Rakes Report #189: Can't hide what you desire once you're on it
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~optional musical accompaniment~
I was planning on sending a version of this after the long Independence Day weekend, but then the news about USC and UCLA going to the Big Ten broke just before. So, then I was going to talk about that, but I was worried the news cycle would potentially make it outdated as soon as it landed in your inbox. When that cycle slowed down a bit, I was sketching something out but getting angry about hypotheticals, which is no way to live life. All of this is to say a few of the items in here are a little dated and none of them are particularly earth-shattering in their insight so we’re going to keep things moving to clear out the drafts file before we really get down to business in the coming weeks. Hope you’re all enjoying your summers – it’s steamy now but we are going to have football and the first air of autumn before we know it.
In late June, we found out that freshman tailback Jadarian Price would be missing the season with a ruptured Achilles. You might remember Price from one of maybe three interesting plays in the Blue-Gold Game, and he had all the qualities — and lack of college film and stats for us to criticize — to perhaps find himself as the team’s best all-around back in 2022. His injury combined with Logan Diggs’ shoulder sidelining him for the beginning of the season has the Irish into a precarious position at running back, which is now combined with the well-documented dearth of options at wide receiver and a new injury at tight end.
The Irish offense now is going to lean even more on Tyler Buchner (who missed time with injury last year), Michael Mayer (same) and Chris Tyree (same). They also are expecting a lot from Lorenzo Styles (a sophomore who has yet to contribute for a full season), Braden Lenzy (who has previously missed time in his career from injury) and Avery Davis (returning from a torn ACL). Mitchell Evans, who was likely set to be the number two tight end, is going to miss most if not all of the season with a foot injury while the recovery of Joe Wilkins, who would be a lift at receiver, is still a major question mark.
Maybe incoming freshmen Tobias Merriweather and Eli Raridon will be able to factor in the passing game or late flip at running back Gi'Bran Payne is ready to roll right away, but right now the health of the skill players is a Big Variable for this season. This is unfortunate, because there are already some existing Big Variables to which we have no way around. Those issues:
A New Head Coach: How is Marcus Freeman going to handle making the big decisions on the sideline? The Fiesta Bowl was just one game in really tough circumstances with the swirl of responsibilities in the preceding weeks but there were a couple missteps. Dave Aranda won Baylor the Big 12 title last year in his second season in Waco, but he did so only after shaking off some conservative defensive coordinator instincts on fourth down that plagued him in 2020 while also hiring Jeff Grimes, the high-flying offensive coordinator who helped make Zach Wilson a top pick. Can Freeman be Year Two Aranda on fourth down in Year One?
A New Quarterback: Tommy Rees coordinated two good offenses in his first two years on the job, doing so with a pair of experienced quarterbacks. Buchner has more natural ability than either Ian Book or Jack Coan, but he’s raw and we have no idea how he’s going to adapt when teams have far more tape on him. Last year, we saw him look great sparking the offense in Blacksburg amid a high-leverage situation only to complete a single third quarter pass (to a Hokie for a pick six). His upside is much higher than Book or Coan, but the floor is far lower.
New Kicking: For the general lack of faith in college kickers, we’ve been in pretty good hands for a decade with Kyle Brindza, Justin Yoon and Jonathan Doerer, who all came through far more often than not. At punter, the Irish are likely to be relying on true freshman Bryce McPherson. New special teams coordinator Brian Mason has loaded his room with options, but we don’t know how they’re going to perform.
Notre Dame has been making hay at the margins for the last five years. Since 2017, they have second-best win percentage as a favorite in all of college football, trailing only the Bearcats. They still maintain the longest win streak against unranked foes in the country, surviving a number of uncomfortably close calls in the first half of last season to keep their last toe-stubbing in the doldrums of 2016. If things break poorly, you can see how the dominos could start to fall the wrong direction: A couple injuries at the wrong time lead to a game being tighter than it should, putting more onus on the quarterback play, place kicking and sideline decision making, at least one of which could fail to rise to the occasion. Close games plus too many Big Variables is not an equation I want to investigate too closely this fall.
There are also a few questions on the Irish schedule outside of their control: If Clemson has a good offense, they will be a clear playoff contender with the freakish defense they’re set to field. In a mirror situation, if Southern Cal can scrape together any kind of defense, they could be in the mix among the nation’s best as well. Is North Carolina a potential post-hype sleeper now that expectations for Mack Brown are low? Is Phil Jurkovec going to live up to the first-round projections? Does Stanford have a bounceback in it or is David Shaw just playing out the string?
We must not forget that all these questions might end up being just fine for the good guys, and there are areas where the downside risk is relatively low but where you’ll find a ton of potential upside: Will the front seven be really good, or potentially among the best in the nation? Will the offensive line and secondary be adequate, or pleasant surprises ahead of schedule from the jump? If Buchner, Mayer, Styles and Tyree all play the full season at a high level and the defense is what we think it could be, then special teams shouldn’t matter all that much and it would take truly atrocious in-game management to undercut that production. And hey, perhaps the kicking will be a plus and Freeman will be a natural at clock management and fourth down decisions from the word go. It’s simply a lot of stuff we’re not sure about, but it doesn’t mean the answers will be bad.
Late but brief laurels section: Notre Dame’s run to the Men’s College World Series was an absolute blast. If it was just pulling off the late rally to finish off the upset on Rocky Top, dayenu, but then to take the Friday night opener from Texas was a real cherry on top despite being eliminated over the ensuing two games. Link Jarrett going home to Tallahassee is a bummer (albeit an understandable one), and while the South Bend climate likely limits the ceiling of the program, hopefully they can build some momentum from the last couple of years because that was a really fun bandwagon to join. Due to Dillon connections (thank you MacKrell family), I was able to attend the opening weekend and it was really the best time because you had so many different groups of fans gathering in one place in mostly good moods to drink and enjoy some baseball/gross prepackaged jello shots. Highly recommend the trip, and if you want a brief travelogue about that weekend, we recorded one here.
Second very cool thing to happen in June was Blake Wesley being selected in the first round of the NBA draft, the first Notre Dame player to earn that honor since Jerian Grant in 2015. Wesley’s decision to go pro was criticized in some circles that perhaps did not understand how basketball has evolved, but now he’s locked in between five and 12 million dollars in guaranteed money, which is a decent first job out of college. He played well in Summer League and with the San Antonio Spurs going into full tank mode this season he should be able to get plenty of burn in addition to off-court development. Really, really happy for him, even if I will get occasional pangs of sadness this winter that he’s not running the floor with J.J. Starling. (Seriously, watch that link – if the Irish men come through, could have a pair of Top 25 teams playing at Purcell this fall because you know Olivia Miles and Co. are ready to run the ACC off the floor.)
One way for Marcus Freeman to make his life easier in future seasons is by having fewer tight games, which he can achieve by increasing the talent gap between Notre Dame and most teams on its schedule. The Irish went on a recruiting tear as the calendar flipped from June to July, picking up not just a number of four-star prospects but doing so at a couple of positions — corner and wide receiver — where quality and quantity have suffered in recent years, in addition to locking in a blue-chip quarterback prospect whose grandfathers are both Michigan legends (not that we’re keeping track of the woe befalling the Wolverines – would never). The Irish are in good shape to finish with a Top 5 class for 2023, and they’ve already got a nice jump for the year following as well.
I know the range of recruiting interest among readers here goes from “Aware of which teenagers’ parents are following which schools’ assistant coaches on social media” to “Checks out the roster (and the Frosh O podcasts) every August to learn the new names” and my expertise is certainly not in this area so I won’t opine at length but it is worth noting why this matters so much. (It is, however, not the only thing that matters, as the Recruiting Industrial Complex would have you believe.* Few things are more boring to me than approaching this sport only through a single lens, particularly if that lens is recruiting – stars indeed matter, but you still have to play the games from time to time.)
* Not a perfect metric, but here’s the 247 Talent Composite for last year, a rough idea of the raw firepower on each roster. The top three of the Tide, Dawgs and Buckeyes checks out, but then it gets a little sketchy with Clemson at 4 (missed ACC title game), LSU at 5 (coach fired), Oklahoma at 6 (missed Big 12 title game), Florida at 7 (coach fired), Texas A&M at 8 (mmm), Oregon at 9 (eh), USC at 10 (coach fired) and Texas at 11 (they lost to Kansas on the way to 5-7).
The most obvious reason for why recruiting is important and why the teams with the most five stars are finding success in the playoffs more often than not is they have those gamebreakers for the high-profile contests. Close your eyes and think about Notre Dame in any number of big postseason games and you can visualize them lacking the extra bit of first round prospect juice that separated the Alabamas, Clemsons and Ohio States of the world from the perfectly respectable Irish squads they faced. Life would be much better if every Notre Dame roster had a trio of Kyle Hamilton-level defenders and a second set of Michael Mayer-level offensive threats. You can obviously develop elite players from the lower rungs of the rankings, but the success rate is much higher with better pedigrees.
The second reason why recruiting matters so much is you can buy yourself goodwill and wiggle room on the random Saturdays when you’re going against a foe that is capable but not one of the elites. This is the advantage we thankfully already see with the Irish in so many of their games, particularly against ACC teams: Notre Dame has more talent when the game starts, which means they need to play poorly while the other team plays really well in order for the upset to be sprung.
Not an ACC team, but think about the Toledo game: The Rockets scrapped and clawed and the Irish played like crap for much of the afternoon but they were able to have Top 100 recruit Tyler Buchner throw to Top 100 recruit Chris Tyree for a one-play touchdown drive in the second half and then when they trailed late it was just a matter of tossing it up to Top 100 recruit Kevin Austin and Top 50 recruit Michael Mayer. The Irish are going to win a few games this fall just because some opponents will have no chance of blocking Al Golden’s front seven for four quarters because the talent gap is going to be so wide.
Our good friend Jamie Uyeyama ran the numbers earlier this summer on the growing rift between the Irish and the rest of the ACC. From Irish Sports Daily, with the caveat these totals are from mid-June and there have been additions to both the Irish and ACC (Clemson in particular) totals:
Notre Dame currently has 13 blue-chip recruits (composite 4 or 5-stars) committed in the 2023 cycle. The ACC teams have 18 combined and no team even has half that amount of blue-chips committed. Clemson has six.
Notre Dame signed 19 blue-chips in the last cycle. No ACC team had more than 10.
Pretty good! If you want to know why the Irish are in good shape to win a bunch of games this year even though they’ve got the major questions looming we’ve discussed above, you have to look at their overall advantages against most of their opponents. The 2022 Talent Composite isn’t up yet, but there’s an even rougher metric we can use in the Blue-Chip Ratio. That is just counting and one piece of division: The percentage of players on the roster you signed who were four- and five-star recruits (transfers aren’t factored in at this point).
The Irish are ninth in this stat, at 62%, while only two of their opponents make the cut of having a majority of their roster classify as blue chip: Ohio State (second, at 80% - mamma mia) and Clemson (one spot ahead of the Irish at 63%). However, it is noted that both USC and North Carolina are one excellent class away, so they’re lingering not that far behind.
As we’ve said repeatedly, the dream of the Freeman Era is to maintain the great development and deployment of the last five years of Brian Kelly’s tenure, but couple that with taking recruiting to the next level. That second part is going extremely well right now, we just have to hope the other rather important goals also are met.
I think that’s enough of a catch up at this point. I wanted to close by plugging a few of the podcasts since I last emailed in April. Those are available on Spotify, Apple or whatever app you use to subscribe by searching “Rakes Report.” Starting with most recent and going backwards:
Jess and I basically took a class from Notre Dame professors Meghan Sullivan (philosophy) and Christine Becker (Film, Television and Theater) about fandom, celebrity and what we’re trying to get out of sports. This was a ton of fun and I think you’ll dig it.
A discussion of conference realignment.
Breaking down the NBA Draft and Blake Wesley’s NBA future with Sam Werner and Mike Laskey.
The aforementioned check-in from Omaha.
Ashton Pollard from Blue and Gold talked recruiting after top quarterback C.J. Carr committed to the Irish.
Our USC Insider Nick Tresnowski provided an update on how things are going under Lincoln Riley. If you’re wondering when was the last time both the Trojans and Irish had new head coaches in the same season, it twas not long ago at all: 2010, with Kelly and Lane Kiffin.
A look at the NFL Draft and the post-Jordan Addison freakout about NIL destroying the heart of college football. Turns out that’s actually the people in charge of it and not the athletes they’ve been exploiting for decades! Very surprising turn of events, who could have foreseen this.
Bridget Reynolds was also kind enough to make an awesome design to commemorate the Irish making it to Omaha, and you can get that over at TeePublic in a few different shades. I think that’s it? I’ll be checking in against next month once camp starts and we have a few more data points, and there’s also the looming potential for you to see an unhinged screed on conference realignment hitting your mailbox some random morning.
Until then, take care of yourself and each other. Go Irish.
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