Rakes Report #152: Gotta stay on the straight and narrow and find a little light within (The Louisville Review)
~optional musical accompaniment~
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1) If you were told coming into this game that Notre Dame would rush for 230 yards and hold Louisville to seven points you would have probably thought that meant another easy win but boy can statistics — if we count point totals as statistics — be deceiving. There were a few things about this match up that made me nervous, in no particular order:
Scott Satterfield seemed like too good of a coach to start 0-4 in league play, considering what he did at Appalachian State and his eight-win season last year. He had the team locked in and made some aggressive calls with the fourth down conversion on their touchdown drive and the onside kick attempt.
One of Louisville’s biggest problems this season was they were turning the ball over at too high a clip. It was entirely possible they could just stop doing that for a game, particularly since Notre Dame hasn’t been too ball hawky this season despite an impressive havoc rate.
Just the general looking ahead toward Clemson, with the Cardinals, Panthers and Yellow Jackets seen as boxes to check instead of living, breathing opponents who would delight in defeating a highly ranked Notre Dame team. Throw in the whole “playing football in a pandemic” thing and when Mike Tirico said it felt muted in the Stadium you could start to feel this coming. It’s easy to fall into the trap where you view the Irish as the sole protagonist of the season but Louisville was interested in winning the game as well.
We were just due for one of these. Notre Dame had won eight straight games by double-digits and while this roster is talented it’s not good enough to have drama-free fourth quarters week after week. Irish fans used to be able to handle these existential crises of games at least once a month but we’ve apparently gone soft.
But the important thing is Notre Dame won. The defense was lights-out and the offense did what it had to do but the team is still going to have to continue improving if they want to even keep it competitive with Clemson and/or win all the non-Tigers games remaining on their schedule.
2) Let’s start with the bad, which includes the red zone offense that had been humming along before careening into a bridge abutment along with the fact the leading receiver checked in with two catches for 28 yards. I think perhaps Tommy Rees was trying to anticipate the run blitzes and stacked boxes that eventually came and went a little pass heavy to start. Afterwards, Ian Book said that was the windiest game he ever played in so that maybe wasn’t the best idea? In the first half, Notre Dame had drives of 12 plays/61 yards, 15 plays/78 yards and 14 plays/90 yards (with the latter two going over seven minutes each) and managed just six total points. Needless to say, if Notre Dame comes out of those drives with between 13 and 21 points, everyone is much more relaxed but they didn’t so we weren’t. It was the ultimate leaving the door open and Louisville, temporarily, took advantage.
It was disappointing to see Book struggle with pressure so much in his 27th career start, but he also had some nice throws that didn’t connect either due to nice secondary play or receiver error. There are flashes — Kevin Austin here, Michael Mayer there — but it looks like a passing offense that is still trying to replace the first tight end taken in the draft, a reliable slot receiver, and a dude who scored four touchdowns in one NFL game as a rookie. Book averaged only 5.6 yards per attempt, which is gross, but Louisville was only at 6.3 yards per throw so maybe conditions really were just that bad. (Malik Cunningham averaged 11.6 yards per attempt last season and was at 8 per this year coming into the game, to put that into perspective.)
But we wondered what this offense might look like with a little bit of game pressure and they really responded nicely. After Louisville went up (and the Irish were saved on an onside kick by a penalty), Book and the running game responded by going 66 yards in eight plays, the quarterback improvising the go-ahead score on a 3rd and 8. When they needed to run out the clock, they did, bleeding nearly eight minutes to deny Louisville a chance to break our hearts, including two clutch third down throws to Javon McKinley (who also converted a first down rushing) and Bennett Skowronek.
The running game was still pretty good, at least. Kyren Williams had another 132 yards from scrimmage, averaging five yards per carry and clinching the game with a great cut/stiff-arm combo on third down, his chain-moving helping to limit Louisville to just seven possessions by soaking up so much time. The challenge for the next couple weeks will be Rees trying to balance doing a lot of the thing his crew is good at (running the ball) with enough of the thing they must improve at (throwing the ball) to actually maybe get better at it. Hopefully Braden Lenzy, who Brian Kelly said was dealing with a soft-tissue injury, can get back into the mix going forward because there needs to be a jolt. Force-feeding McKinley didn’t work in this game so what I’m proposing is let’s try forcing the ball to Austin and see what happens these next couple weeks.
3) Okay enough moaning and groaning: The defense was awesome. Louisville came in with the 12th ranked offense in the SP+ and got shut down. Javian Hawkins was averaging 5.5 yards per carry and mustered just 3.4 on Saturday (he averaged only 1.6 if you subtract his 28-yarder). They kept the lid on Tutu Atwell, who had five offensive touches for 36 yards. An offense known for its explosiveness didn’t have a play over 30 yards and only had two drives crack 20 (one of them being the end-of-half surge that shouldn’t have happened). Would I have felt good if Louisville got the ball back with a couple minutes left? No, I would not have, but thankfully we didn’t have to deal with that situation.
It would have been nice to see some more/any sacks — although Cunningham being chased out of bounds by Drew White didn’t count as one — but Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah was a force again, Kyle Hamilton had a key pass break-up on an early third down to Atwell in addition to just being generally great and Shaun Crawford was good again in an overall nice effort from the secondary. (Blustery conditions probably didn’t hurt.) Daelin Hayes wrecked a guy with the hit of the day. The blitzes aren’t quite getting home, which combined with the number of almost-interceptions is making this defense tantalizing close to another level they can hopefully attain as they get further removed from half of the depth chart being isolated/quarantined. Also, as we’re about to get to in the Winning Is Hard section, the Florida State offense the Irish struggled with a bit last weekend looked pretty okay with their new quarterback so that cancels out a little more of the angst from this one.
(It’s fair to say Notre Dame caught a break on the Cardinals’ penultimate drive when Cunningham had to briefly leave with an injury. I think it’s also fair to say if you’re going to run your quarterback against this Notre Dame defense too much, they will be hard-pressed to survive the entirety of the contest.)
4) Shoutout Jonathan Doerer: After two straight games with misses, he drilled a pair of short ones that ended up being the deciding margin in the game. Missing kicks is another way these sweaty games where everything seems off get even sweatier, and he prevented that from happening. It was very much a “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” day for special teams, which were solid throughout but nearly gave up an onside kick and didn’t convert the fake.
In addition to Doerer having a perfect day, the Irish only had three penalties for 18 yards, playing a clean game and watching Louisville unravel at times to the tune of seven flags for 60 yards. Little stuff really matters when your red zone offense is on the fritz and the Irish did a lot of that well.
5) Some really bad game management around halftime. If Kelly felt the team needed a spark on their third long drive while only leading 6-0, then maybe do something short of the end zone on third and nine and go for it with a normal, non-fake field goal on fourth. Then the Irish called timeout when Louisville was just trying to run out the clock when Notre Dame didn’t have enough timeouts to actually get the ball back, almost costing themselves three more points after Cunningham put on a drive. Then after scoring to go up 12-7, the Irish went for two on a fade route and didn’t convert, the decision at the end of the first half bleeding over to cost more points. Very happy that sequence did not contribute to a loss because it could have if the defense hadn’t been so on point.
6) Winning Is Hard/Schadenfreude Round-Up: First of all, Brian Kelly has dropped three “Winning is hard” references in the last two weeks and I just want to thank him for the shoutouts. Regarding actual games, No. 5 North Carolina went down to Tallahassee and fell behind 31-7 to Florida State, but the Seminoles are still the Seminoles and almost gave it away before a series of late drops by the Tar Heels allowed the underdog to hold on for the big upset win. Players who didn’t look so good against the Irish looked a lot better against North Carolina, which is probably just a coincidence and not something about which we should be pleased.
Georgia had a halftime lead in Tuscaloosa but then got outscored 21-0 after the break to lose to Alabama. I’m not writing this to mock the Dawgs because the Tide receivers are comically good and will do this to everyone but just a reminder that when really good teams play one of them has to lose per the rules of football and sometimes the team that loses gets outclassed in the second half.
No. 15 Auburn was a small favorite at South Carolina and lost to them for the first time since the 1930s. No. 18 Tennessee got wrecked by Kentucky — including two pick sixes in a three-minute span — and have now been outscored 61-7 over their last six quarters, putting a halt to the quadrennial “Rocky Top is back” talk. (It was Big Blue’s first win in Knoxville since 1984.) A week after scoring 48 against Alabama, Ole Miss mustered just 21 points in a loss against Arkansas as they threw six interceptions. (Did Notre Dame get lucky missing the Hogs this year? Perhaps.)
Syracuse lost at home to Liberty but that’s not actually surprising because Liberty was favored? I think we broke Dino Babers in the Bronx. Duke let one slip away against NC State. Virginia fell apart in the fourth quarter against Wake Forest. Boston College got walloped in Blacksburg. No. 17 SMU needed overtime to win at Tulane. No. 21 Louisiana lost at home to Coastal Carolina. Central Florida blew a 35-14 third quarter lead at Memphis for their second loss of the season already.
7) The nice thing about the Louisville and Pitt games were that even though both teams were flawed they each featured one really good side of the ball to test the Irish. For the Cardinals, that was their offense, and the Irish passed that quiz with flying colors. However, the Irish couldn’t actually pass, so they ended up failing what was supposed to be an easy test against the Louisville defense. Against Pittsburgh, Book and the receivers are going to have to play much, much better because Pat Narduzzi’s modus operandi is making the opposing team’s receivers beat him in single coverage while a disruptive defensive line goes to work.
Both Book and Rees have experience dealing with Narduzzi, with Book coming off the mat in 2018 to finish the game 10-for-10 for 134 yards and two touchdowns after the Irish trailed the Panthers 14-6. Rees prepared for Narduzzi four times as a player and beat him in both of his starts. (Have I mentioned before that the 2013 Michigan State Spartans — 13-1, Big Ten champions, Rose Bowl victors, the best Sparty team of the last half-century — suffered their only loss to Tommy Rees?) Pitt’s offense isn’t very good but with the bizarro season I expect them to put up 35 on Clark Lea just because. Also, Heinz Field is going to be even more of a mausoleum than usual with crowd restrictions, but at least it’s a 3:30 start and not a sleepy noon kickoff. This is also the first road game of the season, and considering other teams have cited travel as an accelerator of COVID outbreaks, let’s hope that isn’t an issue.
Notre Dame needs to make it to Clemson undefeated because losing to either Pitt or Georgia Tech would be Real Bad but the unfortunate truth is if even if the passing game gets humming and the pass rush picks up the pace and the stuff that’s been good remains good it’s going to take a minor miracle to beat the Tigers, who have the look of a war machine led by a generational talent at quarterback and an NFL running back who stuck around to torment us. It’s frustrating to find the program a tier below the elite of the sport but a) Minor miracles sometimes occur, if we’re just talking about one game on November 7 b) The other option is shutting down the program and giving up and I’d prefer to keep recruiting and developing and running up that hill while winning 27 of the last 30 games c) 120 FBS programs would love to trade places with the Irish, which is nice to remember for perspective when the summit seems a long ways away.
The Irish are almost certainly not the No. 3 team in the country as stated by the polls but they’re a good team that has room to grow. We know at this point in his tenure the baseline for a Lea defense is quite sturdy and the havoc rate is high enough that it should convert to more turnovers at some point, at least one would hope/think. (Also, having more key players further removed from COVID-related absences can only be good.) On offense, the Irish are great at one thing and there seems to be enough material to eventually be capable at other stuff as well but that’s going to depend on the senior quarterback finding some weapons on the outside with which he can work.
This team has been through so much this year and while they haven’t faced the toughest competition, they’ve won every game, which is more than a lot of schools can say at the moment. Keep winning, keep improving and we’ll see how far this journey can go.
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