This season is the special kind of a gut punch to the point where I wasn’t really interested in watching Notre Dame’s final offensive possession to try and tie the game against Stanford. The odds of THIS team driving down the field, calmly putting together a touchdown and PAT, and then winning in overtime was roughly 2.678%. In other words, it was only a matter of finding out how Notre Dame would lose.
And lose they did! Now, the 5th loss in 7 games this year and the 7th loss in the last 9 games.
Defense Did Its Job
So much so that during halftime the narratives were being crafted that this Stanford offense, without the injured Christian McCaffrey, might be the answer to the question of which Power 5 offense is bad enough to make the Irish defense look competent.
Stanford doinked a field goal in the first half but otherwise looked non-threatening, harmless, and even hapless at times on its way to a shutout at the break.
The worst that can be said is that Stanford was pretty good on 3rd down (7 for 12) and backup running back Bryce Love gained some momentum in the second half ending the game with a solid 129 yards on 23 carries. Still, the Cardinal scored one touchdown all game long and still won.
The defense had 3 sacks and 3 turnovers! We still lost!!
Rarely Both Sides in Concert
In the history books the Brian Kelly era will largely be known as one where both sides of the ball (and special teams) rarely worked together to create a great team. So it went on Saturday night where Notre Dame was getting quality play from its defense and then allowed the offense to fall flat on its face in the second half.
Against a decent-but-far-from-great Stanford defense the Irish put up 4.8 yards per play which was the worst non-hurricane total going back to a sleepy effort against Wake Forest last year. They were also shutout in the second half.
I really, really, really hate to rely on common tropes but the offense simply couldn’t find a killer instinct. Leading 10-0 at halftime (and getting the ball!) Kizer threw a bad interception and things were never the same on offense for the rest of the game.
The run game had some good moments but things fizzled away in the second half, plus the offensive line struggled mightily containing Stanford’s pass rush and not false starting. Also, a week after ending the game with a poorly timed snap, center Sam Mustipher air mailed a ball out of the back of the end zone for a safety.
Kizer vs. Zaire, Why?
Truth be told, DeShone Kizer has put together some pretty average football in recent weeks. Especially as a passer he’s had bouts of inaccuracy, poor pocket presence, and ill timed interceptions. You still have to roll with him through the bad stuff, though.
Brian Kelly said he does not regret going to Malik Zaire. Thought Zaire could offer momentum as a “catalyst”
— Irish Illustrated (@PeteSampson_) October 16, 2016
Kizer threw 2 straight INT’s to open the second half and then took a seat for all but the final series. There was some belief that he was banged up but that doesn’t seem to be the case. When he left the Irish led 10-7. When he came back the Irish trailed 17-10 for the game’s final score.
Malik Zaire, utterly ineffective and a broken shell of his former self, showed for the third or fourth time this season that he’s incapable of doing anything on the field besides stuttering in the pocket and trying to scramble for yardage. In his 3 series, Notre Dame gained -9 yards while gifting Stanford the aforementioned safety.
Of course, this game was entirely winnable. You could say even this miserable Notre Dame team should have at least put together enough of a passing game to win a close one. Instead, everything fell apart in the second half (aside from the final third down stop by the defense) and we’re left wondering how Brian Kelly could continue to come up with new and different ways to lose football games.
I now think Kelly needs to go. Not because the team is bad (though it is). Not because he’s losing games as head coach (though he is). Good coaches sometimes have bad years where mistakes pile up and the breaks are against them. In fact, Kelly has had years like that and still been a pretty good coach.
This time is different. Kelly lost touch with the state of the team before the season began. He didn’t realize just how dreadfully mismanaged the defense was. After firing the DC, things have improved a bit on that side of the ball, but the offense is now foundering, and Kelly has no idea how to fix it. He is just mashing buttons, hoping that he hits the right combination. But that’s not how to coach a college football team–coaches have to design and train the combinations themselves; they can’t just move pieces around and catch lightening in a bottle.
So long as Kelly continues without a plan, the team and program will probably deteriorate at an alarming rate. Recruiting will become more difficult, locker room difficulties will fester and grow, and talented players will look for the NFL that much more eagerly.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that Kelly can regroup enough during the bye week to start salvaging the rest of the season, though a losing record would still be the likely result. The offseason will provide a better chance of reinvigorating the program, but I don’t know that Kelly can do it. He’ll need to make some great hires, manage a group of (likely) dispirited players, convince recruits to come to a losing program, and deal with the pressures of being a losing Notre Dame football coach. I don’t know that he has the vision and the energy for that.
I don’t hate Kelly or wish him ill. If he can recover from this I’ll be surprised but delighted. But I don’t think he can. I think the damage has been done, and that he doesn’t have a plan to rebuild ND again, or the energy to do so.
I basically agree (the Zaire entrance into the game is best evidence for just mashing buttons to see what works). The question is: what happened? How did he lose what got him here?
My take, informed by some stuff that I think Eric wrote, is that Kelly doubled down on the CEO-coach approach he’d adopted. Last year went well and the coaching staff didn’t change much, so Kelly probably thought it was a good idea. However, BVG was a catastrophic hire, and this was the season that became incontrovertible. Kelly’s hands-off approach let BVG run the defense into the ground. Then, after firing BVG, Kelly took his hand off the tiller on offense, and that unit and coaching staff aren’t getting the job done. So Kelly, who has been focused on the defense for the first time in years, is trying to fix offensive problems on the fly, and he’s just button-mashing.
In short, Kelly doesn’t have a good handle on either side of the ball, things are falling apart, and he’s just shuffling pieces around to try to luck into something that works.
Well said, I have been wondering something very similar in the recent weeks. Is his staff incompetent if he isn’t guiding them?
What pile of excriment did I just watch in person?
I’m struggling to think of a season where coaching so obviously cost a team almost all of their losses where there were so many losses. Such a season would require (1) close losses and (2) inexplicable coaching strategies. We have:
1) Lost to Texas by 3. 3-3-5.
2) MSU. We got outplayed there; I won’t primarily blame coaching.
3) Duke – lost by 3. Sure why not keep running the complex defense with a bunch of true freshmen when it hasn’t worked in 3 straight games against meh competition.
4) NC State – lost by 7. 30+ passes and a two-man wall in a hurricane.
5) Stanford – pulling Kizer.
Brutal.
I can no longer defend BK.
He won’t get fired this year but his players have to be losing a little faith in him. For him to come out and try and defend the benching of Kizer is just crazy. BK had to see that Zaire just didnt have it tonight. It was just stupid putting him out there for 3 series. Coaching has cost this team wins and that simply can’t happen at Notre Dame. Not with the schedule we play every year. A bowl game is out the picture. The 2017 recruits have to be second guessing their verbals to ND as well.
Maybe Kelly has lost this team. See link below.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/jerry-tillery-has-some-fascinating-likes-on-twitter-033631210.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWJXDG2i0A
I looked at his account. There’s 3 separate tweets he liked from 10/8 and 10/9 regarding Miles to ND. I know some people don’t think these types of things on twitter etc are that big of a deal, but it’s a little disturbing coming from a player who is currently on the team. It’s a public show of him liking something that is advocating for his CURRENT coach to be fired. Will be interesting to see if he removes them or not now that there’s an article on yahoo sports about it.
Now that it’s all over Twitter from other media, he responded and deleted the likes FWIW.
Yeah, i think that is reading way too much into a “like”. Hitting the like button on anything can have a million different reasons. i wish infotainment would get squeezed back onto the supermarket checkout line so that real journalism would proliferate again.
I watch this team and wonder what’ going on in practice. It’s not one player or position but each player that seems to have Jekyll and Hyde moments. Bad snaps, false starts, jumping offside, dropped passes- Does this stuff not happen in practice? It certainly has happened in previous games. Why is it not corrected? What has happened to Malik Zaire? UW and WSU put up 40+points on this defense, we score 10 and give them 9 on offense. This is the offense that’s going to carry our shaky defense?
I guess what I’m trying to say here is, what has happened to this team in the past 10 months? The whole team seems to have regressed in that time. Is there a position group that is better this year than it was last year? If your old enough, I am, this is rekindling memories of Gerry Faust. Just like those teams I watch this one knowing they will self destruct as the game goes on. They will make miscue after miscue just often enough to bite them in the end. There is no joy in watching that.
I can’t add much to what’s already been said, other than in the post game, Kelly seemed pretty casual compared to last week when he came across as wounded and beaten. This continues to make me wonder what he has in mind for himself down the road. Has he had enough?
the defense seemed energized and playful, seemed to actually be feeding on one another and having fun. Offense looked grim and tight, especially Kizer. We went into the year being told we had two terrific QB’s. Kizer now mentally seems to be where Kelly drove Golson eventually. Big load on his shoulders, no margin for error, pressing, not having fun playing. Malik looks like he never played QB before, a deer in the headlights. I thought with Golson it might have been that idiot QB coach we had that left, at first, but in the end it became clear that Golson no longer had any trust in Kelly. If I were Kizer, I’d be getting to that spot soon I think. I never bought into the “top pick in the draft hype” on him, but he’s a much better QB than we’ve seen in the last several games. He’s not being helped at all by the Oline, who’ve been underwhelming, and the running backs are not explosive this year. Maybe those latter two thoughts are conjoined.
I felt bad for Malik on the snap over his head for a safety. If I were coach, I’d have yanked Mustipher, not Kizer. If you can’t snap the ball consistently you shouldn’t be playing center, and he did it twice this week, both at awful times. I don’t give him a pass on the 4 he had last week, as the NC State center coped well.
Lastly, I don’t know why, but this team just doesn’t seem to want to win as much as our opponents do. I was pretty confident that we could beat Stanford. Their offense is bad, and even worse without McCaffrey. I was sure we’d be able to outscore them, even with an assumed porous Irish defense. WRONG!
I wonder if Kelly has already made a decision and is now just experimenting as he goes, curious to see what will happen. He seems pretty calm on the sidelines, even as he was in a lengthy conversation with Harry after the safety snap snafu. I’d have expected a Saban-like explosion.
Very unexpected year, with more drama to come. The odd thing is that with all the possible returnees, especially the young guys on D, this could be a very strong team next year. I think those who can leave will though, unless the chemistry changes drastically, especially at QB.
When your center messes up the snap, doesn’t it make sense to have him practice his mechanics on the sideline between drives, especially when the weather was such a large factor?
I haven’t been to a game this year and the broadcasts haven’t shown it so I’m not sure what’s actually happening on the sideline.
Good point, Kerry. If he did practice on the sidelines, it wasn’t shown, even though there were lots of close-ups of Mustipher on the bench. I’d guess the announcers would have shown it and commented if he had done so, since those muffs were pretty important.
Between the Duke and Stanford games the bathroom at the bottom of our section was remodeled. It’s very posh now, with individual urinals rather than the urine troth — and freshly painted.
Fine work by the maintenance department and very efficient.
Yay! Progress!!
Does Zaire have a first down this season? Did he get even 1 against Texas? I missed a couple games (thank god), so can’t remember a single positive play with him on the field.
I want to say one first down, that’s it.
I really try not to be a knee-jerk reaction type when it comes to coaches: take the long view, note long-term trends, take into account the overall circumstances, etc. Given the turd sandwich Weis left, 2010 bothered me none at all. 2011, I felt we could have done better but the trajectory was up. 2012 was fantastic, though the NCG clearly showed we weren’t there yet. 2013–step back, but Golson was suspended, so waddyagonnado. 2014–uh…huh. This isn’t good, but new DC and maybe it wasn’t BK’s fault that Golson went off the rails. Certainly seemed like Golson was the head case, not BK. 2015–nice! While the D stunk, the offense overcame. A lot of weaknesses and we couldn’t break away from bad teams, but 10 wins is good, and we played our top 2 teams competitively in losses. I came into the season hopeful that we could improve the D (though severely doubting we could do so with BVG still around and our personnel losses) and have a decent season, though I expected some regression.
“Some regression” is a charitable way of describing this season. Every single loss can be ascribed to coaching–whether it was horrendous coaching by the defensive staff, poor QB management, play calling, etc. This certainly doesn’t excuse the play of the players, but we’ve sprung so many leaks that you can’t help but see systemic issues. I think BK is a good coach (though not ELITE perhaps), so it’s really shocking to me how completely he’s mismanaged everything about this season. I anticipated we’d lose to Stanford, so I didn’t think my opinion would change. And yet the game was winnable–and once again, poor coaching took it away from us. He’s making completely irrational decisions, and they are costing us games. I don’t understand the logic. This is what’s different to me from 2011, 2013, or 2014. I really want to think he can turn the team around for next season (this one is a waste), but that’s going to require seeing us win a game this season through coaching. Beyond maybe Oklahoma 2012, I can’t think of many games under Kelly where I thought “yeah, great gameplan–the coaches won that one!” Maybe I’m just myopic because of the last few weeks, and there are more, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Kelly needs to win a game through coaching to get me back on board. I don’t think we’ll fire him this year no matter what happens, but we need to win a game we don’t expect to win.
We’re almost to the point where every game is a game we don’t expect to win.
Army put up 62 this week, so you might be right.
Almost? I’m already there. There is no guarantee we win another game this season.
Good thoughts KG. I share similar sentiments regarding BK. Another game to add to Oklahoma would be the Florida St loss in 2014. BK was masterful in that game.
But yes, the coaching is baffling. It’s saddening. I hate seeing this out of Kelly. I just want him to put this team in a good position and I truly think he does too… All the theories that his mind is somewhere else or on another job are silly. He cares about this job and wants to win here. I’m just at a loss for some of his decisions this season.
This was the first game I’ve been able to sit down and watch since BVG’s Whitesnake posters were removed from the Defensive Coordinator’s office.
Granted, the defense has not looked ELITE in the 3 games since, but man, the tackling. It’s almost as if the players know how to tackle again. I don’t think I saw many attempts at grabbing ball carriers by the cleats or using just 1 arm. And, the defense seemed to be swarming more – at least to the degree of multiple defenders around the ball carrier. I’m guessing this was covered multiple times during the live chats, but I just had to put my anonymous thoughts out there. (Even my wife wouldn’t shuttup about how they were actually making tackles on first contact).
Still regularly got pushed back 2-5 yards upon contact, but hey, at least they made the tackles. Baby steps….
^Agreed. Just nice to see the first defender not getting truck-sticked, the 2nd one diving after the ball carrier has passed and 3 & 4 running into each other (while also incurring some combination of bee stings/allergic reaction to the detergent the uniforms are washed in/social anxiety/tummy aches/Dr. McBVG’s “Over-thinkies” paralysis)
It’s amazing what happens when you simplify responsibilities and let the players try to make a play, rather than have them overthinking on every snap. Oh, and when you can actually get subs in the game to prevent your defense from being gassed by the third quarter.