A few big pass plays for North Carolina masked what was otherwise a very dominant performance as Notre Dame went into Chapel Hill and picked up their first road win of 2022 and the Marcus Freeman era. Things started poorly for the Irish after UNC drove down the field to open the game while converting a 4th down touchdown. Notre Dame would punt and then miss a field goal to start their day while giving off vibes that it could be a very long day for the faithful.
The game would turn around immediately thanks to 6 straight scoring drives from Notre Dame, including touchdowns on 5 of those drives.
Stats Package
| STAT | IRISH | HEELS |
|---|---|---|
| Score | 45 | 32 |
| Plays | 85 | 60 |
| Total Yards | 576 | 367 |
| Yards Per Play | 6.77 | 6.11 |
| Conversions | 8/15 | 8/16 |
| Completions | 24 | 17 |
| Yards/Pass Attempt | 8.50 | 9.40 |
| Rushes | 51 | 28 |
| Rushing Success | 72.3% | 41.6% |
| 10+ Yds Rushes | 10 | 4 |
| 20+ Yds Passes | 4 | 5 |
| Defense Stuff Rate | 26.6% | 15.6% |
The defense also locked things down allowing only 1 touchdown from the next 7 full North Carolina drives following the start to the game. That opened up a 45-20 lead and let the Irish cruise to a drama-free win. It feels pretty good!
Offense
QB: A
RB: A
TE: A
OL: A
WR: B
Notre Dame was only successful on 2 of its first 11 plays from scrimmage on offense. After a 12-yard Drew Pyne scamper it turned into a brutally efficient next 2.5 quarters of football, though.
Pyne was cool, calm, and collected while playing close to flawlessly against an inept defense. He was sacked early in the game and from then on barely touched. Pyne was able to take his time and go through his progressions without much worry of North Carolina hitting him. He missed a sure touchdown pass to Michael Mayer (chalking this one up to a lack of natural arm strength) and didn’t convert on a 4th down sneak to salt the game away even more. Other than that, Pyne was really sharp finishing with 3 touchdowns passes and a 171.11 passer rating, pretty much a top 20 national performance.
One nit is that the receivers still didn’t get involved heavily very often. The Pyne to Styles touchdown was a thing of beauty for 30 yards but otherwise Styles, Thomas, Lenzy, and Salerno combined for 9 receptions and 82 yards. Solid for this team but still not much development for a good offense.
This was a NFL hype game for Mayer snagging 7 catches for 88 yards and 1 touchdown.
Rushing Success
Tyree – 10 of 15 (66.6%)
Diggs – 6 of 10 (60.0%)
Pyne – 2 of 4 (50.0%)
Estime – 15 of 17 (88.2%)
Lenzy – 1 of 1 (100%)
Real talk, this was an embarrassing overall defensive effort from North Carolina and an extremely ass-kicking rushing performance from Notre Dame. Nearly 3 out of every 4 runs were successful and that’s with a ton of situations where the Irish were obviously going to run the ball and chew clock. North Carolina was helpless.
Initially, this started out as a nice game from Chris Tyree. We didn’t even see Audric Estime touch the ball into the early 2nd quarter and he was so dominant he finished the game with 15 successful carries!
All three of Notre Dame’s running backs feasted:
Estime – 134 rushing yards, 2 TD
Tyree – 104 total yards, 1 TD
Diggs – 115 total yards, 1 TD
Defense
DL: A
LB: B
DB:Â C+
This was an extremely hit-or-miss performance for North Carolina’s offense who didn’t have the ball enough (25 fewer snaps and over 15 minutes fewer time of possession) and couldn’t create a balanced enough attack to keep pace with Notre Dame.
They hit long pass plays of 80, 64, and 43 yards while their top 10 biggest plays went for 301 yards.
Unfortunately, North Carolina’s other 50 plays would go for only 66 yards and led to their home crowd raining down boos for a big chunk of this game once Notre Dame took over.
The Irish defensive line showed up big again for the second game in a row, while the linebackers also put in a much stronger effort. Contain on the quarterback remains an issue (Drake Maye scrambled for 7 successful runs) but the Tar Heels ground game was anemic and put so much pressure on their passing game to be perfect.
Stuffs vs. North Carolina
Mills – 2.5
Foskey – 2
Kiser – 1.5
Liufau – 1.5
Smith – 1
Kollie – 1
Botelho – 1
Bracy – 1
Mickey – 1
Griffith – 1
Ademilola, Jus – 1
Ademilola, Jay – 0.5
North Carolina had 3 players combine for 0 successful carries while primary running back Omarion Hampton only mustered 3 successful carries and 28 total rushing yards.
As it often happens when you give up big plays, it still felt like a really inconsistent performance for Drake Maye completing just 53% of his passes and yet he finishes the game with 301 yards and 5 touchdowns passes. His YPA was pretty solid, however, nearly 18 yards per completion was what kept the Tar Heels in this game for a while.
Notre Dame’s secondary will definitely want a few snaps back allowing some big gains.
Final Thoughts
This was the type of performance we hoped to see from Marist Liufau every game. Maybe he just really hates rams? He’s played really well in 2 games against North Carolina.
The Estime fumble and Pyne missed 4th down sneak are a couple plays I really shouldn’t be too bothered about but they irk me. Estime (7th carry of the drive) looked absolutely gassed prior to fumbling and should’ve been subbed out.
Grupe missed a field goal, too. Arguably, the Irish should’ve dropped 60 on this sad North Carolina team.
What are North Carolina fans thinking about this program? Maye plus their skill talent should have them contending in the ACC for 2023-24 but this defense is just a huge tire fire right now and the players overall seem so undisciplined and not very tough.
The JD Bertrand targeting penalty should be overturned on review. Don’t conferences look at these calls after the fact? What can Notre Dame do as an independent? Appeal to the ACC because that’s who was officiating the game?
Drake Maye really stood out because he wore the world’s tiniest leg pads and doesn’t wear any rib pads which is probably a bad idea for how often he is going to get hit. He’s a big kid and good athlete, but also a big target.
Might want to protect your QB, maybe.
Notre Dame had 34 successful runs in the game. Thirty four! How about 35(!) first downs, too.
The Irish moved into a positive yards per play differential on the season after this game. Thanks to those big plays given up the defensive YPP actually jumped up a bit to 5.30 yards but the offense moves up 0.6 yards/play for 5.43 YPP on the season.
I remarked on Twitter during the game that it’s a shame Estime doesn’t wear No. 6 when it’s available to wear for a player on offense.
DJ Brown tweaked his hamstring and with Ramon Henderson not playing against UNC these safeties have to get healthy quickly during the bye week because there isn’t much depth to rely on back there.
Marcus Freeman announced after the game that tight end Kevin Bauman had torn his ACL. The injury to Blake Fisher was just a poke in the eye and he should be fine.
I know it was against easy competition so caveats apply. This was one of the more fun and smart game plans from Tommy Rees since he took over the coordinating duties.
Are we comfortable enough with Drew Pyne now? I think if the line offers good protection and the running game is about 60% as effective as we saw against North Carolina there can be a lot of good things for the future. Due to the run dominance there weren’t a ton of third down passing opportunities for Pyne against the Heels but he did go 5 of 7 for 51 yards with 3 conversions. Salerno, Thomas, and Mayer caught those 3 passes to move the chains.
I’m more comfortable with Pyne than I was last week, as long as we never attempt another QB sneak with him again. That was hideous.
Yeah that was terrible
Too cute by half. No reason to ever sneak a 5-10 guy when Estime is available. (He was in the backfield on that very snap.)
Pyne should be solid, but he’s also limited. Can we go 8-4? We’ll see, but I feel a lot better today than I did 2 weeks ago. Also ND opened up this game -1 but was +2.5 at kickoff I believe. The sportsbooks killed it with this game
watching ND set up that pass to Diggs throughout the course of the game was so unbelievably cool
had an awesome time at the game
Irish section was loud and really fun
Glad you had a good time! And thanks for the noise … could hear you all even on the TV.
Oregon State takes the lead on Southern Cal with 4:41 to play!
ah well nevertheless
we are right on track with the USC rollercoaster tho we’ve hit the “go on the road and escape a evil spooky not very good team and show major cracks” portion of the ride
“Escaped with a 3 point win while winning the turnover battle 4-0 and the opponent missed a field goal” is showing some major cracks.
Their defense can’t keep generating turnovers at this rate…. right??
Absolutely right… when the percentages even out! Our hope could be that they keep winning out and we get to LA and they are riding on a wave of highly ranked fool’s gold, and our hammerin’ run game and an unexpected burst of turnovers pop the Trojan bubble (Trojans do burst under pressure, as my dorm sign read before the ’66 beat down). Sorry, I am a tad giddy after last night 🙂
I didn’t watch the game but their offense is meant to be a juggernaut and they only scored 17 – might have just been an off game.
Their line was terrible (as expected) and Williams was wild (as unexpected). Addison was a non-factor until, unfortunately, he scored the game winner late – on what honestly may have been an ill-advised throw by Williams. Defender missed picking it off or at least knocking it down by literal inches.
So hopefully their OL doesn’t improve much by the end of the year but you’d figure Williams then wouldn’t be quite as bad then I suppose and had more of an off game. Though at this point, he seems to have a bit of a track record of being inconsistent (even if super-talented).
Using the SP+ standard for turnover luck, which at this point is pretty well correlated to empirical evidence of regression to the mean, they’ve been insanely incredibly absurdly inexplicably lucky with turnovers to date.
Fumbles (whether you fumble or your opponent does) should be recovered by you at about a 50% rate over time. USC has fumbled three times and recovered all of them, and their opponents have fumbled three times and USC has recovered all of them. Statistically speaking, they should be even on fumble margin and they’re instead +3.
Interceptions typically occur at a rate of about one for every four passes broken up. USC’s defense has 11 interceptions this season against just 13 passes broken up, while on offense they’ve thrown no interceptions against 11 passes broken up. Here, they should be +1 at best and they’re +11.
Overall, the Trojans should be +1 on turnover margin through four games and instead they’re +14. They’ve been massively lucky with turnovers. I don’t know when the regression is coming but it has to.
Wow, yea no way to keep that up.
Your last line made me think of this immediately.
https://youtu.be/23DIN42SDK0
Not gonna lie, after feeling like the world was ending after Marshall, this week was helpful for some perspective. I’m not sure I’ve seen a unit as dreadful as UNC’s D.
Really nice to see so much improvement in the offense. It felt all components were really clicking.
I said a lot of mean things about drew pyne in my living room after the 2 batted down passes, sack and subsequent missed field goal. And he was great the rest of the game. Missed the second half due to stuff with the kids, debating whether to go back and rewatch. A lot of firsts checked off though, first road win, first turnover, first double digit lead and 30+ point game of the season and most importantly first end of half competent games management from freeman. thought he nailed that sequence.
Next game vs byu becomes huge swing game. Win and 8-4 seems like the minimum. stanford, byu, navy all are a mess, syracuse has been super lucky so far. And this week showed some warts on usc/clemson. if nd could win 8 games and beat usc or clemson i’d be pretty darn happy especially with how dark it was around here 2 weeks ago.
Also really fun to enjoy the chaos elsewhere. miami and oklahoma losing was glorious. michigan struggling and clemson/usc escaping was pretty nice too.
Navy, bc, unlv, and Stanford all look like “should win” games now. Syracuse could be tricky but they’ve also gotten a lot of luck so far. BYU, USC, and Clemson are definitely the 3 hardest games remaining on our schedule. Looking at today’s SP+ we’d be favored against the first 5 teams by more than a TD, but the other 3 games are all within a field goal (ND favored vs BYU, underdogs vs. Clemson and @ USC). So let’s enjoy a week of cheeseburgers and keep improving!
Expanding on this a bit… ESPN’s FPI win probabilities currently predict four virtual locks, two should-wins, and two don’t-bother-showing-ups:
Navy – 95%
BC – 94% (lol)
UNLV – 93%
Stanford – 89% (lol)
BYU – 65%
Syracuse – 59%
Clemson – 36%
USC – 27%
I know there’s a home/road factor at play with Clemson and SC, but I have no idea why FPI is so much dimmer on our prospects against SC than against Clemson. Regardless of venue my eyeball test tells me that even a subpar Clemson is far more problematic. Maybe it’s preseason projections, maybe there’s something about the way USC is winning that particularly impresses that model.
So if I do/understand maths correctly, that is an expected 5.58 more wins, so 7-5/8-4ish. Seems right.
BYU being 65% win is the figure that surprised me the most of what is still to come.
lest we forget sparty being turned into a paste by minnesota
I see that Mel Tucker’s Charlie Weisization is proceeding at speed.
Yeah, 8-4 would be a disappointing failure. At the rate this team is improving the Marshall game looks more and more like a let down after sloppy play lost the aOSU game. BYU and USC were not impressive yesterday. Clemson still has the guns to win a shootout, but their defense is well below their usual. ND still has some more sloppiness left to clean up and a few other things to correct, but 10-2/NY6 or 9-3/tier 1 ACC bowl (all the names are changing and i no longer no which one is which lol) is possible just by continuing to improve towards their talent level.
I dunno, still seems like 7-5 is more likely than 9-3. 2/3 of BYU/Clem/USC and otherwise running the table? That would probably require the offensive line playing like they did yesterday against defenses that aren’t complete turnstiles like UNC.
To be explicit, I think 8-4 is a clear likeliest result, which, way better than how I felt about things in the middle of the Cal game!
yea, 9-3 is still pretty rosy.
This was one of the worst defenses in college football. We’ll have to continue to get better and even then some of these games we’ll be slight favorites in. Playing a lot of 60/40 games one is bound to lose at least one of them.
BYU is basically 50/50 it seems.
Clemson/USC seem more like 25/75 maybe at this point even with some improvement.
Navy and BC seem the only sure wins. Though I like our chances against UNLV, Stanford, Syracuse (all more like 60/40 games).
That’s 7 wins if we don’t lose the turnover battle against any of those teams (not a given).
It seems like 8-4 would be a pretty good finish.
10-2 is a pipe dream and requires all kinds of luck. 9-3 would require the winnable games to go well and to get some timely turnovers against Clemson or USC while playing our best game of the year.
I still think 7-5 is the most likely at this point with 8-4 and 6-6 real possibilities.
I wouldn’t be surprised either if we beat BYU but then got tripped against one of the lesser teams on our way to 7-5.
ND gonna be a double digit favorite against unlv and stanford and clemson will be closer to 50/50 than 25/75 per advanced stats. Bill connelly been saying usc going to be very vulnerable to a team that can run the ball and rush the passer. Man that better be nda strength by then.
Having said that I would still be happy with 8-4 if it included a win over clemson or usc. we’re still just 2 weeks removed from losing to marshall in game that wasn’t really flukey.
Yea I’m not sure how much the advanced stats still include last year’s results/pre-season expectations in their formulas. And we still might be propped up a bit from that. I think it’s more like after 6 games are advanced stats all from this year.
Preseason expectations are still baked in but are being scaled down over time. ND went down in SP+ this week despite a dominant win, I believe, because of that phasing out.
Exactly, so while they aren’t fully in there, they are still in there to some degree perhaps making us seem a bit stronger than we really are.
When would they be completely phased out? That’s what i was thinking with the 6 week mark but I’m not sure.
Except clemson presumably getting the same benefit of preseason expectations. I think they had a 33% pst game win exp yesterday.
Maybe, but DJ U is actually playing better and their offense is taking off. Their defense has been more of the problem but has more talent and will probably round back into form. Against WF anyway, their secondary was the culprit it seemed. We don’t have the skill to take advantage of that at all.
Well, we’ll see. I’m not remotely sold on them yet. Looking at them game by game:
They have an interesting game this week as they host #10 NC State. Of course I’m inclined to think that NC State, as per tradition under Dave Doeren, is a paper tiger, but they’re almost certainly for real the best team Clemson will have seen to that point.
I think Dabo made uninspired offensive hires and a potentially disastrous defensive hire, and I think that as the year goes on that’s going to become more evident. They have a ton of talent that might cover for it to an extent, especially on D, but man he took a huge risk.
Not to pick, but just a cool stat I heard: Stanford hasn’t won against an FBS team in almost a full year (where they did beat #3 Oregon in early October 2021). I don’t really know what to expect from them, but I tend to think they should be even messier than Notre Dame, and possible a lesser version of a line-driven team whose lines aren’t really that good any longer.
With the ND o-line growing, as it tends to do with improvement as the year goes on, I think you can put all 5 of those wins in the bank. (Then again, I also thought Marshall was in the bank, so what do I know).
Fair enough. It just seems like we aren’t good enough to overcome a couple of turnovers and/or a few bounces/penalties not going our way. Stanford only lost by like 12 or 13 to USC (right?) so they didn’t seem too bad and I thought their QB is playing decently too.
Though after seeing Brandon’s FPI locks above – looks like you should be right too about Stanford!
I hope so, we shall see. I wouldn’t use the final score of the USC game to feel good about Stanford, considering it was a 41-14 game going into the 4th quarter.
I’d put Stanford below even Syracuse at this point, but they’re both kinda in the UNC realm to me. Not a total joke of an opponent, but one that even an imperfect ND team is still superior to.
Pyne was solid, but an A is grading on a bit of a “well we know we’re not working with a good quarterback here” curve – he didn’t throw for that many more yards against UNC than Florida A&M’s QB.
Estime fumble I suppose cost the RBs an A+, which, sad but fair. Great game for them.
Maybe harsh grades for the defense, though? Holding the SP+ #10 offense to that performance is arguably as good as how the offense did, no?
Pyne had a 171 passer ranking, and from Sampson’s article today only 4 QBs in the country had a higher one that that for the season in 2021. Yards aside, it was a very strong quarterback performance by about any other measure for Pyne. I’m totally fine with giving him an A anytime he completes 70% of his passes and goes 3 TD to 0 INT, it’s going to be a very good day no matter the yards involved.
I was fine with the low DB grade. Lewis got beat deep and has somewhat quietly been phased out already this early in the season (only 10 snaps vs UNC). It looks like Hart’s eyes are in the wrong place and his priorities aren’t exactly covering the deep guy very well. I don’t know the coverage called so I’m not going to call for his head, but four games in I think we all expected a big season from Hart and he’s been either quiet or giving up big plays in his area.
I do think the LB grade is a little harsh, nice bounce back for Liufau and Kiser is always solid. UNC RBs only had 30 rushing yards on 15 carries, another very solid showing for the front-7 in that regard.
Hart was wrestling with a hammy issue late in camp and I wonder if it has persisted into the season. He just looks off, and has apparently taken a step back while Bracy has taken a big step forward (and Morrison and Mickey are earning early snaps). Hopefully if that hammy is the problem the bye week will give him a chance to get back to himself.
Could be, let’s hope so. I could be reading into it too much, but for Hart to me it looks like seems more mental or how he’s reading things vs. physically being a little behind. Like that last late TD, he was looking in the flat and just released a guy to run behind him. I don’t know the coverage but it looked like he gave up the WR running deep in order to focus on something underneath. Surely it couldn’t be helping if he’s not 100% though.
Concur on the mental part, I guess. I thought Orloksy’s comment on the last TD during the telecast was reasonably close — zero way he should play underneath for that situation, not so? Unless Golden/Mickey screwed up the call?
Could be the physical stuff is causing mental stuff too – like he doesn’t trust himself to sprint so that makes him change how he tries to play angles or when he looks for what or whatever. Regardless, whatever it is, he definitely hasn’t looked like himself, and maybe the bye week is coming at a good time for him to reset.
One of my favorite things about this game, btw, is how from about halfway through the third quarter, maybe even earlier, it became quite obvious that everyone on North Carolina’s defense was Very Much Done with being hit by our backs and blockers. There were a couple of plays where Fisher got to the second level and his man just conceded the block, and a few guys were more interested in being able to say they tried to tackle Estime than that they actually tackled him.
Glorious.
Flammang pointed out on Twitter that the only reason Estime’s fumble got recovered by UNC was because Salermo had pancaked his defender and the guy pretty much fell onto it after being pushed back 5 yards. When the walk on is pushing you around, you’re pretty much done.
To be fair, that’s a totally normal reaction to someone that big moving that fast.
Thought it was a good team win and definitely a confidence building win for everyone involved. It wasn’t fluky and after the first quarter ND felt like they were playing rather loose for what felt like the first time all year. Hopefully this game propels everyone, players and coaches, to move past the holding their breath every play phase which is what it felt like the first 3 games of the season.
I still am very much down on Rees. The first quarter was straight up bad again and I felt there were a few points in the game when ND was kind of pulling away, but not quite where he got kind of cute with play-calling again. ND got bailed out on the bad PI call on 4th down. That would have been zero points there after the UNC fumble. (3 straight pass plays from the 3 yard line?!?)
Right after that score ND is up 38-14 and forces a punt and Rees rides with Diggs instead of Tyree and ND fails a 4th and 1 with the Pyne sneak. UNC immediately scores the next play to make it 38-20 with a quarter left.
I know it ends up not being a big deal in the grand scheme of the game. But to me it’s a continuation of the same issues we saw under Kelly and lack of killer instinct. 45 to 14 is much different than 38-20. ND had a chance to score 60+ points in this game and should have done so. I know in the context of the Marshall game I should just be happy with the performance of this game.
Long winded way to say I’m still selling Rees hard. Gun to the head, I think 9-3 is what we end up with a bowl win to keep the 10 win streak alive. Hoping BYU can sneak into the top 15 before 10/8. Syracuse could be a top 25 team at game-time, fools good, but still looks good on paper. Add in a chance to get for 2 top 5/10 games at the end of the year and not all is lost.
In the photo for the headliner, Mayer is rather funny to see… It looks like a half hearted block, until you realize the UNC guy is on roller skates going backwards.
Our O-line has improved considerably in the last two games. Something I wonder about from fall camp is Freeman frequently talked about putting best on best. Does that effect the psyche of the O-line if they are consistently being beat by Foskey, Mills, or the Ademilola brothers. Do they lose a sense of competitiveness that it takes a couple of games into the season to get back? I like that we use iron to sharpen iron… however, is there a drawback in that if the player doesn’t have a mental makeup to suffer being beat on more snaps than not if they are going against a formidable opponent in practice. Does it sap their will?
After much negativity and personal invective, I applaud Tommy for deciding to run the touchdown plays. My complaint is now wondering why it took until week 4 to see them.
But actually, excepting that awful first series, the offense looked good, looking like it had a coherent identity and strategy with plays and counters building off each other, and put the game out of reach early in the 3rd quarter. Now my big concern is that in each of Rees’ three years as OC, the team has looked pretty bad on offense the first few weeks before eventually rounding into an identity.
Agreed with your last sentence. Even people who are sanguine about Tommy as a play caller, can’t deny that he doesn’t seem to be able to identify what kind of team he has coming out of camp. I don’t know if that has something to do with the way we practice, or what, but at least he can adapt to what he’s got once he figures out what he’s got.
Did a quick search on this and man did ND play some absolutely terrible defenses in the second half of last year. I just went with a Yards Per Play Allowed and end of season total as opposed to when ND played them.
Apologies for the formatting in advance. I’m at work so kind of running out of time, but overall I wouldn’t say that Rees elevates the offense regularly. I get that elite defenses are elite for a reason, but thru 2+ years I don’t see him as an offensive genius that pundits and writers were bestowing upon him in the offseason.
Pitt and Clemson 1.0 in 2020, first half against OK State in 2021, and overall the gameplan against Ohio State was complimentary I would say. I would also include FSU 2021 based on how FSU ended the year.
Kind of how I feel about him as a recruiter. IMO, he probably hasn’t been terrible, but in now way has he been elite or really close to it.