Rakes Report #138: On the brink of death we still managed livin' life (The Stanford Review)

~optional musical accompaniment~
1) Are you familiar with the concept of “pulling the chair” in basketball? It’s a move where if you’re defending in the post you allow the ball handler to get a sense of where you are and then just step away, throwing them off balance because they were planning on resistance but there isn’t any. As I sat with a few thousand other fools in Stanford Stadium on Saturday, I realized that closing the season in Palo Alto was sort of like pulling the chair on a college football team: All fall you play in front of hyped crowds and then suddenly you’re participating in the equivalent of a quiet April Triple A baseball game that features an irony poisoned marching band and negligent grounds crew. The Irish wobbled out of the gate but in the end the superior team led by halftime and salted away a perfect November with the first road win against the Cardinal in a dozen years. Not a bad way to end the season.
2) I am not sure what Clark Lea and the gang were up to in the early going, as outside a stout goal line stand to force a field goal the Cardinal offense pretty much did whatever they wanted. To be fair, they were without Julian Okwara, Daelin Hayes, MTA and Jayson Ademilola in this game, which hurts the cause. We should also give some credit to Davis Mills, a top-15 recruit who made some damn fine throws before the weight of the game was too much. For as bad as the start was, after Lea felt it out and the defense locked in the Cardinal couldn’t muster much of anything. Ade Ogundeji, Khalid Kareem and Jamir Jones were great, JOK was absolutely electric, Isaiah Foskey proved the coaching staff’s redshirt management wise and Kyle Hamilton did more Kyle Hamilton things. In all, Stanford was held scoreless on seven straight possessions after they hit 17 points and only cracked 100 yards of second half offense due to garbage time.
3) After an easy score to start, the offense also had some rough spots, coming up empty on three straight possessions after the opening touchdown and two straight to start the second half. Still, another good Ian Book performance, putting up another four touchdown passes to make 18 in the month of November. Book also had a key first-down run on 4th and 2 to finally earn the two-score lead and didn’t turn the ball over on a sloppy day. (Your Book season totals: 37 total touchdowns, 6 interceptions, 2,787 passing yards, 516 rushing yards. He is now 19-3 as a starter.) Chase Claypool’s touchdowns were both right in front of me and ~very~ cool while Braden Lenzy and Cole Kmet were great again. Perhaps some of the early struggles were due to the absence of Chris Finke, who was limited after a hamstring injury in practice after what had been an excellent stretch of football, or simply not throwing the ball up to Claypool enough.
The rushing game found some life in the second half, putting up 166 yards on the ground after just 24 before intermission. It wasn’t a bad effort when you consider the field conditions and replacement right side of the line, but Jeff Quinn needs to get the false starts — as detailed by Tyler James last week — cleaned up going into next season with what should be all five starters returning and a more seasoned running back room that will feature a new five-star option. Offensive line play was fine this year, but it needs to be a strength in 2020. I do wonder how it looks if Jafar Armstrong is healthy all season, Tommy Kraemer/Robert Hainsey stay upright and Book was playing better earlier to provide more balance, but we at least got the strong Tony Jones, Jr. performances against Virginia and Southern Cal, two Top 25 teams. Hey, also, a screen pass worked for a touchdown on Saturday! Small victories.
4) Really appreciated David Shaw’s cool tough guy tactic of taking timeouts at the end. In the first half, Shaw could have actually been aggressive instead of punting on 4th and 5 from the 49 and 4th and 2 from the 46 when the game was still in the balance, especially since he was coaching a 4-7 team that had nothing to lose. The final score would actually have been somewhat respectable if he had just let the clock run out but nope he got cute and was immediately punished with a garbage-time strip sack score for the cover, capping off a nice stretch of football for Kareem. 4-8 couldn’t have happened to a nicer coach.
(While speaking of powers beyond mortal control: I cannot stress how much the wind picked up just before Jonathan Doerer’s missed field goal. If they had snapped it a few seconds sooner or a few seconds later perhaps it wouldn’t have been caught in Aeolus’s clutches but the elements conspired against the junior. Doerer survived the crappy field to make his second attempt and finish the regular season 13 of 16 on field goals and 54 for 54 on extra points. One of the many pleasant surprises on this team. And also shout out to long snapper John Shannon, who got the game ball after recovering the muffed punt and downing the final Jay Bramblett boot that set up Kareem’s touchdown.)

5) On the ground reporting: The weather actually wasn’t that bad save for the walk to the stadium and the period in the third when the wind and rain picked back up. It was as empty as it looked on television and while we were waiting to get into the game — it takes forever to get into Stanford Stadium and we perhaps dawdled in the dry comfort of a nearby watering hole slightly too long — the cheers for big Notre Dame plays and big Stanford plays were indistinguishable. Going onto the field after the game was weird but fun. Time expired, then there was a 90-second countdown clock to wait before you were allowed on the field (not nearly enough time for the teams to exit) then fifteen additional minutes were put on the clock for wandering around on the trash surface. Also, the public address announcer in the stadium was Not Good, repeatedly getting players wrong and referring to end-arounds as reverses multiple times. I know we just talked about dropping Navy off the schedule but hey should we also swap out Stanford for UCLA or Cal here and there? I’m not sure the Pac-12 would sign off on further disruption of their end-of-season schedule but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
6) No one is going to write any songs about the 2010 or 2019 Notre Dame seasons but they featured two of the biggest plays of the Kelly Era to jump start perfect Novembers and bookend the decade: Robert Blanton’s punt block against Utah and Book-to-Claypool on 4th and 10 against Virginia Tech. If those games aren’t wins who knows how the seasons play out but they were and the aftermaths were quite positive. This 5-0 close is even more impressive when you consider it had three combined starts from Okwara, Hayes, Kraemer and Hainsey, who were all gone for the season by the time the team flew home from Durham. In previous years that wave of injuries would have doomed the program and instead it was a perfect final month for the second season in a row.
7) Winning is Hard/Schadenfreude Round Up: Trying to imagine Notre Dame being in the running for a playoff berth and losing the season finale to USC in the exact same fashion that Alabama lost to Auburn, including a head coach meltdown and game-icing illegal substitution penalty. (Small Sample Size Theater: Alabama is 0-3 against its last three ranked opponents and has allowed 46 points per game in those contests.) The other top ten team to fall was Minnesota, whose wide receivers couldn’t come through in a 21-point home loss to the Badgers. Otherwise a pretty clean day at the top, save for Utah trailing Colorado after the first quarter although the Utes won by 30 so that worked out fine but just a reminder that sometimes it takes a little bit for the better team to assert itself.
Michigan got mauled by Ohio State again. Nebraska could have pushed for a last-second score against Iowa to get bowl eligible but instead they opted to try to run out the clock, messed that up and gave up a game-losing field goal. Whoops! Ole Miss lost the Egg Bowl in the dumbest possible way and fired Matt Luke on Sunday. Miami lost at Duke to finish 6-6, which, yikes. TCU lost at home to West Virginia as a double-digit favorite and the Horned Frogs will not be bowling this year. Penn State messed around with Rutgers for entirely too long. Pitt lost at home to Boston College but Steve Addazio got fired anyway. Wake Forest fell at Syracuse. Herm Edwards improved to 2-0 against Kevin Sumlin, who will get a third season despite missing bowls his first two Tucson autumns. Texas A&M paid its coaching staff One Oil Well to get annihilated by LSU. This is a pro-Matt Campbell newsletter but we should point out he lost to Kansas State by ten as Chris Klieman completes a dandy of a first season in Manhattan. Honestly, kind of a quiet weekend from a carnage perspective.

8) Back in August, which seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago, I listed seven goals/historical trends working against the Irish:
* The last time Notre Dame won in Palo Alto was 2007.
* The last time Notre Dame beat Southern Cal in three consecutive years was 1999-2001.
* Since 1994, Notre Dame has won in Ann Arbor exactly one time, and that required the blood sacrifice of Rhema McKnight’s knee.
* The last time Notre Dame achieved a double-digit win total in three consecutive seasons was 1991-1993.
* The last time Notre Dame went undefeated at home in two consecutive seasons was 1988-1989.
* Only three schools have made the playoffs in consecutive seasons (Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma).
* Worth noting that Notre Dame hasn’t lost a dumb game to a subpar team the last two years — or in 2015 — with all their losses coming to teams that finished the season ranked, all away from home save for a one-point defeat against the Dawgs. Does that mean they’re over dumb losses or simply due for one?
Well, the Irish absolutely did not win in Ann Arbor and they didn’t make it back to the playoff but they checked the other five boxes on that list. They hit the over on their Vegas win total and exceeded the SP+ projection by nearly a full game, just kind of fulfilling expectations in a professional fashion. I understand that it is very disappointing Notre Dame lost the two biggest games on its schedule, but there’s something to be said for just taking care of business against the teams you’re supposed to because when you fail to do that there are consequences.
If Utah hadn’t lost to the Trojans’ third-string quarterback, they’d be win and in to the playoff this weekend. Ditto Oklahoma with Kansas State and Wisconsin with Illinois, both three-touchdown road favorites when they fell. If Georgia hadn’t lost to 4-8 South Carolina at home, they’d be playing for seeding. (If all four of those teams had won their games, we’d be looking at playoff apocalypse, so a real shame that didn’t transpire.) Notre Dame grinded this season*, handling the losses of some all-time players by putting their head down and continuing to churn out victories to the tune of 22-3 since the 2018 season kicked off. (Fun fact: The Notre Dame Class of 2021 will go into their senior year having witnessed a single home loss, by a single point to a team that played for the national title.) With the talent set to return, the recruits currently verbally committed and next year’s schedule, it appears this train might keep rolling.
*If you can describe winning eight of your ten games by two scores or more grinding.
In all, I think the clearest sign this program is in excellent shape is that they just went 10-2 and the reaction from all quarters is somewhat muted. There are days not too far gone where a ten-win Notre Dame season would have merited a slew of national columns if not a Sports illustrated cover, but at this point it’s a ho-hum story. The fact Notre Dame fans feel like 10-2 is somewhat of a letdown is incredible considering how much of the prior two decades consisted of six-to-eight-win malaise. Ennui over double-digit victory counts? A radical concept, but one I’m happy to embrace.
One more bowl game left to take a crack at another 11-win season. One more chance to see so many guys who gave so much to this program play in the blue and gold. One more chance to gather with friends and loved ones to celebrate and complain and feel a sense of community over the dumbest sport in the world. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
But before the bowl, we have important business to attend to: Christmas Giving is a week away. Get ready.
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