Any fears of a tight game against the undefeated Naval Academy quickly dissipated on Saturday afternoon. In front of a crowd of over 76,000 in MetLife Stadium, the Fighting Irish built an early lead and then sealed a blowout after buckets of turnovers and mistakes doomed the Midshipmen for their first loss in 2024.
Let’s review Notre Dame’s 7th win of the season with a bye week coming up.
QUARTERBACK: B+
This was another solid but not quite spectacular performance from Leonard who kept the offense on schedule and averaging over 7 yards per play. He hooked up with Jaden Greathouse for 42 yards (should’ve been a touchdown) and then tossed a score to Beaux Collins for another 37 yards to soften up the Navy defense. On the afternoon, Leonard was 3 of 4 for 105 yards on passes thrown 15+ yards down field.
Watching Leonard go 1o of 17 for 73 yards on his other throws left something to be desired but this game evolved into a pretty easy situation where his passing wasn’t need much beyond the 1st quarter or so. It certainly didn’t feel like a game where Leonard threw the ball 21 times, especially when he exited the game with under 5 minutes to play in the 3rd quarter.
Of course, Leonard had a big, big game on the ground rushing for 83 yards and accounting for 3 out of the 6 explosive rushing plays on the day from Notre Dame. Is he improving? It seems so, but the real test and payoff may not come until December.
RUNNING BACK: A
A big day was expected for this group and they didn’t disappoint. Navy only managed a trio of tackles for loss and couldn’t slow down all 4 Irish running backs who rumbled for 182 yards on 30 carries. At 6 yards per carry, that was more than enough to put this Navy team away. And I suspect had the offense really needed an extra gear (and played a little more quickly) this could’ve been a 250+ yard day for the running backs.
Also, for the second time this season Jeremiyah Love went over 100 rushing yards. He’s also scored at least 1 touchdown in each of the 8 games in 2024 so far.
WIDE RECEIVER: B+
Welcome back Jordan Faison who double his season output with 4 receptions against Navy. Is he back to full health now? As the offense continues to rebuild its confidence from that game weeks ago, the presence of Faison down the stretch making plays could be huge.
A mentioned, Greathouse should’ve taken his catch to the house for a touchdown. Not only did he look slow, but he paid too much attention to the defender in his area instead of sprinting to the goal line. It’s that lack of top-end explosiveness that has been holding Greathouse (and some of the other receivers) back from lifting up this offense this year.
TIGHT END: B
Eli Raridon had a brutal drop on his only target, one of the more memorable mistakes from this mostly fun game. Mitchell Evans got going early and finished with a pair of catches. Overall, it was a decent game for the tight ends. Solid blocking.
OFFENSIVE LINE: A
This was a clean performance from the Notre Dame offensive line. The only sack allowed was Leonard’s attempt to run around in the red zone only to run into his own players and suffer a loss. The Irish missed a field goal on the next play–maybe the low point for the offense on the day. This Navy defense wasn’t expected to offer much resistance anyway. I liked that we didn’t see the typical Navy blitzing causing havoc for a while (insert flashbacks to the 2022 game).
DEFENSIVE LINE: B+
This is always a tough and thankless job for the Notre Dame defensive line. It was more complicated on Saturday as Navy has moved away from the fullback dive as a main weapon in 2024 and has started exploring the edges and, gasp, throwing the ball more. I always like to look at what the non-quarterbacks do on the ground and Navy rushed for 95 yards on 28 carries if their name wasn’t Blake Horvath.
That’s not going to get it done if you’re Navy.
LINEBACKER: B
Horvath was able to do some good things as a runner and that typically comes down to linebacker play cleaning things up. He led the game in rushing–which isn’t a surprise given his 14 carries and outsized role within Navy’s offense–but the biggest problems on Saturday were his runs of 60 and 47 yards.
That accounted for 48.1% of Navy’s rushing total on the day. However, it’s still Navy and you have to live with a handful of losses and potentially a few big plays given up. Being able to limit the Middies to 203 yards on their other 55 plays (3.69 yards per play) is a massive win for Notre Dame.
Yes, Navy shot itself in the foot with multiple turnovers and essentially doomed their chances. However, their offense did not look like it was going to do nearly enough to win this game even if the turnover battle was more even.
SECONDARY: A-
Leonard Moore’s first career interception capped off a very good effort for the secondary on Saturday. There was plenty of concern about a newly restructured Navy offense being able to hit some plays through the air and instead they finished with only 88 yards, their lowest output of the 2024 season. Granted, Navy’s offense isn’t set up to throw the ball more and more while trailing but the fact that they couldn’t get anything going through the air while trailing early and needing to score quickly was telling.
NOTES:
Another Navy test passed for Marcus Freeman. He moves to 3-0 against the Middies while Notre Dame has won 7 straight overall in the series. This is tied for the 3rd longest winning streak against Navy.
I get the sense Navy isn’t too fussed about this loss. They seemed to go into a shell pretty early and realize their odds of winning at 31-7 during halftime were so low and why not just stop the bleeding? The AAC is a really easy conference right now and they still have all to play for in the league ahead of them.
Zac Yoakam missed a very makeable 36-yard field goal as Mitch Jeter sat for another game with an injury. Not good. Eric Goins also missed a PAT after being inserted for that job in addition to kickoffs.
This roughing the passer penalty on Junior Tuihalamaka was criticized pretty heavily:
Looks can be deceiving.
I paused it at this point for effect. At first contact, Junior is standing up nearly straight but as Horvath’s arm comes through with the ball, we see Junior’s left arm slide up and on to the quarterback’s neck area. I don’t think this would’ve been called a penalty had this completely random event neither could control had happened. When they fell to the ground, it made it look like Junior had essentially clothesline tackled Horvath–which is not what happened.
I suspect we won’t see a huge bump from the advanced stats community after this game. I’ll be curious to see how they handle a 37-point win for a team that was +6 in turnovers. Notre Dame only gained 156 more yards, as well. Obviously, it was cruise control for 2 quarters on Saturday and that matters more. But I wouldn’t expect many to be super impressed by a win over previously undefeated Navy–and that might be completely fair.
Notre Dame’s 65 snaps on offense are the most against Navy since the 2018 game.
I thought Adon Shuler should’ve scored easily on his fumble recovery. Instead, he waited to see where his blockers were set up instead of racing down the sidelines and making Navy catch up to him. He was predictably caught from behind. However when you’re playing a military academy, those turnovers deep in their own territory where your offense is going to burn more game clock feel real good. Especially when you do punch it into the end zone.
This was the 5th time in the Freeman era that Notre Dame scored at least 50 points.
Brendan did this week’s Navy preview and put together their drives today for your pleasure:
Fumble
Fumble
Touchdown
Punt
[fumbled ND’s punt]
Missed FG
Touchdown
Fumble
Interception
[fumbled ND’s punt again]
Punt
You hate to see it.
One last thing before I go. In the NIL era we’re seeing plenty of player empowerment. Still, we need to rein in some uniform atrocities being committed by these young people.
This is Jaden Greathouse from the Navy game. Generally speaking, lower-cut crew socks (maybe the most common sock length for college football) looks fine. Longer crew socks looks the best and full length tights are fine, too. Going with these super low-cut ankle socks looks really bad. Also, the pushed up pants way above the knee is pure vomit and should be banned and enforced by the officials.
Nice review! I thought the officiating in this game was pretty bad overall, but in spite of that I would like to see us clean up the penalties, which has kind of been an issue this season.
I thought it was funny to see the announcers talking about how this was one of Riley’s best games while also showing a stat that Jaxson Dart threw for 320 yards. He’s improved no doubt but he’s never going to be a guy who puts up impressive numbers through the air.
Also, in a move that truly surprised me, the AP poll jumped us all the way up to 8th, with A&M slotted in at 10th
Some observations on the AP Poll:
Even though we moved up 4 spots, each voter on average only increased our ranking by 1.5 spots. (I think of this as, everyone dropped LSU, and then about half the voters pushed us up one more additional spot on their individual ballot.)
Only getting a +1.5 average increase, but it resulting in an overall 4 spot jump indicates a general volitility and disagreement among the voters about the other teams around (and specifically behind) us. This is why, point-wise, ND being ranked 8th is actually still closer to 13th than to 7th. And also why Indiana actually had a greater average improvement in the voters individual rankings than ND, but moved 0 spots to ND’s 4.
Basically 8-13 is a pack right now (ND, BYU, A&M, Clem, Iowa St, Ind), and in any given week they could fall in any order because it seems there’s not much separating them in the voter’s eyes. That ND is at the top of the list indicates they are the most consistently voted of the pack, and that’s probably only due to a general proclivity to keeping them above A&M due to the H2H.
As we move into CFP rankings, it’ll be interesting to see if the committee has a similar view and how that plays out.
Very useful analysis, thanks a lot.
Some of those teams need to start losing. The Aggies need to keep winning (never thought I would be saying that).
I read on NDN that one of the AP voters, Kate Rogerson, accidentally left us out of the poll last week altogether.
This happens way too often. The coaches poll is bad enough with the likelihood that few or zero coaches actually do their own votes…but ap voters should be putting more effort into the process than the average fan
That’s true. She said later on socials that she would have ranked ND at 13. My analysis above adds those points back in to last week’s result in the comparisons.
Another well-written review — thanks to you and Brendan as well. They make me look fwd to Sunday afternoon (my time).
Grades for the LBs seem a touch low, but yeah, those two QB runs can’t be ignored. Still they did really well otherwise — I wonder if Sneed can turn this into an upward arc for his career?
Finally, no dreaded noon start sleepy attitude. Not that they can afford anything like that, being on the very knife’s edge of survival as they are. I
I will say that HCMF seems to do a good job of getting his teams ready for environments on the road. His comments this week (like noting that MetLife had NFL numbers on the field, etc.) seem to corroborate that. The outlier would be Clemson last year.
PS Speaking of noontime start, that’s a bonus over here, I actually got to sleep before midnight. Plus we changed back to Standard time , so, extra sleep as well. Bring on those cheeseburgers!