The thought crossed my mind at some point tonight – maybe it was around the 6th time Marcel Reed threw to a wide open receiver 20 yards downfield – that in the new college football world that seems so much like the NFL, maybe the “post-Super Bowl hangover” phenomenon you hear so much about in the pros might now be making its way to the college game. With the expanded playoff and the shorter offseason, it seems like a reasonable thought.

If that’s so, Notre Dame is certainly making a great case for itself as the first example of that theory after Saturday’s 41-40 loss to Texas A&M effectively ended its College Football Playoff chances.*

* Never say never and all that, but even if ND won 10 games in a row, which is hard enough to do, it just does not seem feasible to me that enough teams are going to trip over their own cranks to allow a two-loss team without a ranked win into the field, not with the new “enhanced metrics,” whatever those are, that were put in place this year to reward strength of schedule, of which ND’s in 2025 seems to be less than stellar. I suppose you can’t rule out someone like USC making a name for itself later in the season and strengthening a hypothetical Irish win there, but I think it might take two someones doing it for this to be a discussion and I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Why did this happen? Well, the whole idea behind these instant reactions is I haven’t had any time to let the game breathe, so Eric will likely have better answers for you tomorrow, but here are a few possible reasons:

It’s too early to condemn Chris Ash – but it’s not looking good

The Chris Ash hire at defensive coordinator seemed a bit curious at the time, but since Marcus Freeman hadn’t flat-out missed on an assistant hire of any stripe since taking over the ND job (the possible exception was Gerad Parker and time constraints were a factor there), the majority of the college football world mostly just shrugged their shoulders and said, more or less, “Well, they’ve got a boatload of talent; he can’t really screw this up, can he?”

It turns out, maybe he can. Marcel Reed is a pain in the ass to defend, but he shouldn’t be able to rip off nearly 300 passing yards in a half against a defense as talented as this one. Through two games, the defense has rarely gotten serious pressure on the quarterback, doesn’t seem to be able to stop opponents from completing passes downfield, and isn’t all that great at tackling (the dual whiff by Jalen Stroman and Christian Gray on the Aggies’ first touchdown was a massive groaner). The linebacking crew entered the season as one of the most well-thought-of in the country; have any of them made a truly game-wrecking play yet?

There were some bad breaks along the way tonight – Leonard Moore leaving for a drive with an injury gave strong “2018 CFP” flashbacks as A&M immediately tossed its playbook out the window and threw at his replacements for huge gains twice in a row, and the targeting penalty on Adon Shuler was utterly reprehensible (though completely expected given the targeting rule seems to default to “ND hit/targeting, ND getting hit/not targeting”) – but if you score 40 points in a game, you should win every single time. Period. The defense only forced one turnover and didn’t get enough big stops. It’s really that simple. Even more infuriating is the 13 penalties committed by A&M, many of them on offense. And they still dropped 41 on Notre Dame.

It’s not necessarily too late for Ash. Recall that Freeman himself had two quite bad showings back-to-back to open his single year at DC for ND. But with CFP hopes all but gone, it’s going to be very hard for Ash to win back this fan base’s trust, whatever that may mean to him or ND.

Special teams…Sigh

With things looking bad early on, I commented on our Discord channel that there wasn’t one thing I felt great about with this team. I quickly caught myself and said the special teams units hadn’t screwed anything up. (There was a blocked-punt TD tonight! Remember that?)

So what happened later was probably my fault.

I do feel bad for Tyler Buchner, who probably didn’t want to leave Notre Dame in the first place but had to – he was recruited over, after all – then came back and has by all accounts done everything right as a teammate since. I’m sure no one but him in that locker room is putting the slightest bit of blame on him for this defeat, but…man. He’s been holding long enough to catch that snap. And of course, on top of that, he had an open receiver after picking up the ball and – as he’s done his whole career – threw a laser instead of putting any touch on the ball.

Now, granted, even with a PAT, had everything else played out the same way, A&M may have decided to go for two and the win after the touchdown, and do you have any faith ND would’ve stopped them? Still, though, you hate that they never had to make that decision thanks to a totally preventable special teams miscue.

The offense seems – mostly – cured, if that helps at all

Whatever the hell was going on for much of the game against Miami was not as big of an issue tonight for the Irish offense. There were a couple of missed blocking assignments, but the offensive line largely did enough to win, consistently giving CJ Carr time to throw. They didn’t run-block that well, but did so at the biggest moments; had ND won, Freeman’s successful decision to go on 4th and 1 on the Irish’s final real drive, rather than kick a go-ahead field goal, would’ve felt like a remarkable statement of intent rather than a footnote.

As I said above, they dropped 40 points on a good (or, at minimum, very talented) defensive team. It should have been enough.

It is hard to come away anything but extremely optimistic about Carr, who was very good in Miami given what he was facing (the Canes might just be really really good after pounding South Florida today) and even better tonight. He made a successful check at the line that resulted in a Jadarian Price touchdown. His decisions were mostly very good – a terrible pick and the silly clapping miscue at the end of the first half excepted – and his throws were more often than not right where they needed to be. There is obviously much to look forward to.

Is this Freeman’s biggest test?

But right now it feels like it was all for naught. The Irish season feels remarkably empty from here, because there’s essentially nothing they, by themselves, can do to salvage a successful season. It will take an awful lot of help I don’t think is coming to end up in anything but a game like the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

I know the chatter is – and has been for some time – that the Irish feel like 2026 might really be their year and that this might come off as more of a building season than the second surge to the top than was hoped, but that doesn’t mean a lot at the moment. For a team that was on the doorstep of immortality a scant eight months ago, it’s very dispiriting to feel like this.

I suppose, in its way, this might end up being Freeman’s truest test yet as a leader. Last year, he had to get his team to respond to a horrifying loss knowing they couldn’t afford another slip-up. This year, he faces the task of motivating a wounded team that entered the year with high expectations and, despite its flaws, was really close to an impressive 2-0 start and a pretty easy path to a CFP bye. Now he needs to figure out how to keep that same team going hard when there’s almost certainly no real reward waiting at the end for them if they do.