Notre Dame couldn’t stop North Carolina and they lost one of their best defensive players to a targeting call in the second quarter. Deep trouble, right?

Clark Lea laughs in the face of deep trouble. Notre Dame allowed 3 points in the final 3 quarters Friday and downed North Carolina, 31-17. It won’t go down as ND’s highlight win of the season, but it showed the program’s strengths maybe as well as any of them.

Highlights:

The defense. Oh my goodness, the defense

When Lea gets hired as a head coach someday, it will be a sad day in South Bend, but all he needs to do to win over his new fan base will be to show them the footage of this game. After North Carolina, one of the most ballyhooed offenses in the country, scored 14 points (essentially on Tariq Bracy) to start the game, they managed three more after that, and zero in the second half. Not once did they seriously threaten to score in the second half.

They took two running backs each averaging over 100 yards per game – Michael Carter and Javonte Williams – and held them to 85 in total. The great Sam Howell had 213 yards of total offense. ND’s defensive line got in Howell’s face with regularity, more than contained the run, and held Mack Brown to his lowest scoring total as North Carolina’s head coach since November 8, 1997.

(Alright, I’m cheating a bit with that last one since Brown wasn’t Carolina’s coach between 1997 and 2019. It still sounded cool, didn’t it?)

Sometimes you get a defense that is far more than the sum of its parts. This is one of them. (I’m still trying to figure out how the Irish secondary in particular continues to do this; on paper, they have no right to be pulling this off.) The depth, effort and football savvy on that side of the ball is something to behold.

Ian Book was feeling himself

On a day Ian Book moved into a tie for all-time wins by a Notre Dame quarterback (!!), he got extremely comfortable amidst chaos. Maybe a little too comfortable. After miraculously saving a bad snap by Zeke Correll (you knew there would be 1 or 2 of those, didn’t you?) and ensuing bum-rush by the Carolina D-line by turning it into a touchdown pass, Book didn’t stop there. He busted out not one, but two Patrick Mahomes-ish forward flip passes, the second of which may have violated some laws of physics.

Book also broke Brady Quinn’s school record for consecutive pass attempts without an interception. Anyone waiting for whatever magic stuff the senior QB got a hold of a month ago to evaporate, keep on waiting, because he’s doing some special things. This team is his to a degree I’m not sure has been the case at Notre Dame in many, many years.

Case in point: Coaches are even delivering metaphorical hand-slaps to anyone who slights Book.

A battered O-line holds up fairly well

It was a little jarring to the psyche when it came out that Notre Dame would be down two starting offensive linemen this week, with center Jarrett Patterson done for the season with a foot injury and guard Tommy Kraemer sidelined by an emergency appendectomy. (The aforementioned Correll and Josh Lugg, respectively, took over their spots in the starting lineup.) The Irish line has been, indisputably, the team’s best position group this year, and having to replace 40 percent of it on the fly didn’t seem like a recipe for success.

It wasn’t always perfect Friday, as Book seemed to face a bit more pressure than usual and ND’s running game wasn’t quite as effortless as it sometimes seems, but the line did its job when it came to brass tacks, controlling the second half. The Irish ultimately ran for just under 200 yards, over five yards per attempt, and kept Book from taking any big hits.

Neither of the next two defenses on the schedule are particularly scary, so hopefully the new-look line (Kraemer should be back soon) can round into form in time for Dec. 19.

Confidence

This team never, ever seems rattled. Not when their legacy is on the line against the top team in the country, not when it all seems to be crashing down around them early on in Chapel Hill, not when a Tar Heel whacks them in the head (nice one, Crawford!). When you have a bunch of veteran players that fought desperately to make their season happen in the first place, I guess little things like football plays don’t seem all that daunting.

The Irish need only win once more to secure their place in the ACC championship game. But let’s go ahead and win two more. Or five. That’d be good.

And just for posterity: