Before you read this reaction post, remember to let me know in the comments how you think my writing affected Notre Dame’s College Football Playoff chances.
You might as well, as almost literally every other thing that happened during Saturday’s 31-13 win over Georgia Tech was examined through that lens, as opposed to being concerned with anything happening on the field for its own sake.
(Have I mentioned lately that this is a main reason I dislike the playoff expansion? ESPN immediately using it as an excuse to discuss the damn thing 500 times a game rather than actually do the work of analyzing football was the most predictable thing of all time.)
Anyway, the game began sloppily, as most Notre Dame games do, but after Georgia Tech constructed a touchdown drive out of duct tape, butter, glue and balsa wood, the Irish more or less handled things after as Riley Leonard had probably his sharpest overall game throwing the football.
It didn’t look like that would be the case after his interception early on, a bad decision made worse by the enigmatic Beaux Collins just quitting on the route while the ball was in the air, but from then on Leonard was on point, completing slants with ease and even hitting Jaden Greathouse on an impressive slot fade route on ND’s first third-quarter drive.
However, only one part of today’s game needs to be the lead topic.
The defense
Al Golden, man. It doesn’t seem to matter what is thrown at him, the product is an elite defense. The latest hit was Benjamin Morrison’s season-ending injury, revealed early this week.
Marcus Freeman: Benjamin Morrison was sending advice/film to the younger players this week from the hospital.
— Irish Sports Daily (@ISDUpdate) October 19, 2024
That left four scholarship cornerbacks, counting nickelback Jordan Clark. Didn’t matter much. Freshman Leonard Moore, who Morrison said earlier this year will end up being better than him, got off to a good start backing up that praise with a rock-solid performance. (I think Morrison probably would’ve picked off that deep ball Moore defended well late in the game – but baby steps.) Clark made a really nice play to put a stop to an end-around on a third-and-2 in the first half.
Xavier Watts had another pick. Drayk Bowen was an absolute missile all day long. Jaiden Ausberry made some plays. Howard Cross and Rylie Mills got some pressure on Tech QB Zach Pyron. It was just another ho-hum team effort that resulted in 13 points allowed, seven of them in garbage time. ND hasn’t allowed over 16 all year.
Golden got a 4-year contract extension in the offseason. He and Mike Mickens need to be appointed co-mayors or something so we can supplement their salaries further.
Emptying the special teams playbook
Part of the reason the playoff became such a central topic of conversation during the second half was that Marcus Freeman played right into the discussion by calling not one but two fake kicks in the fourth quarter. They both worked, including a remarkably amusing fake punt that saw the ball snapped to Davis Sherwood, who shovel passed it to Jayden Harrison, who then lateraled it to Jeremiyah Love, who ran it for the conversion. (Love is now 2-for-2 on converting fake punts in his Notre Dame career.)
Fake Punt Alert! Notre Dame going deep into the bag of tricks with this tap pass punt reverse. #GoIrish #GoldenDome #collegefootball #cfb25 pic.twitter.com/sLZGeYOcty
— Throw Deep Publishing – 🏈 Books and Videos (@TDPublishing) October 19, 2024
While searching for a Tweet about this, I saw one about the Braden Lenzy fake punt in the Gator Bowl a couple years ago. It turns out Saturday’s fake was that with one more wrinkle. Pretty wild.
It was a pretty good day all around for the special teams, which also converted a fake field goal when Tyler Buchner (!!!) picked up the snap and raced around right end for a fourth-down conversion. Bryce Young blocked a field goal, and Zac Yoakam made his first field goal with Mitch Jeter still sidelined with a groin injury. (He missed a second.)
Less impressive was James Rendell, who for all his hype has been a significant downgrade from the transferred Bryce McFerson.
Effective if unspectacular offense
Notre Dame’s offensive line seemed to go into next-week mode as soon as the Irish went ahead 24-7, taking the rest of the day off in terms of run blocking especially. However, up to that point things went pretty well. Jadarian Price ripped off some impressive runs, going for 69 yards, and Riley Leonard took in two more scoring runs. As mentioned above, Leonard looked good throwing the ball. Hard to complain about much.
There goes Leonard 👀💪
His second rushing touchdown of the day#GoIrish☘️ pic.twitter.com/LryrwFjSzE
— Notre Dame Football (@NDFootball) October 19, 2024
It’s possible, though, that my new pet peeve player is Beaux Collins. In addition to quitting on the route on Leonard’s interception, he had a drop on a pretty easily catchable throw from Leonard in the third quarter, which cost ND a down on a drive that ended in a punt.
Mitchell Evans seems pretty clearly less than 100 percent, and as a result the Notre Dame tight ends haven’t been that much of a factor in the pass game. Love’s individual prop bets disappeared from gambling apps just prior to the game, scaring a few Irish partisans. I’m still pretty certain he’s not at his best right now, but his less-than-best is still better than most. Underrated? His blocking.
Allstate Playoff Predictor!
God, I hate this garbage. Anyway, Texas A&M won again, so ND’s anchor win continues to look good. Navy and Army both destroyed their opponents, so ND’s game against the Middies next week will be a ranked-on-ranked showdown.
Northern Illinois lost again. Whatever. Miami barely beat Louisville, a result that would’ve been really cool to see reversed for all sorts of reasons.
Just keep winning, fellas.
My biggest pet peeve about the playoff talk was the fact that ESPN has gone full Fox News for the SEC. I can’t wait for BIG and Fox/NBC/CBS to pick off the SEC/ESPN in 2029. At this point it’s not going back to what it was, so I will enjoy watching Sankey getting played for a fool signing a 10 year media deal. Talking about an 11-1 ND team being ranked 13th and on the outside to multi-loss SEC teams, c’mon.
As for the game, agreed on Collins but to defend him on the deep ball int, wtf was Leonard looking at? That wasn’t open from the snap.
Agree on Love, he twisted his ankle against Louisville and has been a bit hobbled.
Defense is lights out, except for a drive an early where they run a different playbook to throw Golden off. Mickens needs a statue or something. It’s really hard for me to get behind Leonard as a QB. I know there’s been some improvement, but as a Bears fan I know bad quarterback play and he’s not a good quarterback despite the guys at Irish Illustrated and Pete Sampson trying to convince us otherwise.
Miami can’t keep getting away with this. Had a sack/fumble/TD reversed that would have definitely swung all momentum to Ville.
Overall, felt like a NFL win. Kind of boring, not a blowout, but not a ton of concern either in the second half. Get a win next week and get to the bye to heal up a bit for the home stretch.
We’re going on what, almost 20 years of ESECPN partisanship, aren’t we? On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that the SEC has undoubtedly been the best conference in this era, but yeah the coverage is insufferable.
Oh yeah it’s been nauseating for the past 20 years, but they are fully pumping the SEC this since they don’t have anything else. The Miami/Louisville game and the ND game all they talked about was the SEC.
Not even trying to hide their propaganda anymore.
Riley Leonard could go 30-for-29 and we’d still get people afterward saying that he sucks.
In response to being told about the idiocy of the day at ESPN last week I told some people that the business model is just to be performatively stupid in order to drive engagement. After consuming more than usual of it this week it’s hard not to just believe that the people who work for ESPN are actually, pretty much all, total imbeciles.
Tough to feel bad for a depleted GT team given all our injuries, but hopefully King is back soon and can help them wrack up some wins. Particularly since their coach tried to have Pyron killed at the end of the game for inexplicable reasons.
The sideline interview with the GT coach has to go down as one of the all time worst. Not that any are good but, the questions today were so inane as to be comical. It seemed as if the coach was wondering if the reporter was f’ing with him.
It’s unfortunate because ESPN does have some talent that is actually smart and thoughtful (I listen to Mina Kimes and Ben Solak preview NFL games every week and they actually Know Ball™️), but all the most prominent ESPN football guys come across as either lazy or hot take artists.
Looking at what remains of the schedule, I think there’s a very good chance we end up 11-1, really depends how legit the academies are. USC is not especially good, FSU is a disaster (how are they 1-6!?!?) and Virginia is … there. It’d be baffling to not have us in the playoff at that point regardless of how bad the one loss is. I still don’t think we’d go far in the playoff or are by any means a legit national title contender, but when you let 12 teams in. Not putting ND in at that point very much become a mask off, just have the top four B1G play the top four SEC it’s clearly what you want type decision.
There’s no chance we don’t make it at 11-1. Only question is do we sneak into the 8 seed and get a home playoff game. I suspect no – our schedule this year is pathetic.
Assuming for these purposes that we win out, the NIU game is going to be super annoying. In that world, per above, I suspect we’ll end up the 9 or 10 seed, whereas would have been the 5 seed if they had just put in Angeli in the second half of that game.
I’m starting to come around on the idea that a mediocre to bad NIU might be better than a good NIU. If NIU finished 10-2 or 11-1, the ND loss would just look like ND couldn’t beat a pretty good team. An ND loss to a 7-5 or 6-6 NIU team becomes more of a shrug/must have been a bad day situation. I think the truth is somewhere between those two, but if it’s a binary choice, I feel like it’s more the latter than the former
Boring: Winning
Soaring: Quality Loss
Roaring: Bad Loss
This might have been scary with GaTechs qb 1 in the game, but echoing what everyone else has said, the defense down 3 starters plus depth and still being elite is remarkable.
I would put are playoff odds around 63% but that’s just off the top of my head, haven’t seen actual odds anywhere.
Ready for some weirdness against Navy, but also confident with Kiser and co having the experience to limit the option success.
‘I would put our playoff odds around 63% but that’s just off the top of my head, haven’t seen actual odds anywhere.’ I see what you did there. That’s actually a pretty funny way to mock the ridiculous saturated coverage of that topic, as you have all noted.
I watched College Game Day for the very first time all year, to see how they would cover our game, given we were the ESPN game (vice on NBC which they despise showcasing at all). Nothing, nada. Except for when the clown show was picking winners and they even just showed us for one second picked by all of the clowns.
So I agree with all hands about the exceptional bias.
This site is getting less functional for me. More recent articles aren’t showing up on the home page at all. First I had to click menu, then football to find the new ones, then they stopped showing up there. Then I clicked on archives and they’d show up, but not any more. I clicked on 18S Reads to find this one and the game preview.
Same for me. I found that I could click the refresh button and the new articles would show up.
Always refresh the page when it first loads, that’s what I do. WordPress sucks in that way.
It’s a cookie/cache issue from what I understand. I started using Incognito/Private browser on mobile and it works just as normal for me.
I don’t have any issues on my laptop using Chrome.
I was praying for relief from the constant playoff talk. The announcers talked playoffs constantly as a substitute for actually analyzing the game. E.g., they could have mentioned that the ND offensive line decided to take the rest of the afternoon off once it got to 24-7, and they could have mentioned that the GT coach was trying to get his QB killed at the end of the game so that they could score a relatively meaningless TD.
My prayers were not answered. Though, as one of my old ND roommates texted; “Your prayers weren’t answered, but God did grant you a Defense/”
I won’t get into a discussion about our team and playoff chances with anyone but an ND fan. Yes, the offense is average but, the D is top notch and would be in any conference. IMO. Try telling that to anyone who thinks Gameday is much watch TV. The SEC stuff, I answer with, “If the league is so good why do half its teams lose every week this time of year?” Why be serious debating with people who think an SEC team could give an NFL team a battle. I cheer for one team each week and against a few others. The haters get all but one team and here in the northeast, don’t even have a real favorite.
If this team wins out they absolutely deserve a playoff spot and when the dust settles, probably home field. Somehow though, I see us on the road in Miami first round.
Oh man, of the available options, I would sign up for @ Miami in the first round right freaking now. Ward is terrifying, but their defense is big bad and ND can at least slow down anybody, if not outright stop them.
Much rather Miami than someone like Texas or Ohio State or Oregon.
I’m just thinking of our last time there.
With this team, I would rather go against one of the best QBs in the country and a meh D, than vice versa. Passing attacks are the one thing I am confident we can shut down. Obviously with no BMo that takes a hit, but even without the best player on our team, I still trust out passing D more than anything else.
What’s even going on here, ESPN??