Rakes Report #231: How long does it take to find the peace that we wanted
Taking a look at two additions to the football staff and the basketball seasons thus far as we sit on the cusp of March.
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Hey folks, hope the football offseason is treating you all well so far. This is a Tuesday edition because for the sake of synergy I wanted to plug a new podcast episode with The Athletic’s Pete Sampson talking about all manner of things, from new coaches on staff to the expectations for Marcus Freeman going into Year Three. If you missed last month’s episode discussing some advanced stats, depth chart power rankings and aspirational Friend of the Report Jack Reacher1, that’s also available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Had a lot of fun with both and I hope you enjoy listening.
Rundown of this edition: Before spring practice begins next month, I wanted to clear the deck a bit by hitting on the new coaching hires and then dive in a little on basketball. Let’s get to it.
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The most recent and likely (knock on wood) final addition to the 2024 Notre Dame staff was Max Bullough, who was promoted from grad assistant to linebacker coach following safety coach Chris O’Leary’s departure to the NFL. You might remember Bullough from his time as a Sparty linebacker, which overlapped with the beginning of Brian Kelly’s tenure. Bullough was essentially the linebacker coach last season and everyone around the program gushes about his ability and acumen, so it was nice to be able to retain him. However, this does mean there is no formal safety coach.
This is the great thing about consistency in the program, because Al Golden coming back for a third season and Mike Mickens entering his fifth means you can get a little creative because the foundation is so sturdy. It will be an “It takes a village” approach to the safeties, with Mickens, Golden, special teams coordinator Marty Biagi (who has experience coaching defensive backs) and a grad assistant likely to be named later handling the collective responsibility. It’s a little unconventional, but with a departure this late into the offseason and a guy on staff everyone loves like Bullough, it’s a fun gamble. It also helps that Xavier Watts is back there and they got veteran Rod Heard II from Northwestern in the transfer portal to pair with him.
What doesn’t feel like a wager in any way is the hiring of Mike Denbrock at offensive coordinator, which we are yet to discuss at length here. The degree to which this could be a perfect fit for Freeman cannot be overstated. This is Denbrock’s third time on the Irish staff, so he knows the program and university well. He has been successful at multiple stops as a coordinator, running the best Irish offense of the post-Weis years (2015) as well as good offenses at Cincinnati (including 17th in F+ during their playoff run) and elite ones at LSU (10th and 2nd in his two years, plus the Heisman winner).
This is big for both the micro and macro. For the grander vision of Freeman’s tenure, Denbrock is a guy he trusts from their time at Cincinnati and his is not a name that pops up on a lot of head coaching searches, meaning he could be in this for the long haul as the steady hand on the side of the ball that isn’t the head coach’s speciality. Focusing exclusively on this season and the pressures surrounding it, he could be a godsend.
There is every expectation in the world for Notre Dame to make the inaugural 12-team playoff this fall, and to ideally finish in a position where they’re hosting. At 11-1, they’re definitely in and almost certainly hosting. At 10-2, considering it not being the strongest schedule, making it in is more of an open question.* It puts so much pressure on the opener at Texas A&M, because if the Irish win that, managing 2-1 against home Louisville, home Florida State and away USC achieves the goal as long as they don’t lose to a team they’ll be projected to destroy in the other eight games. Fall in College Station and now you need to run the table the rest of the way to be fully confident in a berth.
* It’s a 12-team playoff but unless the Group of 5 team is elite, there are really only 11 spots. If the Big 12 is a coin-flip free-for-all and cannibalizes its champion, it’s possible they’re outside the top 12 as well, which means only 10 spots. If there is no elite ACC champ — Pitt and Wake Forest played for the title ranked 15th and 16th in 2021 — you could get down to only the top nine teams making it. Heartbreak awaits for a lot of teams.
The opener against the Aggies is going to be really tricky for a number of reasons, a major one being two new tackles, including having to replace Joe Alt and going from no-doubt top-ten pick to giant question mark. There will be a new quarterback, new receivers and no Audric Estime combined with intense heat, a hostile crowd and a Mike Elko defense. There’s a good chance since it’s Game One that Denbrock will have to build the plane while he’s flying it to steal a win down there. When we talk about coaching as problem-solving, this is the guy we want in that position.
A few quotes from Denbrock’s press availability last week that stood out in a positive fashion.
“I think we’ll probably be a little more spread-looking football team than they’ve been the last couple years. A little bit more [three wide receiver sets] than they’ve run the last couple years. The reason for that really is to help out the run game, to help the play-action game, to help out getting our athletes out in space and giving them the ability to make some explosive plays. That’s what we’re going to try to create.”
In defense of Gerad Parker, it is hard to deploy formations with three or four wide receivers when you don’t have that many healthy players in a given game, but this is very much a step in the right direction. I still get itchy thinking about the amount of times last season where it felt like the Irish were trying to run the ball in a phone booth.
Along those same lines, forgive me for a longer excerpt but I think it’s an important one (bolded emphasis mine).
“I think everything that you do has to be built around a strong running game. Now, does that mean that it's going to be 60 times a game? It doesn't mean that. It means that when we do call runs, that we give our guys a chance numbers-wise, number one. Number two, we put them in a position, from a scheme standpoint, to take advantage of what the defense is trying to do. And then we execute it.
But I think any great offense revolves around the ability to be able to run the ball. Having said that, I will say that I think I'm more open than I was years ago to not just pounding my head against a brick wall, and just understanding that the game has changed. And the more athletes you can get out in space and create mismatches is also a good way to play offense. So, there'll be a good balance of that. There'll be afternoons where we run it 50 times and there'll be afternoons where we may throw it 50 times.”
We have wondered about the core tenets of Freeman’s overall offensive philosophy and the fact he hired Denbrock and Denbrock is now saying things like this — spreading it out more, even broaching the idea of 50 throws a game if need be — is a promising sign.
Maybe things go awry and we have stories of the two of them butting heads but I don’t think Denbrock leaves a very good and lucrative job without serious conversations with his new boss about control over that side of the ball. While the Tommy Rees partnership was a shotgun wedding in the wake of Kelly’s departure and Parker’s promotion seemed a bit panicked after Andy Ludwig fell through, this is a calculated move.
Overall, we are really lucky to go into a monster season for Freeman and this program with Denbrock and Golden as the coordinators. Hopefully it is not the only one of this pairing we get to experience.
I need two seconds to whine about a quote that’s more than two months old that I briefly mentioned in the Sun Bowl review. Here is Freeman from a Dec. 20 press conference when discussing incoming transfer kicker Mitch Jeter (forlorn emphasis mine).
“In the two years that I’ve been head coach, the one thing I’ve kind of changed my philosophy on is taking points. It’s important to get points on the board. You can’t be so greedy and turn down opportunities to kick field goals. When you have a kicker that you believe is the best, right, the best out there, it’s a great feeling for an offensive coordinator and a head coach to say, ‘Let’s take the points and kick it.’”
Sigh – I politely disagree regarding that being a great feeling. As my very wise friend Jamie Uyeyama often reminds me, coaches say things in press conferences all the time that they don’t really mean. However, I am still scarred from the attempt to set up a field goal attempt in the waning moments of the Duke game (blessings upon Audric). Hey, maybe this just means that Denbrock and Riley Leonard are going to have to be hyper-efficient once they get inside the opponent’s 40. Good motivational tactic.
Thank you for indulging me on that. You go to some places for smart breakdowns of schemes or recruits and others for great insider information but you know coming to this space you’re going to have to deal with a lunatic obsessed with not kicking on fourth down. You know what you signed up for and we’re all to blame here.
Let’s close with some basketball. With the understanding the overall perspective will be framed around how the next two games and ensuing two tournaments go, I would mark the women’s season thus far as a mild disappointment. Some of this is due to injuries but the defending regular season ACC champion and preseason top-ten team will need to do some serious work over the next week to secure a double bye in the conference tournament and home court for the opening weekend of the NCAAs. Those seem like fair baseline regular season goals for the program.
I say mild disappointment because there has been a lot of fun. The win at UConn on broadcast primetime with all the Huskies’ legends in the house was wonderful. They also notched road wins at Rocky Top (without hitting a three), Florida State (in a double overtime thriller) and Duke (in a big Monday night game). They play a brand of basketball that’s so fun to watch when it’s clicking and when you have three pillars as strong as Sonia Citron, Maddy Westbeld and Hannah Hidalgo it would make any sort of deep postseason run unsurprising.
The issue has been the inconsistent play around those three. If one of the supporting cast steps up (Anna DeWolfe bombing away from three in Tallahassee, Nat Marshall’s big second quarter in Storrs, K.K. Bransford stuffing the stat sheet off the bench in Durham) then this team can hang with anyone. The front court has been an issue all season, as oftentimes size has not translated to a rebounding advantage or easy buckets in the paint. That issue will be addressed with flair next season when Kate Koval — a top-five recruit considered the best post prospect in the nation — arrives on campus, but that doesn’t help at the moment.
But enough with the sadness: Watching Hidalgo has been a total joy this season. I was able to see her in person at Pittsburgh in January and the way you can immediately tell she’s the main character even during warmups despite her stature is wild. It would be one thing if it were just the gaudy steal numbers or just the scoring but the fact it is both and that it has all been so needed, especially when Citron was out with injury. There are so many sequences in games where things are getting a little rocky and it’s a string of foul shots, buckets and steals solely by Hidalgo* that provides the necessary breathing room.
* For example, Notre Dame was trouncing Pitt on the road after the first quarter but found themselves trailing early in the fourth with an extremely short bench (Citron was yet to return, Westbeld had just been bloodily concussed and there was foul trouble). After Pitt took their lead, there was a (very brief) stretch where Hidalgo had six points and a steal in 46 seconds to retake control and the Irish led the rest of the way. This is also the game where she stared down the official after a no-call like a disappointed parent. Swag is phenomenal.
Her tag team with Westbeld to pick-and-pop UConn to death was a masterclass. She also has incredible chemistry in transition with DeWolfe and Citron, and there is at least one hit-ahead or outlet pass a game between them that makes me cackle (here is Citron firing it to Hidalgo from Sunday) (here is Hidalgo finding DeWolfe on the break). I need to see Hidalgo, Citron and Olivia Miles together on the floor like I need air to breathe, but I’m excited to see what kind of damage this current team can do between now and the conclusion of the season.
Expectations were a little different on the men’s side, where Micah Shrewsberry was in a true Year Zero situation after rebuilding the entire roster from scratch. This team is not overflowing with offensive talent, which meant 5’11” true freshman Markus Burton was forced to do so so much, accruing one of the highest usage rates in the country. Earlier this month, the team had lost seven in a row to fall to 2-10 in the ACC and it seemed like Burton had perhaps hit the freshman wall.
Shrewsberry had leaned entirely on rebounding, defense and culture, building the bones of what he’d like his program to be. That paid off over a three-game winning streak and quality second half on the road at Syracuse. The most important thing from this season is learning that Burton is legit, and you can see how the idea of surrounding him with a bunch of long arms who can shoot and finish at the rim is a great concept. Some of the young bigs have shown occasional flashes, Braeden Shrewsberry has turned from Hypothetical Long-Range Threat to Actual Long-Range Specialist and Logan Imes looks like someone who can at the very least serve as a rotation guard. For the first half of the season this team acted as if the shot clock was some sort of Byzantine riddle, and that’s no longer really the case, which is another positive
The KenPom ratings are hilarious, a Bizarro Brey team: 267th in offense, 33rd in defense. I do not view the horrific offensive rating with this cobbled-together roster as a concern. Last year’s Penn State team was ranked 13th in that category, so it’s not like Shrewsberry doesn’t know how to put a scoring attack together. We only have two prior years of data of him being a head coach to draw on, but a couple of stylistic notes: That 2023 Nittany Lion team that made the round of 32 played really slow (320th in tempo) and was only a little above average in percentage of made field goals being assisted (143rd) despite the elite overall rating. His first Penn State team was 354th and 202nd in those categories and this Irish team is 340th and 301st. This could all change down the road when has his ideal roster in place but that’s the trend thus far.
(This doesn’t have anything to do with things going forward, but “Can’t pass, can’t really shoot, never pushes the ball in transition but tries really hard on defense” is like if you asked me to design a basketball team and then gave me the complete inverse of what I requested. From my purely personal aesthetic perspective, I am ready for Shrewsberry Year Two when things are a bit more balanced.)
Okay, that is it from me. Good luck to both basketball teams in finishing their seasons in a strong fashion and to all the spring sports getting started. Will have some pods over the coming months and likely one spring practice check-in newsletter, but at the very least I’ll see you folks the Monday after Blue-Gold to discuss what we saw. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.
If you enjoyed the series and want to try out the books, a good one that’s also thematically tied to this newsletter is “Worth Dying For,” where Reacher is in rural Nebraska and the henchmen are all former Cornhusker offensive linemen. He snaps the limbs of so many guys in lettermen jackets.