It was late in the 1st quarter and Stanford led 7-0 in one of those “here we go again” moments for Notre Dame football. The mood increased quickly as the Irish eventually pulled away from the Cardinal and put to rest any notion that this would be a competitive matchup. Following a weather delay for a lightning in the area, the game resumed in the 4th quarter for some garbage time featuring the backup quarterbacks on each side.
Notre Dame moved to their backups nursing a big lead, Stanford’s got banged up and didn’t come back dressed after the delay, and not much was contested over the last quarter of the game which resembled a spring game.
QUARTERBACK: A
This was the best and most well-rounded performance for Riley Leonard since he came to Notre Dame. He was mostly accurate and on time with his short passing and was able to open up the offense with some explosiveness through the air, too. A 25-yard pass to KK Smith and 53-yard pass to Beaux Collins highlighted that explosiveness, plus he threw accurate touchdown passes on similar slants to Jayden Thomas and later Kris Mitchell.
Steve Angeli got the mop-up duty in the 4th quarter, going only 2 of 5 for 19 yards as the offense continually pounded the ball on the ground to keep the clock moving. That included a brutally dropped deep pass to Micah Gilbert, though.
RUNNING BACK: B
A week after being benched for fumbling, this looked like a redemption arc for Jadarian Price who got the bulk of the carries over Jeremiyah Love. Stanford was doing a decent job keeping them both contained early but as we know it’s not easy to keep it up over a long period of time. Price rumbled for gains of 10 and 16 yards, the latter a touchdown, to highlight his day. Love (only 6 carries on the day) took one 39 yards to the house.
Both Aneyas Williams and Kedren Young flashed something special towards the end. They combined for 10 carries and 67 yards with Williams scoring on an impressive leap over the goal line and Young about to punch one in too but the 4th quarter ran out.
WIDE RECEIVER: B
Beaux Collins suffering a drop and had the ball ripped right out of his hands as a couple lowlights on Saturday. You just can’t lose the ball like that and I dropped the grade here. Yet, we saw some playmaking from Collins (85 yards led the game) and this unit as a whole. By God, we did! Some short passes were taken and defenders missed to pick up extra yards and everything.
119 YAC yards!
It was nice to see Kris Mitchell featured as a weapon bringing in 4 passes on 5 targets. I guess this is what happens when you finally throw for well over 200 yards in a game. Notre Dame had a functional and quality wideout group on Saturday.
Special mention to Pat Coogan’s 11-yard rumblin’ bumblin’ stumblin’ first down catch!
TIGHT END: C+
Is the knee of Mitchell Evans okay? It was a bit odd to come out of the bye week and not get him involved in the offense. Elsewhere, Eli Raridon caught his first touchdown of the season. It’s been a super weird 2024 for the tight ends, I don’t know what else to say. Just 20 receptions for the whole group through 6 games is not Tight End U type of stuff.
OFFENSIVE LINE: B+
The early grade for this group was not good. We saw some poor play from Anthonie Knapp and I’m curious if cracks are starting to form for the true freshman being scouted and playing so much at the premier left tackle position?
Then you look up and only 1 sack was allowed and Stanford could only muster 3 tackles for loss.
DEFENSIVE LINE: A
After the sleepy start, the duo of Mills and Cross finally came to play. And for long stretches of this game when it was still in doubt, they took over. They would combine for 3 sacks and caused a bunch of havoc.
Josh Burnham created one of the plays of the season swatting a speed option pitch, catching the ball, and nearly taking it back for a touchdown. That was on Stanford’s first drive to open the 2nd half and quickly made the game 28-7, essentially out of reach for their anemic offense. I’d call this the play of the game.
Gabriel Rubio marked his return to the lineup! However, Jason Onye missed the game due to personal reasons.
LINEBACKER: B+
Kiser, Bowen, KVA, and Ausberry are becoming a terrific group together. Stanford had no chance in this game unless they could break some big runs. Ashton Daniels was able to break contain a couple times and picked up a 27-yard run and a 13-yard run. Stanford didn’t pick up anything else on the ground over 10 yards, though.
I can’t really recall anything their running backs did in this game. This is not the Stanford of old.
There was a lot of talk during the bye week about an unhappy Jaylen Sneed. He was in the game late and made a couple tackles at least.
SECONDARY: A
Stanford pretty much gave up and didn’t try moving the ball through the air. They waved the white flag. I counted 4 rushing attempts on 3rd & medium or long for the Cardinal and they didn’t pick up any of the conversions. Officially, they went 1 of 2 for 6 yards on 3rd down passing attempts with the lone conversion coming from backup Lamson in the 4th quarter.
This is unbecoming https://t.co/kkuVD8Wpgs pic.twitter.com/fhZxynGqqS
— Greg Flammang (@greg2126) October 12, 2024
We were robbed of Xavier Watts’ 10 career interception due to a terrible holding call.
NOTES:
Mitch Jeter injured himself on his first kickoff and didn’t see the field again. Zak Yoakam handled the PAT duties while Eric Goins handled the kickoffs for the rest of the game.
Notre Dame only punted once after its first drive. James Rendell uncorked a 24-yard bomb in response.
There was a beautiful stuff from true freshman Bryce Young as he continues to ooze a super high ceiling. I suppose there’s an avenue through which we start to get really excited about a Burnham/Young combo next year. Especially coming off the disappointing RJ Oben season so far.
The Irish were a dominant +3.8 in yards per play in this game.
Stanford is really, really bad. I’m sure he’ll have a long leash and there aren’t many people in Palo Alto who really care. Still, it doesn’t seem like the Troy Taylor era is really working out. They will be heading into year 3 under his watch soon and I’m not sure there’s anything to be excited about. They look more like a MAC team to me than a competitive Power 4 conference opponent.
I brought this up with our writers. How much confidence does a head coach provide while he’s wearing old man reading glasses on the sidelines and who are the best coaches in history to wear these? Jimbo Fisher was brought up, is there anyone else?
*checks play-sheet three times to make sure he’s reading it correctly*
Sooo, are we not playing Stanford annually anymore? If it hasn’t been announced now I don’t think it’s happening. I don’t want to celebrate too early now but this game has no business being on the Notre Dame schedule every year anymore in this current climate of college football.
Stanford’s star receiver Elic Ayomanor was targeted 5 times for 16 yards. He’s a legit NFL talent who is just wasting away in this Stanford system with terrible quarterback play and a below average offensive line.
In fairness to Angeli, that pass the frosh dropped in the end zone was really a beauty. He does have a touch on the deep ball that RL hasn’t.
Jaylen Sneed was offside when he did get in. You have to wonder.
Although as I posted on Andy’s review I was glad to be there for this beatdown, it did feel like sort of final redemption from ’92 and those years when Stanford had amazing RBs (given that my former wife grew up a mile from Stanford Stadiu, I used to have to watch Toby Gerhardt and C McCaffery). I hadn’t seen that we weren’t renewing the series, and I suppose it’s time. Who might replace them for the season ending voyage to the West Coast in pursuit of quality California recruits?
And yes, it did feel like a spring game in the 4th Quarter, but tons of fun to see a lot of players you only read about get to come out. I thought the coaching staff handled that well. The crowd that did come back were super.
I guess we get Cal now in the ACC rotation? We could try to leverage that into the schedule in a favorable way for the west coast trip opposite USC.
Have to wonder if Sneed is going to put in the film room work to get better, or if he’s going to be just a special teams and third down “See QB, get QB” player. Hopefully he has a Botelho career arc where he finally puts it all together (minus the injury, of course) his senior year.
Hadn’t thought about the ACC rotation and Cal. Why not?!
Also SMU. Wouldn’t be terrible to spend some time in Texas to mine some of their talent, as well. Realistically, it shouldn’t be that difficult to have a rotation of Stanford, Cal & SMU road games every other year. (Maybe throw Miami and FSU in there if needed)
With the talk of the SEC/Big super conference it behooves the ACC to keep ND happy. A rotation of Stanford-Cal-SMU after Tday shouldn’t be difficult. Especially if SC would prefer playing ND at home earlier in the season. It could be something the Big demands.
Attention defensive recruits…If you don’t want to play for Al Golden, Al Washington, Max Bullough and Mike Mickens….you might want to rethink that.
Odds of recruits getting to play for Mike Mickens seem low, no? He’s got to be one of the most likely guys to leave the staff for a bigger opportunity, along (sadly) with McCullough
I prefer it when Notre Dame scores 42 more points than their opponent
It makes me say: yay!
In all seriousness a big time fun win beating Stanford and Purdue by a combined score of 115-14 is sick as hell
Got tickets to the GT game next week for my birthday so here’s hoping the week over week improvement continues
Yep, totally sick!
Happy birthday in advance!
As was mentioned in the instant reaction, it appears that Leonard missing the spring really hurt him, and and today we got the guy we were promised. Not a great passer, but good enough. Was pretty funny to see him outrun the D lineman on his big scramble. You could see that defender really thought he was going to run him down, but Leonard covers a lot of ground with that stride.
On the passing, nice to see the accuracy on the slants and short balls. Deep balls still a problem, more lead and Collins is easily in the end zone on the 53 yarder. Feels like that was about as underthrown as the NIU interception, just much worse coverage.
Also if he can throw more, he has to run less, and so I hope to be wrong about him not finishing the season due to injury too.
Do have to wonder if our young line will continue to improve or wear down. Knapp has done an amazing job all things considered, but feels like his physical talent ceiling is more right tackle. And if he’s the third best tackle next year behind Jagusah and Lambert, that would be a great problem to have.
Lambert was in for the 4th Q of course, and moves pretty well. Interesting speculation about Knapp.
I thought he was seen as a long-term guard? Or am I confusing him with another player?
Their coach was in a catchers squat all game. Dude’s legs must be shredded.
“James Rendell uncorked a 24-yard bomb in response.”
I see what you did there
I was hoping for the offense to break 40 or the defense to hold them under 10. After the first offensive and defensive series of the game, I thought there was about a 0% chance of either of those happening. Boy did they turn it on quick. What a fun game, even with the annoying weather break!