A very wise man once said, “You can either run from your past, or learn from it.”

Alright, fine. It was Rafiki in The Lion King. But it still applies to Notre Dame, and the Irish performed far better in week two than in week one, downing Nevada 39-10. It remains to be seen whether ND actually learned enough from the week-one loss – that will be seen next week – but at least the Irish looked the part of a very good team in the second and third quarters of today’s win.

WatchND highlights:

Kizer continues to be good

To say the Irish ran a vanilla offense today would be an understatement. DeShone Kizer wasn’t asked to do a heck of a lot, and he didn’t need to. But what he did do was good. He threw just three incompletions and was on the money on almost every throw, with the glaring exception of the interception he threw, a pass that could’ve been an easy touchdown to Kevin Stepherson if Kizer hadn’t lofted it far too much.

However, Kizer bounced back from that and did what he does otherwise: Look the part of a pro quarterback. He moved the sticks when needed with un-sexy but very effective third down dump-off throws, and ran well enough. He was, as always, in total command.

And hey, we even got to see Malik Zaire. And he played pretty well too. Nice to see for him after last week’s cruddy showing, and hopefully it’ll keep him fired up in case he is needed later in the season.

The defense played better, but: Another injury

It’s more or less impossible to take much from the way ND’s defense performed against Nevada, but after last week’s abomination, the fact that ND was shutting out anyone well into the second half was nice to see. Nevada averaged only 3.3 yards per rushing attempt, a major improvement. Anecdotally, there were far fewer horrendous missed tackles. Nevada did post 300 yards, but a good chunk of it came in garbage time.

Of course, this being ND, it couldn’t be that simple. The Irish lost Shaun Crawford for the season – again – with a torn Achilles sustained while breaking up a pass (originally ruled a fumble). Crawford was supposed to play a lot last year before blowing out his knee. This really sucks for a kid who is clearly well-liked by his teammates based on the way they swarmed him after he came off the field. This means a lot more of Nick Coleman, who clearly needs to improve to get to the level he needs to be.

Let’s fix those penalties

ND’s final penalty total – nine for 94 yards – wasn’t that excessive, but man, that first half was ugly. It seemed like every time the Irish did something good, a flag came out. A couple of them were really dumb penalties, like the roughing-the-passer that wiped out an interception.

Twice ND was whistled for offensive pass interference on pick plays. Both calls were correct, but given that Pitt got away with a crazy-blatant OPI for a TD earlier Saturday against Penn State, and given our history with this call, I’m starting to wonder if that page of the rule book is just ripped out for every game that doesn’t involve us.

Bitter sarcasm aside, nine penalties won’t cut it against teams the Irish can’t just out-talent.

Video of the week

I liked the idea of finishing last week’s sad wrap-up with a good play. I’m going to keep that up with the good reviews as well. For this week’s video, I’m picking this awesome catch-and-run by Equanimeous St. Brown in the first quarter. (Probably would’ve gone with Jarron Jones’ pick, but there’s no video of that yet.) It’s been really fun to watch this guy through two weeks. He’ll need to be even better next week.