Is it just me, or was this the first game of the season that had real 2024 vibes?

Notre Dame tripped over itself a few times early Saturday, and we had a good old-fashioned ref show late in the first half (I’ll leave discussion of that to the comments), but things calmed down after halftime and the Irish dispatched NC State 36-7 to set up the latest Game of the Season for the team next week when USC comes in.

Some quick thoughts about this game:

Is the defense fixed?

While the offenses ND has played since Miami and A&M aren’t those caliber of units, the stats tell us that they’re still pretty good. But for the third straight week, the Irish have made the opposite side look very bad.

It was another game of supreme confidence, guys in the right spots, and athletes making plays on the defensive side. Boubacar Traore was a menace, the linebackers made their presences felt for the second straight week, and the secondary was again, mostly, rock-solid. More often than not, ND put CJ Bailey in a position where he had to make great throws to get things done. With one notable exception, he did not.

When Chris Ash took over as defensive coordinator, conventional wisdom was that there was a very high floor for him simply because ND had too much talent to screw up. The Irish tested that theory early in the season, but that talent has shown far more of late. There are no Rylie Mills/Howard Cross level defensive tackles on this squad, and against the truly elite that is bound to cause problems, but the rest of that side of the ball is loaded, and for the last few weeks, they’ve started to look like it.

And speaking of making a guy beat you…

NC State sold out to stop the run today, and they were somewhat successful at it (see below). They did it because they were daring CJ Carr to step up to the challenge.

All Carr did in response was throw for 342 yards on 31 attempts, with no ‘real’ turnovers (the interception in the end zone came on fourth down, and I’ll be charitable and say it maybe should not have counted anyway). And that was despite looking, for most of the game, as bad as he’s looked in over a month.

Carr got a lot of help from Eli Raridon, who looked every bit the inheritor of the Tight End U moniker, going for 108 yards.

Will Pauling also hit the century mark at 105 despite going missing for large chunks of the game (we never knew why, thanks NBC!); in his stead, we got a nice dose of KK Smith, who in his first significant action certainly looked the part.

When the Irish are disjointed offensively, it always seems like merely a matter of time until Carr snaps into form and things start humming again, and that was true again today.

The new issue? Short-yardage runs

Of course, no team is allowed to be problem-free, least of all Notre Dame, so now there’s a new bogeyman for fans to worry about – and it’s short-yardage running.

This may or may not just be a thing with offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock; a cursory Google search didn’t turn up any hard numbers, but the 2015 offense he called plays for was known for big chunk plays, and my memory is they also had major issues on short-yardage conversions. (You might recall the infamous Stanford game where ND gained something like 9 yards per play and still managed to lose, in part because of a lack of red-zone touchdowns.)

Last year, he had a cheat code in Riley Leonard. CJ Carr, as we’ve been repeatedly reminded by broadcasters this year, is not Leonard as a runner, so that removed that code from Denbrock’s play sheet. So now we’re back to having these problems, despite the presences of Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, both of whom were stuffed in those situations during today’s game. Those struggles led to this game being in doubt longer than it ought to have been. The Irish actually converted a higher percentage of third-and-longs than third-and-shorts, which seems like a tough needle to thread.

Is it a scheme issue? A mentality issue? Who knows. But with the ND defense now seemingly doing better, restless Irish fans now turn to this as the topic that no doubt will be beaten into the ground over the next week.

Kicker will continue to be a question mark

To be clear, all due credit to Noah Burnette for knocking through a 48-yard field goal to end the first half. He is actually perfect in limited action, so this isn’t remotely a knock on him.

But just to be safe, next year’s grad transfer kicker, assuming there is one…please do not wear #98. Because apparently when you do at this school as a kicker, you deal with injuries all season long. I suspect the uncertainty of Burnette’s health had something to do with Marcus Freeman’s bordering-on-overaggression on fourth down in the red zone today, although who knows, maybe he really is just the adult form of that softball player meme “Never Bunt Hit Dingers.”

Erik Schmidt has been exactly what you want as a kickoff guy, though, so that’s fun.

Just for fun because I have nowhere else to put it, Marty Biagi’s bag of tricks simply has no bottom (we didn’t know it was Tyler Buchner until after the play; thanks again, NBC!)

The playoff continues

This is the 2nd year in a row the Irish are essentially in a regular-season playoff from September on. So far, for the 2nd year in a row they have responded well. Next week, of course, will be the big test. USC has one of the top offenses in the country and (crosses fingers) will be coming in ranked. There should be yards available on offense, as is typical of the Lincoln Riley Trojans. Hope we have good things to discuss then.

See you here next week.