “beat their heads against the wall” with excessively intense practices earlier on, and to be doing so while trying to recover from sleep deprivation.
Even if Notre Dame somehow defies the laws of nature and gets themselves ready in something akin to an optimal manner, there also is the question of — what tees things up better, a warm-up game or a dogfight.
While Nevada just had a nice little warm-up win over Cal Poly, the Wolf Pack just might be getting a Notre Dame team coming off a bruising brawl with the Longhorns — followed by the sleep deprivation after-effects.
But there’s another wrinkle — short week, sleep deprivation, coming off a possible brawl with Texas — and then going up against a solid, bowl-winning Nevada team coached by a former Notre Dame assistant coach, Brian Polian, who was fired when Notre Dame hired Brian Kelly.
Like Skip Holtz, who beat Brian Kelly at the helm of South Florida, Polian is not going to be intimidated by the Notre Dame campus and mystique. Given that his father was an elite, long-time NFL veteran executive, query whether Polian would be intimidated in any special manner by many football venues to begin with. But Notre Dame will be like a return home for Polian, almost like it was for Skip Holtz.
Yet there’s another wrinkle. The head coach Polian worked under at Notre Dame was Charlie Weis. And Wies has, uncharacteristically, been away from football for a little while, and has some time on his hands.
While undoubtedly just idle speculation, would Weis ever agree to quietly serve as a ghost-writer for Nevada’s game-planning, or otherwise just consult, scouting both Notre Dame Defensive Coordinator Brian Van Gorder and Brian Kelly himself? Ordinarily one would say, no, about the loyal Notre Dame alum. But maybe it might not be that big a leap for a loyal Notre Dame alum to be scratching his head over Notre Dame keeping Brian Kelly on this long, when Kelly has failed to win Notre Dame a national title, and has failed to even win a major bowl game in his entire career, anywhere.
Technically speaking, Brian Kelly has done slightly less well in major bowl games than Charlie Weis did. And back when Weis fought back within one touchdown, late against Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, only to lose by two touchdowns, he did it with a skeleton crew, with a program decimated by the Davie-Willingham drop-off. Kelly, in contrast, benefited from Weis rebuilding the foundations of the program and talent level for four or five years, depending how you look at it, before Kelly even took the reins, just like Kelly benefited from Cincinnati being built up for years by Rick Minter and Mark Dantonio.
Be that as it may, Notre Dame will already have its hands full with a sold, bowl-winning Nevada team treating the trip to Notre Dame like a bowl game, with former Notre Dame assistant Polian as head coach, catching Notre Dame in a short week after a brawl with Texas, with Notre Dame’s preparations marred further by unnecessary sleep deprivation.
This author ordinarily would think Nevada had about a 10-20% chance of upsetting Notre Dame in a rebuilding year. But add in all the other factors, and it might be a 40% chance.
Then things get ugly.
Michigan State
Michigan State is now a perennial elite, who were part of last year’s four-team national championship playoff.
Yet, despite a brief hiatus in the series — because of Notre Dame’s ill-advised misadventure with the ACC — Michigan State has emerged as one of Notre Dame’s key rivals — much more than Michigan ever was, or ever could be.
Michigan State is likely to be well inside the top-10 when they play Notre Dame. And they get Notre Dame in a rebuilding year.
Hang on for the ride.
By then, Notre Dame should be well-rested, with no strange travel issues, and well underway with getting this year’s team configured. They also should be highly motivated, after what might be a couple of stiff contests against unranked oppponents. The problem is, even a good Notre Dame would face an intense rivalry game against Michigan State, and Michigan State should be strong this year to begin with
At the same time, where would Notre Dame stand after two games? 2-0 but sorely tested? 1-1, and embarrassed by Nevada? 0-2 and in a state of shock? And how would they respond?
The Character Issue
Notre Dame has had their share of great moments under Kelly. They also have had tests of character where they pulled out a great win. Yet, as mentioned before, some of those tests of character were against weaker opponents. One time, they pulled out a tough win against a feisty Boston College and dropped in the rankings. And Notre Dame has flat games, this author’s term for Brian Kelly games where they came out flat, and then, instead of sparking an inspired rally, sort of just plugged away with their nose against the grindstone to see if they could creep forward.
Much more to the point, however — Notre Dame’s biggest lapse of character was when they lost a tight game in Tallahassee against Florida State, then responded by going into the tank for half a year until they won a second-tier bowl game.
Now, part of that was the emotion of being one of multiple teams who gave Florida State a close game, only to be edged out. Although there were other teams that year who did that, and when the bubble burst in the bowl season for the Seminoles, it turned out that giving FSU a tight game was not necessarily as monumental as people hoped. There also was the issue of being wronged by the officiating at the end, and, quite frankly, if you’ve ever actually read the way the rules are drafted by the NCAA, they are some of the sloppiest writing imaginable. A first-year law student probably would get a poor grade if they had done that as a class assignment.
And, there are other reasons Notre Dame went on a skid, including bad coaching decisions, such as getting confused and going for 2 in a later game, when nobody else would have done that, or playing Everett Golson additional weeks, when he had an injury that can take months to heal, even with proper rest, and appeared to even slow Golson up in the bowl game.
Be that as it may, after seeing the in-the-tank post-FSU skid, one just has to wonder what would happen if Notre Dame had a big blow to their competitive ego from what can be expected to be, at least potentially, a really ugly two weeks at Texas and then against a really unique Nevada situation after a short week with sleep deprivation.
What happens if they’re 1-2 or 0-3 after MSU? They host a pretty good Duke program, coached by yet another (very briefly tenured, for health reasons) former Notre Dame assistant, who also coached two Super Bowl winning quarterbacks in the SEC.
On the other hand, if Notre Dame can wither the fire, and take care of business, and grow up fast, and somehow pull out a miracle against the Spartans to go 3-0, they might have some ripples in the rankings for being tested, but they should be loaded for bear forging ahead.
