A low bar, but we’ve notched the greatest Saturday of the Freeman Era and it’s not even lunchtime. Two big decisions dropped in favor of ND this morning.
- Northwestern safety Brandon Joseph, a 2020 Consensus All-American, announced he’d be enrolling at ND as a graduate transfer.
- Holy terror edge rusher (and sometimes quizzical middle-linebacker) Isaiah Foskey announced he’d be back for another run as a member of the Fighting Irish.
I’ll add some thoughts below but if you’re wanting expert insight into how the Joseph pickup specifically impacts ND for 2022 (and possibly beyond), Jamie and Greg from Irish Sports Daily did a nice “Hit and Hustle” video pod (also discussed: Harry Hiestand: Resurrections):
Thoughts on a Big Day and a Big Week
For my own part, I think it’s hard to overstate what a great couple of hours this has been for the 2022 defense.
Defensive Line
Getting the Ademilola Bros and Foskey back this week not only sets the bar extremely high for returning production but also provides nearly ideal conditions for another guy to break out upfront. At a minimum, one imagines Foskey will be pinning down two blockers attention in most passing situations, which should make for either a) a bevy of one-on-one edge matchups for another pass rusher, b) a very limited set of options for an offense to deal with DL games (a Mike Elston strength for a really long time), or both. Foskey is a straight-up dude, but there’s a wealth of playmaking ability and potential on the DL. This is set up to be the most hyped ND DL since 2013 at a minimum, right?
Linebacker
Similarly, it’s going to be a great environment for second-level players to make plays. Every time a back has to stay in, or a TE has to double Foskey, life will get a lot more simple for ND’s second-level players. There are great expectations around Marist Liafau as the additional front-seven playmaker ND really needs, and the extent to which opponents simply won’t have the bandwith or materiel to scheme against ND’s backers promises a chance at a really fun season for Marcus Freeman’s former charges.
Secondary
In my mind, it’s hard to overstate how the addition of a quality piece like Joseph improves the picture for ND in the secondary. As the ISD crew notes, there are questions surrounding Joseph’s ability to play in the box against the run, but as a pure cover safety alone he’s a key puzzle piece. With Joseph in the picture, you have at least two guys (Joseph and Ramon Henderson) that can cover a lot of ground and be true backstops for the defense.
Suddenly, you can explore things like putting Xavier Watts closer to the line of scrimmage as a 5th DB or hybrid-rover. You can look at putting the fast-but-tiny Tariq Bracy (assuming he comes back) into a field corner role knowing he’d have some jump ball support; then you can maybe see about challenging Cam Hart to be a game wrecker as a boundary corner. I’m sure there are implications and considerations I’m overlooking, but the general idea of Joseph letting the defense make choices on in the secondary from places of abundance rather than scarcity is critical.
TL; DR – I think we have our best ever shot at holding OSU under 35 points in September, and after that we’re off to the races
This could be a clear top-3-level defense if we pull a starter-level corner out of the portal. Probably already top-10. Very exciting!
Imma wait and see on that type of pronouncement (he says, and then….)
But then again I check Football Outsiders to see where we’d have to go, and our D was 9th in F+ and 11th in SP+ this year, so maybe it’s not as big of a jump as I thought. (can’t tell if that’s pre or post-bowls).((edit: it’s post-bowls, as of 1/5))
For a defense that I spent 5-6 weeks screaming at, that’s pretty dang good. Maybe with all the returns and another year in the Freeman system (depending on who he brings in at DC, of course) we can maintain and maybe improve that.
So basically we are losing Hinish and MTA from last year’s 2nd half defense. And DT is our strongest recruited position on defense (6 out of 8 DT’s next year are blue-chips).
That is a lot of returning production. Let’s hope Joseph (a little bit like Hamilton did in the 1st half of the season) can cover up some of sins of the secondary and Liafau can be a legit playmaker (moving Betrand to a position better fit for him or just to a backup role). Not to mention some improvement among the other players and there is serious reason to be optimistic for the defense next year – which was a top 20 unit this year wasn’t it?
We probably need it to jump to top 10 on defense and hope Buchner can keep us in the top 20 on offense in order to make the playoffs again. 11-1 with a loss to OSU would likely get us in with a stronger schedule this year (presumably). I thought I read somewhere (maybe even on here) we need one unit to be top 10 and one unit to be top 20 to be a playoff type team.
That ISD podcast (I listened earlier) tempered my expectations about Joseph greatly. Any comparisons to Hamilton are silly. Sounds like we got a pretty good player but not a star by any means. The ISD guys aren’t even sure he’ll start.
yea Jamie U basically said really good in coverage. Not very good in run support. But young. He did have a much stronger 2020 season overall on a better team (according to PFF grades) than he did last year on a really bad team.
Freeman loved using 3 safeties at the same time while he was at Cincy. I’m not sure if he will do that in 2022, but there was no chance he could do that without Jospeh. This at least gives us options. Especially against OSU, having more coverage guys can only be a good thing.
I’m reasonably confident he’ll start. The alternatives aren’t great.
To repeat something I haven’t independently verified myself: somebody on another board said that Northwestern inexplicably played him at the line of scrimmage a lot this year, which is why his second season as a starter was much less successful than the first. If he is playing the deep safety position for us and DJ Brown or Watts are closer to the line of scrimmage, that’s not a bad place to be safety-wise.
Good intel on usage there. I wonder if that also factored into his decision to transfer if he felt he wasn’t being put in a position to succeed.
I would think it foolish to have any comparison to a top-10 pick in Hamilton, but I agree Joseph should be good enough to see the field for probably the vast majority of snaps based on his competition on the depth chart. I think it fine to temper expectations to not think he’s a game changer or elite talent, but he’s been at the very least a P5 starting player who was really good in 2020. That’s an add 10 out of 10 times for Notre Dame at safety right now.
Well in 2020 – perhaps when used differently – he has a top 5 PFF safety grade. In 2021 he had somewhere below top 100 safety grade.
What are the chances some Florida school or some school in south east fires their coach this summer and hires Deion on the basis of his recruiting chops alone?
Actually with the transfer portal, let these guys play under Deion for a year and then hire him and the elite players will follow Deion. Mike Norvell’s seat has got to be very hot right now.
Wouldn’t shock me, but man are there some huge red flags around Deion.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think Deion Sanders, SEC head coach, would be a success. Even though it would bring a ton of buzz and flashy players with him.
It would essentially be the equivalent of Memphis hiring Penny Hardaway.
lol imagine how mad pat fitzgerald is right now
this is the new life for lower programs with the transfer portal.
Ya, the pipelines will flow both ways. Top programs will get a do over of sorts with their evaluations.
Patterson back now too. Next year could be pretty fun.
Going to be very interesting to see what ND’s returning production SP+ numbers are. IIRC o-line is one of the lesser-weighted aspects of that, but we don’t lose a ton of receiving production (KA come back!), which I believe is the heaviest-weighted aspect.
I thought Austin already declared
I was joking – yes, he is gone. Was just saying our returning production could be really really high if Austin were back (and even higher if Coan wasn’t shorted the COVID year and could come back too).
Optimistically I can see a team that looks a lot like 2017 and ends up with a similar record.
I’m going to up my post-Austin take that there’s a hard ceiling at 10-2 to “11-1 seems possible if everything breaks right”… but it’s feeling like a very 9-3/10-2 type roster. Of course, I said the same thing going into this year and they went 11-1, so, hey, happy to be wrong.
yea though this year the schedule seemed to end up a lot weaker than one would have naturally guessed.
Well, that’s the ACC for you. Spoiler alert: UNC is going to suck this year too.
BUT DA U IS BAKK I AM TOLD
Even if they are, we don’t play them. After all, why would the ACC resurrect a historic rivalry when they could dump UNC on us for the seventh year in a row?
Yep. And the “independent” games this year (i.e. the non yearly rivals and non-ACC games) are @Ohio State, Marshall, Cal, BYU (Vegas), UNLV. Not exactly a murderer’s row aside from the first game.
I think ND will be just fine next season. Probably 10-2, plus or minus a game. Clemson seems to be receding a bit, USC is a big wild-card, Stanford and Navy are worse than they were 5-10 years ago, I don’t really think the 2022 schedule is very tough either.
BYU is a tough read. They’ve been really good the past 2 years, but then went and lost to a Sun Belt team in a bowl game.
BYU only beat bad USC by 4 points at the end of the season. Not terribly concerned about BYU, they’re good but if that’s the 3rd or 4th toughest game on the schedule it’s not too challenging. Notre Dame has to have way more talent on their side in that game.
Yea if 10-2 is most likely with Kelly at the helm I’m thinking that means more like 9-3. It’s hard to not to think that we’ll get tripped up one game against an inferior team with a new coach at the helm. Kelly seems relatively rare in that regard where that never happened to us before.
That is true and the unknown factor. How is QB play and how is the coaching? I’m fairly hopeful for both. 2 or 3 losses is probably 1-2 games that they “shouldn’t” lose tbh.
I think it would be easy 11-1 and almost no point of watching next year if Kelly was around, you already know exactly what happens– lose to tOSU and beat everyone else.
I see what you are saying which sounds about right if the schedule shakes out the way this year’s more or less did – where Clemson doesn’t turn things around, USC only improves a little bit, BYU doesn’t play like a top 25 team, Jurkovec doesn’t do anything crazy against us, and UNC doesn’t put much together despite bringing in a decent amount of talent the last three years.
It seems like there is a pretty wide variance for how strong the schedule could be even if it is likely that most of those things work out in such a way to make our schedule weaker.
All of that is more likely to happen than not, IMO. But we shall see. I don’t really think ND’s 2022 schedule is all that tough, though. It seems like pre-season every year the schedule gets hyped up as if all the best case scenarios for opponents will happen, and that doesn’t really come to pass either.
Notre Dame has 1 elite opponent, but also a TON of automatic wins based on talent differences (Marshall, Cal, Stanford, UNLV, Navy, Syracuse). That’s pretty much a 6-1 guarantee right there. Even talking yourself into potentially being scared of UNC or BC or BYU at this point feels way out of bounds to me, but hey, to each his own!
Still haven’t figured out what this means for my predictions, since I pick 9-3 in years where everything looks great and 8-4 in every other year. Probably 8-4. I won’t be able to shake the idea that we’ll lose a game because of the young staff being out-coached. Hopefully the roster is good enough that it doesn’t matter against at least 8 teams, and we can split the remaining 4.
Isaiah Pryor declared for the NFL draft. As a player, presumably.
wow that’s a bit surprising. Does he have a chance to be drafted at all?
Kinda doubt it, but he was already a transfer in to ND so it’s not like there was really an option to transfer somewhere else and have time to build a resume. And he likely thinks he’ll be passed, or at least split time. So why not take your shot, even if it’s not a good one.
Yea tough to think: “I may not make it that far next year at ND, so I’ll go see if I can make it in the NFL.”
Obviously, not a big loss and I wish him well. One would just think to have the best chance at the NFL one would want to train and practice as much as possible before trying.
Probably realizes he won’t get drafted but might have the chance to be in a training camp and show his stuff, or maybe try to add value on special teams or something.
See that’s not what I said at all though.
“train and practice as much as possible” isn’t what it would be if next year he’s splitting time (like this year) or loses out to a freshman/younger player.
At a certain point you have to recognize you’re probably not going to put much more than you already have on tape, you’ve (presumably) got your degree, go see if you can latch on in a camp.
I think many people (not saying you are, just many people) romanticize college and think these kids should want to stay as long as possible. At 22 and graduating I was so ready to get the heck out of there and on with my life. (Which, to be fair, was a mistake, and one I corrected by going back for a third round of grad school in my 40s…).
My point being that for Pryor, there’s no clear assumption that next year he’d do anything to “better prepare.” Austin, you’d think yeah another year of tape would help, but he also was likely just ready to be done. I can’t fault kids for that.
On the other hand, I do think losing Pryor is a loss–maybe not a BIG one, but we’ve seen how lack of quality depth hurts us. He’s not going day 1 or 2, but he was a solid contributor at the college level who wasn’t a weak link when he was on the field. I’d rather have that than not.
I didn’t mean to say that’s what you were saying.
Well it would be if only because he’s not going to be able to that anymore anywhere else.
That may well be true. But it’s hard not to think one more year of training would better prepare someone to make the NFL (it’s not about what he’d put on tape but just be stronger, slightly more skilled, more knowledgeable, etc.) – even if it’s only 2-5% better.
Nevertheless, it might be the case where it’s time to cut the cord and go see if you have what it takes right now because you don’t really want to stick around anyway. And that’s fine. I don’t blame anyone for being ready to move on.
And it’s true he’d be some kind loss – just not a big one. I’d rather have him back than not. And it will likely require more from the freshmen set of linebackers coming in (which maybe that’s a good thing).
Fair. The “Yeah” through me–sounded like you were agreeing.
Though we’re not exactly disagreeing either, I just think it’s reasonable for a kid to go “2-5% more ready if I stay? Nah, not really worth it, I’m ready to move on.”
Yup I agree with that. (And I see what you mean with my “Yeah.”)
My main point I suppose is that if I wanted to do absolutely everything I could do to make the league I’d stick around. It’s also hard to judge what other opportunities a guy may already be aware of if he doesn’t make the league.
I don’t think it’s bad to go in this instance, just more hopeless either way. For Pryor it’s a huge uphill climb in 2022 or 2023, but he probably is better off being a year younger and fresher to try and make it in the NFL. Adding experience and miles (and potentially injuries) isn’t necessarily a good thing for his future chances.
The NFL won’t really care about what he did or didn’t do at Notre Dame, they’ll care about what he can do moving forward with how fast/strong he is, what he runs, how good he is. Now at like age 22, there’s no guarantee he’s going to be THAT much better one year from now. And there’s also no guarantee he doesn’t hurt his knee or ankle or something in college and flush whatever small hope he might have had by staying.
Probably not, but who knows, literally just watched Brock Wright catch a ball on the 27 yard line in the NFL and he scored a touchdown, so through Christ all things really are possible.
He looked… quick? Agile? What is this sorcery?
To be fair though, he was wide open on a double reverse flea-flicker.
The miracles were abundant! But jokes aside, I am happy for his success and just felt it a perfect example to point it out that perhpas you never quite know from a college career as far as what player might find a way to have an NFL future.
Durham Smythe is still in the league.
And was the leading receiver for the Dolphins yesterday (at least at the point I checked in on the box score)
Davis coming back!
What about Bauer, C’Bo, Dirksen and Bracy?
Bauer just said he’s coming back. No word on the other 3 yet.
saw that. We are pretty close to 85. I assume C’Bo and Dirksen don’t come back. Bracy maybe.
While I am happy that Avery Davis is coming back, I tend to doubt he will be ready until late September at the best. The bad part about it is that we need him to come back. Really reflects poorly on recruiting/retention at that position.
I think it’s 87 scholarships now after Kia leaving for his mission. Maybe a few more have to finish this semester to graduate? (Flemister, Ekwonu, Wallace). I don’t think any of them have to or will be on scholarship by the summer, so no biggie.
Also there are 7 freshman or soph. CB’s behind 3 veteran, entrenched starters, so after spring practice there could be attrition from a guy seeing himself buried.
Since classes have started, does that mean we are done with the portal for spring? I assume someone could enroll late, but probably not more than a week.
Are we talking receiver or QB? j/k I know you are talking receiver
Avery Davis: one more year, one more position switch
Jaxson Dart in the portal, do we take him if he’s interested??
Does he have any upside over Buchner? I don’t think we take any qb’s in the portal. I think we have to play with the QB room we have this year.
I would say his profile (not his game necessarily, but overall talent) is fairly similar to Buchner. In an ideal world if he was interested he would transfer in and there’d be a battle and the loser would leave, but why would Dart do that?
Relatedly he is apparently visiting Ole Miss, which would probably be a great fit for him.