The dominant win over USF featured an efficiency massacre, defensive disruption from unlikely sources, and a nearly 30-yard per possession field position advantage for Notre Dame. This game reached garbage time at the half, and the Bulls failed to convert a single successful play through the air or on a passing down.

Confused? Check out this handy advanced stats glossary here or reach out in the comments.

Even using Bill Connelly’s recently expanded versions of garbage time, the entire second half is taken out of the numbers below, with USF failing to stay within 28 points in the 3rd quarter and beyond. That was 51% of the plays in the game, but it’s worth noting even in the second half the Irish outgained the Bulls by 2.2 yards per play.

Explosiveness

There are still a lot of nuanced questions to answer about this Irish team, but a lot of Saturdays are simply going to come down to Notre Dame dominating in the trenches, which they should do every week with one obvious exception. The Irish offense wasn’t super explosive, but it mattered very little with obscenely efficient performances on both sides of the ball. The USF passing game may be one of the worst in FBS, but Jeff Scott and Charlie Weis Jr. are highly regarded offensive minds, and Clark Lea’s defense gave up zero successful pass plays and shut out the Bulls on passing downs.

For a second consecutive week, the Irish passing offense wasn’t super aggressive downfield. It was completely unnecessary against South Florida, but to get nitpicky it’s the one element of the offense that would be encouraging to unlock moving forward, especially given the state of the wide receiver room. Book threw just one first-half pass that had over 15 “air yards”, or distance traveled beyond the line of scrimmage, after just two of those passes last week against Duke.

Still, Tommy Rees did a nice job leveraging play-action and a defense that had to sell out to stop the run to create easy throws for Book. It’s not apple to apples, but the foundation of NFL analytics right now is simply that play action is value-added, whether you’ve set up and established the run or not. With the apparent strength of the Irish run game, ideally this takes more of the offensive burden off Book’s shoulders, and allows him some easy low-risk / high-reward throws.

Defensively, the Irish defense held USF to just two gains of 10+ yards in 20 plays in the first half, forcing five three-and-outs in six first-half possessions. Elusive RB Johnny Ford broke one long run with a Shaun Crawford slip, but otherwise, the Bulls were almost shut out of explosive plays (12+ yard runs, 16+ yard passes) as well.

The Irish continue to be far more disruptive than their opponents, and it’s come from all levels of the defense. Notre Dame is tied for second nationally with 12 pass breakups, and has been unlucky not to find an interception from them- every other team with 11 or more has at least two picks. In statistics that would have seemed unbelievable even a month ago, Clarence Lewis had four havoc plays (1 TFL / 3 PBU), Jack Kiser two, and Alexander Ehrensberger two more including a sack.

Efficiency

While there weren’t bundles of highlight plays, it was a clinic offensively in staying on schedule. The Irish had just five passing downs in 41 first-half plays and had an average 3rd down distance of 3.25 yards to gain. Notre Dame was successful on 7 of 11 first down runs with an average gain of 7.6 yards per carry, which keep the playbook extremely open.

Without writing conclusions in ink after USF and Duke, the offensive line continues to look strong in areas that were it’s Achilles heel a season ago. The Irish have been near-perfect in power run situations (3rd or 4th down and 2 yards or fewer to go), and have reduced their stuffed runs significantly. Notre Dame had no gain or a negative play on 19.2% of runs in 2019 but sit at just 13.6% in this young season.

In contrast, the average 3rd down for USF had 10.2 yards to gain, and the Bulls had just one first down in the first half. USF averaged 0.86 yards per pass attempt before garbage time and 4.15 yards per rush, with terrible efficiency. There are not many more descriptive statistics to add when there’s domination like this, so consider it a plug for a lifetime contract for Clark Lea.

Finishing Drives, Field Position, & Turnovers

The scoring chances show the easy dominance of the half of competitive play – Notre Dame created a scoring chance on every single drive, USF had a single opportunity and five three-and-outs. The Irish were excellent converting those chances into touchdowns, settling for just one field goal which Jonathan Doerer uncharacteristically missed (again, timed well – get them out now!). In garbage time USF did create a few more scoring chances but remained scoreless (and credit to Scott and Weis Jr. for not kicking a coward field goal, Dino Babers-style).

The first half field position battle was also a total mismatch – with South Florida’s punting woes and inability to move the ball, the average starting field position for the ND offense was at midfield! Meanwhile, the Bulls’ best starting spot at the half was their own 25, with an average drive starting at their own 20-yard line.

Technically zero turnovers in this game, although the botched snaps by the USF punt team could easily qualify. It’s surprising that the Irish have put the ball on the ground this often after a few seasons in a row of excellent ball security, and Notre Dame was lucky to recover both and this game is the right time for a learning opportunity. As mentioned above the Notre Dame secondary is now overdue for some interceptions, and next week at Wake Forest hopefully will provide that chance.

A quick aside about early advanced stats this season – if you’ve been paying attention to SP+ ratings or another system, there’s been some wild swings. These usually take place early in the season but are likely to be even more dramatic now with a shorter season and virtually no meaningful non-conference games. Opponent adjustments will be more challenging than usual as power five conferences operate essentially as their own bubbles, so as the season advances more space will be devoted to looking at ranks within the ACC as a whole.

So avoid reading too much into early returns, which exposes some of the limitations of these rankings. One key one is that SP+ and other systems, while adjusting for opponents, love to reward dominance no matter the quality of opponent. A week ago Pittsburgh surged by dominating Austin Peay, and Georgia Tech’s Defensive SP+ rating was on par with Notre Dame after a good week against FSU. With enough conference games these adjustments will find themselves, but right now they are just trying to keep up.