Last season, for whatever reason, Notre Dame did not threaten the perimeter much in running plays. The biggest “stretch” of the outside, in my opinion, was probably the “give” option of power-read or inverted-veer that was ran a fair bit. Things will be different this season for the Irish. Chip Long will be using a gap/zone [...]
In 1988, a third year coach edged his team to a national championship led by a brutalizing rushing attack. He employed an option-based running attack with dynamic athletes at fullback, running-back, and especially the quarterback. He was blessed to have in his corner such talents as Bobby Daugherty, Kenneth Goldsmith, Richie Harris, and Patrick Baynes. [...]
The topic of interest for most Irish fans is likely the Run Pass Option (RPO) of Chip Long. They are exciting: you can throw a 20 yard pass on a running play; but also divisive: there can be decisions to throw while having a triple team at the line of scrimmage. Ian Boyd wrote a nice [...]
“So those will be some new things, but at the end of the day, we're not going to change the entire offense and teach a new system to this group.” - Brian Kelly in December. However, last Saturday had little resemblance to Kelly's offense of last year. Regardless of what Brian Kelly and Chip Long choose [...]
Remember in 2015 when Notre Dame played a scrappy Wake Forest team? At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the Demon Deacon defense. Of course now that Mike Elko is Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator that 2015 match up becomes more intriguing. In this edition of Iso Cam, we’ll take a look at the [...]
Our 18Stripes colleagues do a fantastic job breaking down football film, so we figured we'd take a shot at explaining a few of the more interesting lacrosse plays fans will witness this season. We will call these segments Lacrosse Playbook since all the other good names were taken. Joe Keegan (twitter: @joekeegs) wrote a fantastic piece [...]
From the second half of the UNC game onward, the Irish have found their stride on offense. In the last few games, Mike Brey has favored a lineup featuring Bonzie Colson has the lone big man. Since the change in the starting lineup, ND's offense has been humming. The Irish offense scored over 80 points against [...]
Notre Dame recently hired Chip Long, the first-time playcaller from Memphis, to be the offensive coordinator for Notre Dame. Most speculated that the only reason that Notre Dame would force out Mike Denbrock is if Brian Kelly is going to take direct control of play calling and direction of the offense, however it is now [...]
There was a time during the 2016 pre-season where I was sure this unit was going to do good things. Many were down on the defensive line overall, and particularly at certain spots. I thought they’d surprise and overachieve. I was way off. If you are depressed or in a bad mood please do not [...]
Over the holiday season, I took on a little project. I decided I would take a look at the scheme incoming Notre Dame defensive coordinator Mike Elko employs. I charted 111 defensive plays from games against Clemson, FSU and Temple. Through this I was able to get a good sense of how Elko coordinates a [...]
Mike Brey's Notre Dame program has always hung its hat on highly efficient offenses. This year appears to be no different. The Irish are currently the 8th most efficient offense in the nation per KenPom. Where the Irish have struggled is on the defensive end. Due to combination of the lack of athleticism, a lack [...]
DeShone Kizer has been a bit of an enigma this year. At times, he has looked like a sure fire first round NFL draft pick, big, strong, athletic, confident, decisive, accurate. Other times he has been inconsistent, indecisive and struggled with accuracy. The ups and downs in his play are due to a variety of [...]
Game one of the service academy doubleheader is in the books and it wasn’t pretty. The Irish will look for redemption on Saturday in the Shamrock Series game against Army. Last week we went through the basics of Navy’s triple option offense. At a high level, both Navy and Army run very similar offenses. Navy [...]
I’ll cut right to the chase – the defense was bad on Saturday. Really bad. The substitution penalty and the decision to kick the field goal probably cost Notre Dame the game against Navy, but the defense was absolutely brutal. This is a strange thing to write because the defense played so well against Georgia [...]
For large portions of the year the offensive play calling for Notre Dame has been inconsistent and at times downright puzzling. It’s difficult to pick out a unifying concept or a core philosophy in the way that the Irish call plays. In fact, one could almost envision the Notre Dame play calling process to be [...]
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