There were so many terrible things about Notre Dame’s 25-10 victory over Boston College Saturday that I’m not sure which one I hated the most.

Let’s take them in chronological order:

Kicking

This is an absolute traveshamockery. A presumably fed-up Marcus Freeman benched Noah Burnette after he doinked another PAT and went for 2 after ND’s second touchdown, which failed. Then he sent Erik Schmidt out for an end-of-half relative chip shot, which wasn’t even close. Then he pulled the at-least-this-guy-hasn’t-proven-he-sucks-yet card and trotted out the third-stringer, Marcello Diomede, for a PAT, which also missed.

Schmidt finally made a PAT later in the game. It sort of feels like he ought to be the guy – he came in considered one of the top HS kickers in the country, and if no one is going to be trustworthy anyway you might as well roll with the young guy with good pedigree – but maybe ND should just ban kicking. (This is the second year in a row I’ve said this. The last time, that story ended with Mitch Jeter drilling clutch kicks one after another in the playoff. One can only hope we’re in for a similar ending.)

ACC officiating

I’ve watched a lot of ACC football today, and my God, this conference and its officials. Even before the ND game began, we saw them basically take a win away from Clemson with an indefensibly terrible pass interference call on the Tigers. There were also some special moments in Miami-SMU, though my eyes are now bleeding from the ND game so I can’t remember the specifics.

Then we got to the ND game, and while ND made its own bed a couple times too (don’t worry, we’re getting to it)…what the hell is with these guys?

We had a facemask penalty that was not even close to a facemask of any kind that essentially gifted BC three points on its 21-play imitation of the Army football team. There was a pass interference on Leonard Moore for…something, maybe (this didn’t matter because the play was a touchdown anyway, but it was annoying). And to show you all my homerism doesn’t make me totally oblivious, the roughing the passer call on BC for the slightest head tap in history on CJ Carr was utterly bewildering.

This is the 4th game in a row where the total incompetence of the game officials – not even necessarily their bias, just serial play-to-play incompetence – played a prominent role. This is a real problem for the ACC, and because of that it’s a real problem for Notre Dame.

I’ll spare you all, for this week, the rant about how conference-based officiating is a system that does not deserve the presumption of propriety given the money at stake, but believe me, I have thoughts.

Brain-dead penalties

It is beyond me what goes through players’ heads sometimes. Jaylen Sneed’s late hit in the second half was one of the most incomprehensibly dumb things I’ve ever seen a player do. You’re literally chasing the guy, you know the ball is out, and you throw a forearm shiver into his back three steps later? What on earth are you doing? We didn’t see Sneed after that, and with good reason.

It wasn’t the only silly penalty by Notre Dame. Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa probably shouldn’t have been called for unsportsmanlike conduct – if the thought was he was doing a forbidden throat-slash, he clearly was not – but why even take the chance? Do something that isn’t in the same zip code as that. BC ended up getting a TD instead of a drive that was going nowhere.

Short yardage failures continue

If Ty Washington is going to come on the field, either he needs to (along with all his blocking teammates) get better at blocking, or Notre Dame needs to do something different when he comes on the field. I’m growing tired of seeing him and knowing that a) ND is going to run straight up the middle and b) it’s likely not going to work.

Several times during the game, the Irish not only did not succeed on short-yardage running, but let multiple BC players into the backfield, effectively killing the play before it could even start. Boston College is reputedly a decent run-stopping team, but…c’mon. This shouldn’t be happening.

Also, Jadarian Price is in the top 10% of my power ranking of fun ND players of all time, but dude, please stop fumbling.

As one of our writers said in the Slack, though, it’s game 8. No non-injury problems you have in game 8 are getting fixed. ND will have to figure out a way around them.

I guess it wasn’t all bad

Well, technically it wasn’t a total negative. Not to steal a line from the great Chris Wilson’s Rakes Report (which you should all be subscribing to), but…winning is hard. Miami played a game outside the state of Florida for the first time all year and looked like crud in a loss, Vandy became the first team all year to make Arch Manning look awesome in Austin, Georgia needed some breaks to slip by fired-coach Florida, and who knows what might yet transpire tonight?

And even beyond that, there was a little to like. When they weren’t committing dumb penalties, the ND defense was pretty outstanding, recording 12 tackles for loss and a pair of turnovers despite having to deal with a mid-game QB switch. (Why in the name of Pete Mitchell did BC not just start Grayson James at quarterback?) Eli Raridon had a couple of big-man catches that called to mind some of the great ND tight ends of the recent past.

And Jeremiyah Love gave us another signature highlight, becoming the first Irish player to score two 90-plus yard touchdowns in his career. If there’s a positive memory that will stick me from this one, it’s Love woofing at his sideline starting AT HIS OWN 40-YARD LINE because he already knows he’s going to score.

Anyway, it really comes down to this: If today’s silliness can be chalked up to a one-off sleepyhead performance because the team just had fall break, they knew BC is a train wreck and they were getting a little too high off their own supply, it’s understandable, if not acceptable. But if these issues persist, Navy is pesky enough to make things weird next week, and Pitt is for sure good enough to do so the week after.