I’m going to be honest: I expected to write something like this next week.

Next week is ND’s 8th straight game, on midterms week, against USC. I expected to get crushed. (I still do.) And then I thought I’d be writing about ND being at a crossroads under Marcus Freeman.

Guess it arrived a week early.

With ND’s season effectively over – they’d have to win out just to get to a New Year’s 6 game that I’m sure they’d lose anyway – Marcus Freeman has questions to answer.

Through all his hiccups – Marshall, Stanford, 10 men on the field – the one thing he hadn’t done was have his team get their ass handed to them. That’s what happened tonight against Louisville.

Let’s run down some things that sucked.

The offensive line

Notre Dame’s offensive line largely pushed around Ohio State for much of the game two weeks ago. Ever since then, they’ve been terrible. Blake Fisher has proven to be the latest lineman really good at committing backbreaking penalties. Joe Alt straight up got ran over on more than one occasion, but I’m sure Mel Kiper still has him as a top-10 pick, so that’s fine, I guess. Notre Dame had so many runs on which Louisville basically had to pick which guy knifing into the backfield was going to make a tackle that I lost count. They were atrocious. Again.

Less bad but still bad – the insistence on repeatedly sending Audric Estime up the middle after it had been shown not to work. Meanwhile, Jeremiyah Love was ripping the Cardinals apart more often than not. I’m not Mr. Shiny New Toy, but if one thing is working and the other is not, just try sticking with the thing that is working. Just once. Please.

Marist Liufau

Look, I hate disliking Notre Dame players. I really do. But I have utterly lost the ability to comprehend why this dude plays. All he does is miss tackles, whiff on blitzes, and commit disastrously stupid penalties. I refuse to believe Jaylen Sneed is worse. I refuse to believe Jaiden Ausberry is worse. I refuse to believe the stable of highly recruited linebackers on this roster can’t produce better results. Stop wasting a starting spot on this guy. Please.

The fact that Notre Dame had no choice but to bring out a freshman walk-on

The only good thing that happened to Notre Dame tonight was Jordan Faison popping early in the game. And it only happened because the other wide receivers on this roster are either so injured, so underwhelming, or both that ND had no choice but to toss a freshman walk-on who was brought here to play lacrosse onto the field.

Faison absolutely looked like he belonged in his brief cameo, catching a key third-down pass and then a touchdown – ND’s only touchdown that mattered, as a matter of fact. The fact that we never saw him again presumably means that his route tree is limited, as you’d expect from a freshman walk-on. But the fact that he did more in half a possession than most of the receivers on this roster have done all year is a glaring problem.

The honeymoon is well and truly over

Marshall and Stanford were disasters, but you could somewhat explain them away in retrospect by pointing to the quarterbacks who played in those games and their subsequent results. The 10-men thing was a debacle, but you could point to the fact that Notre Dame hadn’t been in position for something like that to matter late in a game against an elite team in many years.

You can’t explain this. Louisville is a fine team, probably capable of double-digit wins, that played its best football in the biggest moment they’ve had in some time. That they straight-up kicked Notre Dame’s ass tonight is an indictment of everything that led up to it. And with probably another butt-kicking in store next Saturday, Marcus Freeman is about to have a big, big problem.