Undefeated Army faced its most talented opponent of 2024 on Saturday night in Yankee Stadium and the result was a bloodbath. In all aspects (well maybe not kicking field goals) Notre Dame dominated the action from the opening whistle to secure Marcus Freeman’s second straight 10-win season with the Irish.
Let’s recap the blowout win over Army.
QUARTERBACK: A
Outside of Riley Leonard trying to jump for a touchdown and getting stuffed a few times it was a nearly flawless performance from Riley Leonard who exited the game early with a handful of minutes remaining in the 3rd quarter. Just 3 incompletions with a couple scores through the air–it was easy work as the Irish running backs did the majority of the damage.
We were poised to see a lot of Steve Angeli but Army ate up most of the 4th quarter slowly moving the ball against Notre Dame’s emptied bench. That only allowed Angeli to throw 5 passes (completing 4 but missed an easy touchdown) in his action. I thought we might see Kenny Minchey but instead Angeli didn’t even throw a pass in the 4th quarter (Notre Dame’s ran only 1 play in the 4th quarter, the long touchdown run by Aneyas Williams).
RUNNING BACK: A+
This was frightening efficiency from Notre Dame’s running backs. I stopped tracking success rate in my old school way from the past but the eyeball test felt like this was well over 75% for the Irish. Maybe even higher outside of those rather silly runs up the middle near the end zone that didn’t go anywhere.
20 carries for 245 yards from Love, Price, and Williams. An average of 12.25 yards per carry!
WIDE RECEIVER: B+
Did we have a game with no drops? For the most part, the receivers were very wide open on the night and did their job well. It was certainly a low-stress affair. Looking over the box score, no receivers were targeted on 3rd down snaps–a product of only 5 total 3rd down attempts for Notre Dame in the entire game, and one of those was the attempted field goal before halftime.
TIGHT END: B+
I thought this might be a game where Mitchell Evans had a big game barreling through the Army secondary. However, just a couple targets went his way, although Evans caught both.
Had Angeli been able to make the connection in the end zone, Cooper Flanagan would be leading the team in touchdown receptions on just 5 overall catches in 2024. A missed opportunity.
OFFENSIVE LINE: A+
We’ve already covered the destruction given out by the Irish running game. Leonard was under pressure on dropbacks exactly one time, I believe? He was surrounded and about to take a sack but just got the ball out in time.
This is a good place to point out that Notre Dame only ran 47 plays on offense. It was the first time since the 2019 season that Notre Dame averaged over 9 yards per play on offense.
DEFENSIVE LINE: A+
Domination.
LINEBACKER: A+
Domination.
SECONDARY: A+
Domination.
For all the hype of Army’s offense, Notre Dame brought the pain and shut their scheme down violently and with impressive speed on defense. If this wasn’t the best performance against an academy offense it had to be way up there. Army had 2 sustained drives into the 4th quarter, the latter mostly against the Irish bench and even that was a turnover on downs result.
On Army’s other 7 drives before garbage time they gained 62 yards.
This might have been the best tackling game I’ve seen from Notre Dame in a long, long time. Not just physically stopping guys for no extra yardage but doing so with incredibly bad intentions and a high level of intensity. There were a couple chippy moments throughout but the message was clear: Notre Dame came to the Bronx not to eff around.
Although I will say, what was this gameplan from Army?
Running quarterback Bryson Daily 39 times is part of it. Army didn’t have any explosive plays of 10 yards or more until right before halftime (Daily promptly lost a fumble after a 19-yard gain) but they just kept giving the ball to him hoping for the best. For the #13 offense according to FEI to come out and with this gameplan was pretty bizarre. And to continue doing it late in the game, against Notre Dame’s 3rd-team defense, was pretty embarrassing.
NOTES:
Being +5.8 YPP is an absurd ass kicking, you guys. Nearly 40 minutes of possession and only 14 points for Army doesn’t seem like it could be possible but that’s academy offense for you.
The roughing the passer penalty on Jack Kiser is one of those calls all you can do is shake your head about. I was surprised that was called against Army of all teams, too. That was like the 6th hardest tackle Daily took on the night!
Notre Dame didn’t punt in the game. That was the first time since the 2023 opener in Dublin against Navy.
What was the verdict on these Shamrock Series uniforms? I really like this blue-gray shade and wouldn’t mind it being used semi-regularly. I was looking at other photos of the standard blue and kind of preferring this look. The shiny numbers, well, they weren’t very useful for identification purposes. It was cool to see nameplates, though. We are one step closer to putting them on all of the jerseys.
Blue-gray for the win?
Just under 32% of Notre Dame’s offensive snaps were of the explosive (10+ yards) variety.
How close do the Irish have to get for you to feel comfortable with an injured Mitch Jeter making a field goal against USC? I might refrain from kicking anything outside of 35 yards. If it’s 4th & 5+ yards from this area of the field perhaps it’s punt to win time.
Notre Dame was several close calls on interceptions away from making this a 60-point win and I firmly believe that.
Can you imagine this Army team making the playoffs? They are the only G5 team (along with Boise State) with 1-loss on the season now. The Broncos have to play whatever is left of the Oregon State program and then likely UNLV in the Mountain West Championship. Army faces UTSA and then Tulane in the AAC Championship. Remember, Army could conceivably go 12-1 with that AAC title, lose to Navy the following week, and still be locked in the no. 12 seed because the committee won’t re-rank after conference championship weekend.
Loved everything about the jerseys but the numbers. They could be Gothic font or gold but not both.
I’ve felt very anti-shiny jersey accents since the start of that fad. It takes away from the unique glory of the helmet shininess vs. the matte gold everything else. And it makes the gold pants look so weird when we wear them. I’m also a big fan of the blue-grey shade though. I hope we keep that around.
Hmmm, thanks as always.
1, I am with Tim Prister on the numbers, (1) they really need to be readable. (2) As for Football as a verb, “either gothic or gold, not both”… but even with just gold and normal style, I don’t think they would be readable.
2, Army is gonna beat Navy, just sayin’
Quite possibly re the jerseys. There were times it was so bad, I couldn’t even tell if the jersey had a single or a 2 digit number.
Props to the announcers. Clearly their spotter was effective because no delay in calling the players was noted.
This is a good game to point to to make a “time of possession is a meaningless stat” argument.
I thought the same thing.
A service academy is the only opponent who could double your time of possession and you (ND in this case) could double their total yards.
AP Poll Reflections (while “meaningless,” the AP Poll has shown a fair amount of similarity to the CFP rankings this year, and thus give some insight of what Tuesday might reveal):
There are 61 AP voters, each granting one point per a rank position. This allows us to get a sense of the average poll position, because if there was perfect agreement among all voters the breakdown would be:
This tells us, all voters have Oregon #1 (1525), and all but one voter have tOSU at #2 (1463). Texas (1395) is 8 votes off a consensus #3.
This is where things start to shake up.
Penn St. (1301) is 41 votes off of #4. While in reality, those votes could be spread around a bit, this is equivalent to 2/3s of the voters putting PSU at #5.
ND (1278) is only 3 votes short of a perfect #5 average. But since PSU has a bunch of votes lower than #4, this most likely means that there’s a good handful of voters who put ND at #4 (above Penn St.), but to end up with a #5 average, a good number would have to had ND at #6 (or lower).
Georgia (1242) at 22 votes above #6 shows that it has garnered votes above ND or PSU from 1/3 of the voters on average.
PSU lost 18 points from last week to this week. So roughly 1/3 of voters were willing to jump someone over PSU this week – I’d expect this to most likely be ND rather than Georgia in most cases given their respective accomplishments this week.
ND gained 87 points. And is only 23 points behind PSU – or 1/3 of a rank.
Georgia gained 129 points. They are only 36 points behind ND – or 1/2 of a rank.
Interestingly, this coming week we play a common opponent with PSU, and Georgia plays a common opponent with ND. We’ll see how much that actually motivates voters (our win against Purdue is already a better victory than PSU’s win against Purdue, though broadly, they were both blowout victories.)
RedditCFB posts it every week: https://x.com/redditcfb/status/1860817797506556031?s=46&t=2sUOtt17a2qIWXA43EjdvQ
Brian Fonseca’s got a slight beef
Fonseca’s ballot is a joke. When I look at teams that should be ranked ahead of ND it is something like: If both teams are playing in that 90% -100% range of their best football, questionable referee calls are eliminated, and it is a neutral field, who am I worried about. Fonseca has SMU, Boise St, Miami, TN and Penn St in front of us. I don’t think any of those teams are a worry and most of them we would beat on their home field.
The teams I worry about this season are Oregon, Ohio St, Georgia, and Texas. I think we would be in a fight against any of them, but the outcome would be up in the air. I was worried about Bama to until I watched what OU’s defense did to them.
Reece Davis ballot isn’t nearly as atrocious. However still shows favoritism to the SEC. David Jablonski seems to show favoritism to the BIG. Admittedly, it would be difficult to do this every week, because you have to watch a lot of football to get it right, vs just looking at box scores. I still haven’t seen a TX game this year, will probably watch vs aTm this next game.
Cool, never knew.
So does Reece Davis (noted Bama grad).
Love jumping over the Army defender at the goal line is a major highlight of the year! What an athlete.
To his credit, he said in the presser that his long TD run was his favorite play because it was a team-glory kind of play with everybody doing their job. But yeah, that leap will endure.
The long TD was definitely “teach tape” for the oline. Shrauth and Knapp took care of the playside tackle who stunted, and accounted for the playside LB and damn near a safety. Love had no defender until the safety rolled down at about 9 yards with a *slightly* bad angle, which is all he needed.
NDs outside zone blocking was dominant saturday: the army players didn’t have the athleticism to handle horizontal movement of the line with the vision and cut backs of the RBs. Loves other TD came on a gun sweep he cut up due to the front 7 overcommitting to the outside zone blocking. I appreciate when denbrock does commit-to-the-bit in the run game; they have inside zone, outside zone, power, pin and pull, duo. That’s enough subtlety to give love and price just a little extra gap they can spring. It really forces defenses to know their run fits, and ND different probing tools to exploit a certain defense. Both backs will punish you, I’m here for it
My favorite play of the game was the Love 14 yard TD run. By the time Love had taken one step with the ball, still 3 yards deep in the backfield the OL had blocked the play into a touchdown. Great read by Leonard, great blocks by the line and Evans, pretty easy work by Love to take it in.
https://youtu.be/_Govxxe5oRU?si=hH1VQ-Adjs3tM-Go&t=289
Concur. This is great to relook, I had kind of forgotten about it!
Two redshirt freshman, Shuler and Ausberry, lead the team with 8 and 7 tackles respectively. Nice to see.