Everything went wrong, but let’s power through to look at which advanced stats were bad, ugly, and terrible in Notre Dame’s loss to Miami. And instead of previewing Navy, who looks like a usual Midshipman team in advanced and traditional stats, let’s look at the validity of some hot takes from the blowout loss.

The Basics

Total yardage isn’t indicative of the difference between the performance on Saturday, but scoring opportunities certainly is. Notre Dame had just two scoring opportunities with first downs inside the Miami 40, a season low by far (there were six such chances against UGA). I wasn’t expecting this game to get into garbage time, and certainly not in the first half. But by both objective and subjective measures it feels like a pretty clear cutoff, with garbage time starting with Miami’s pick-six to make it 27-0 shortly before halftime. As a result, 44% of plays classify as garbage time.
Well, that was gross, and a good lesson in the unpredictability of college football. Nothing Miami or Notre Dame had done this season foreshadowed another massacre in Hard Rock Stadium. Yet that was exactly what unfolded, with the Canes dominating in every facet of the game. The Irish had everything click in a few big wins this season, and this was the inverse of the Michigan State, USC, and NC State games. Some days you are the windshield, some days you’re the bug.

Explosiveness

The Irish seemed to have a big-play advantage entering this game against an aggressive Miami defense that was boom or bust, with lots of TFL but also long runs surrendered. That didn’t happen, with zero runs of 12+ yards before garbage time for Notre Dame and just two explosive pass plays. The ND offensive line was dominated and Brandon Wimbush played poorly – the two pieces I’d argue are most critical to the Irish in winning this game. It’s bizarre to me that the Notre Dame rushing attack has been virtually unstoppable in eight wins and complete bottled up in two losses with seemingly no middle ground, but here we are.

Nothing worked offensively. The coaching was bad, the execution was poor, and things snowballed very quickly in a hostile environment. Monday morning quarterbacking a blowout loss is the easiest of things, because we all watched nothing succeed and our minds immediately fill with infinite possibilities of things that at least have the possibility of breaking through. But to pinpoint one area – passing, blocking, play-calling – is impossible in a thorough beating like this.

The best one can do for optimism is to point out that after a somewhat similar but less extreme struggle against Georgia, the offense rebounded pretty well. Just as young defensive backs struggled immensely last year and vastly improved in 2017 in part because of that experience, we can hope that these hardships do the same for Wimbush and many young offensive players.

Efficiency

This game reiterated an obvious point Irish fans hoped didn’t apply to the 2017 team: you cannot be a great team without balance. The Notre Dame passing game looked inconsistent all year – some games flashing immense promise, and in others floundering for quarters at a time (or games against tough defenses). In two games now we’ve seen what a strong defense can do to an imbalanced offense – shut down the run and Chip Long’s offense to play left-handed and throw to win.

It’s sad because the playoff potential was/maybe still is there. If you Frankenstein the pieces of this offense and defense all firing together on all cylinders at the same time – Wimbush’s MSU or Wake Forest passing with the run game against USC and defense against NC State, let’s say – it’s a playoff team. Unfortunately that consistent excellence has eluded this team, and on Saturday is was a domino effect with failure in one area begetting more bad things.

The defensive performance was one example of that ripple effect. They put on a poor but not as miserable performance as the offense, and were constantly put in poor field positions due to turnovers and offensive ineptitude. The Canes averaged about 30 yards per possession – an average number – yet were gifted an average starting field position of their own 43 yard line. It’s hard to bend but don’t break when there’s no room to bend.

That’s not to minimize the poor things displayed on Saturday. The honeymoon period with Mike Elko on message boards and beyond probably ended over the last two weeks, cemented by Malik Rosier draws up the middle. The Irish linebackers had a particularly poor game, exploited in pass coverage and slow to diagnose and react to runs. It’s a unit that is still much improved, but has dropped from a top-10 to 15 defense in S&P+ to just top-25ish after the last two weeks.

Finishing Scoring Opportunities, Field Position, and Turnovers

The turnovers and field position went hand in hand in this game – Miami’s average starting field position was an incredible 23 yards better than Notre Dame’s (starting at their own 20). Looking at historical data, teams that have an advantage of 20+ yards in average starting field position win 97% of the time and on average outscore their opponents by 32 points. Hey, that matches up eerily well to Saturday’s game!

It could have been even worse, somehow, because the Irish defense did stiffen up and hold the Hurricanes offense to a few field goals (and a miss) when some of the four Notre Dame turnovers had given Miami generous field position. About the only upside is that the Irish scoring eight points in their one red zone trip will bump up their average points per visit – hurray!

The Irish could not afford to lose the turnover battle (or really, any of the five factors categories) and expect to win without countering with dominance in another area. That, uh, didn’t happen. By the advanced stats the Canes did get some turnover luck in this one, but they also created those opportunities pretty systematically with a ton of pressure/sacks and pass deflections. In all of our misery it’s worth acknowledging just how well Miami executed – virtually mistake and penalty free (as called), with strong efficiency and explosiveness numbers across the board.

On to Navy the Big Picture

The hot take machines started firing up around eight minutes into last Saturday’s action, so let’s take a minute to reflect on the big picture here:

The Notre Dame gameplan was horrible, BK defaults back to the pass: After the first quarter I saw lots of stats thrown out already about run/pass splits, but there’s not a huge difference (in very small sample sizes) between the start of the Miami game and USC or NC State, which most folks seemed fine with. The game plan obviously bombed, but assuming that going run-heavy or that different types of runs would have done the job is some confirmation bias at its best.

Notre Dame always noshows in big games: There are definitely some high profile defeats in recent program history – 2012 Alabama, a beating at USC during the late 2014 collapse, and all of the 2006 losses if you want to go back that far. But generally the Kelly era has been characterized by close, heartbreaking losses – both to teams that shouldn’t be close and coming up just short in the big-game showdowns like Clemson, FSU, Stanford 2015, or UGA earlier this year. This type of beat down hasn’t been common over the last eight years, although that doesn’t make it sting any less.

This shows how far away Notre Dame is from competing for a national title: This one has some truth in it – great teams don’t get blown out. On the always excellent Rakes Report last week, Chris Wilson and Brian Fremeau (creator of FEI) talked about how top-5 teams consistently put up huge average margins of victory. These margins come from both blowing out a lot of teams and not losing by much when they lose. Strangely, this season has included both blowouts of bad and good teams (a great sign) and now a blowout loss on the road (a bad sign).

Recent history though, doesn’t suggest that means you are a galaxy away from playoff contention. UGA is clearly very good and everything went off the rails at Auburn last week – no one is piling dirt on the Bulldog and Kirby Smart’s grave (yet). Ohio State has been a top-3 program since Urban Meyer’s arrival, but somehow got housed in Iowa City a few weeks ago (somehow allowing Iowa to put up 55 with the 108th ranked offense in S&P+ against the #14 Buckeye defense). They also lost 31-0 to Clemson on the biggest of stages, the CFP, to close 2016.

Oklahoma was rolled at home last season by Ohio State, and they’ve bounced back nicely. Dabo Swinney’s magical run at Clemson was preceded by a 51-14 loss at home to FSU in a top-5 matchup in 2013. Bad matchups happen, things can snowball, and confidence and mental focus can plummet off a cliff with 18-22 year old college athletes. It doesn’t necessarily spell doom to a bounce-back season, just playoff hopes.

Fire Kelly! This one isn’t as common, but it could grow with a struggle in either of the last two games. Along with the early success of 2017 came the slow creep of increasing expectations, so it’s helpful to remember what most fans thought a good season would look like before demolitions of a few rivals and a close loss to a very good SEC team. In this piece before the season I looked at the program quality and W-L record for Brian Kelly, and came to the following conclusion:

“After finishing 29thin F+ last season, combined with performances below the top-25 level in three of the past four years, Kelly needs to show strong improvement to argue he’s made changes that are correcting the program’s course back to a top 10 (or near) level. A top 10-15 performance would represent a step in the right direction, and unless lightning strikes twice, will lead to enough wins that Kelly should be back. Any worse than top-15 in program quality, and that’s where lucky with wins and losses will determine Kelly’s fate.”

As of today, the Irish remain a top-15 and borderline top-10 team, per both human polls and advanced stats systems like S&P+, FEI, and Massey-Peabody. It’s been a strong bounce-back season from 4-8 and a finish of 29th in F/+ so far, with both coordinator hires looking like upgrades, although it will take time to see to what magnitude Long and Elko can elevate the program. There’s still two games left for things to change – a slide to 8-4 would put the hot-seat conversation back in play, or a 10-2 finish with a major bowl win could continue the momentum that has been building (with some setbacks) in 2017.

There’s still reasonable arguments you can make on two sides of the debate – one would be that this could be Kelly’s fourth top-10 caliber team in eight seasons, which is far better than any recent predecessor and hardly justifies a coaching change (which even at powerhouse schools, history would suggest are mostly crapshoots). On the other  hand, you could argue that Kelly has failed to field a top-5 team now in eight seasons (or arguably one), and that ceiling isn’t cutting it.