Notre Dame won a game Saturday against Louisville, 12-7. At least, I think they won. It can be hard to see sometimes on a day where Clemson – the one measure of this season – utterly blowtorched Georgia Tech 73-7 and invited some (more) pessimistic thoughts about whether the Irish can hang in when the teams play in three weeks.

However, the day wasn’t completely without positives. (Again, I think.) I tried to find a few.

Situational football

One good thing I observed today was pretty high-level situational play from Notre Dame in the second half. The Irish ran nearly eight minutes off the clock to end the game, coming up with clutch third-down conversions time after time. (Kyren Williams was good all day, but especially so on that final drive.)

Ian Book’s touchdown, which proved to be the game-winner, was another example of good situational play. Rather than panic out of frustration that things weren’t coming a bit easier (*cough*fakefieldgoal*cough*), Book saw an opening and created a little something for himself. Book wasn’t always very good today, but he made a nice play there.

And, of course, on defense the Irish were mostly solid as usual. Louisville had one drive where it pretty much ate Clark Lea’s lunch, but before and after that there wasn’t much damage done. Seven points is always a good number to allow.

We learned a new rule

If you didn’t know blocking wasn’t permitted on an onside kick prior to the ball going 10 yards, congrats: You’re qualified to be an 18 Stripes postgame recapper. I sure as heck didn’t know that. Now that we know the rule, we know it was applied correctly on Louisville’s surprise-but-maybe-it-shouldn’t-have-been-a-surprise onside kick in the third quarter with Louisville already ahead 7-6. But it was pretty freaking lucky that it was, because I suspect that play was more likely than not to work out for the Cardinals even without that block.

The defensive line didn’t make things easy on Louisville

I have no particular evidence for this, but it felt like ND’s defensive line had a pretty solid game. Louisville wasn’t able to get much of anything going up the middle in the run game, and the Irish stretched plays out fairly effectively and didn’t allow Malik Cunningham a ton of time to throw. (Now, the secondary, that might be a slightly different story; far too many passes that looked wounded duck-y were completed for my taste.)

Seriously, though, Kyren Williams is awesome

Not much more needed here. Kyren Williams pretty much makes the most he can make out of almost every carry he takes. It’s pretty terrific to watch. And if you weren’t counting, he can be a bell-cow, too. His 25th carry of the game – that’s a lot for a college running back these days – was the game-clincher on 3rd and 5 that saw him make a couple of great cuts and get loose for a big gain.

This one wasn’t pretty. I don’t have a laundry list of positives. Brendan’s Win Probability Matrix is going to give us something like a 25 percent chance to beat Clemson when he publishes it later this week. That’s about 23 more than I’d give us. But, hey, we don’t have to play Clemson next week. We have to play Pittsburgh. Hopefully I’ll have a more fun recap to write after that one.