The solace for those Notre Dame fans who held their noses when Michigan took home the 2023 college football national championship on Jan. 8 was how similar that finished product seemed to resemble Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman’s recurring description of his blueprint.
Specifically encouraging was the notion that a more Jurassic style of football was not only pragmatically stylish, but perhaps the new preferred template to finish a season No. 1?
That’s something the Irish haven’t done since Freeman was about to celebrate his third birthday, at the end of the 1988 season.
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The 2023 Wolverines were offensive line/defensive line-driven in 2023, were a pedestrian 81st nationally in passing yards per game — 79 spots lower than the team they beat by three touchdowns last week in Houston — Washington.
Michigan also swam in the same recruiting pool as the Irish in recent years and outperformed ND only twice in the Rivals recruiting class rankings in the six cycles of contributing players on this field this season.
Both programs have to recruit to a similar stigmatized Northern climate. Neither team is transfer portal-reliant, nor non-competitive or extravagant in the NIL space.
But Michigan statistically looked every bit a traditional and trendy champ where it mattered most, being elite in four of the five time-tested metrics at which title teams tend to excel or at least show competence in: Total defense (1st nationally), run defense (5th), turnover margin (1st), pass efficiency (8th) and rushing offense (54th). The Wolverines enhanced that by finishing in a three-way tie for the nation’s least-penalized team.
The perhaps-surprising/certainly-perplexing connection to a Notre Dame team that finished 10-3 and 14th in both major polls is that the Irish statistically looked more like a playoff team using those same measures than certainly national runner-up Washington, and you could argue semifinalists Texas and Alabama as well.
Expanding the key statistical categories to 19 — nine offensive, nine defensive and turnover margin, the Irish ranked first or second among themselves and the four playoff qualifiers in more than half of those (10) and lower than third out ot five in only one — fourth in third-down defense, but a still-respectable 29th nationally.
Additionally, the 2023 Irish statistical profile was superior to the 2012 Irish team (see chart) that reached the BCS National Championship Game, and Notre Dame’s 2020 and 2018 playoff teams that fell off the big stage in the semis in a similar manner to the 2012 national runners-up.
So, why wasn’t Notre Dame a playoff team in 2023 instead of a Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl bully? And what do the Irish have to do differently in 2024 as they start to build toward that end in the meeting rooms this month and on the field in spring practice beginning in March?
The answer to the first part of the equation showed up prominently in upset road losses to Louisville and Clemson and to a lesser extent in the near-miss at home against Ohio State on Sept. 23. In those games, the Irish were so far removed offensively from their statistical profile, they were unrecognizable.
Against the Cardinals and Clemson alone, Notre Dame combined for a minus-5 differential in turnovers (8-3), and the nation’s No. 9 team in pass efficiency over 13 games (165.4) put up a 115.6 mark against Louisville and a 70.9 clunker against Clemson.
The showing against Louisville is the equivalent of a 113th-place finish out of 130 teams spread over an entire season. What the Irish did against Clemson in pass efficiency was worse than the No. 130 team in that stat category, Iowa, did in 2023 — by roughly 20 ratings points.
There can be a natural dip stat-wise against stronger teams on one’s schedule, but in these instances, it was more like a crater. And the Irish defense played well enough to win.
The largest contributing factors all played off each other — transfer QB Sam Hartman navigating a new offensive system after five years of familiarity, a wide receiver corps exposed by a steep learning curve and persistent injuries, an offensive line that hiccupped too often for its collective talent level, and an offensive coordinator in since-departed Gerad Parker who couldn’t camouflage his inexperience as a fixer.
Parker left in mid-December to become the head coach at Troy. And now this is successor Mike Denbrock’s mess to clean up.
And also his expertise.
After presiding of the nation’s No. 1 total offense and scoring offense last season at LSU, Denbrock begins his third tour of duty needing to install a new offense and simultaneously conduct a quarterback competition between incoming Duke transfer Riley Leonard and Sun Bowl standout Steve Angeli, coming off the highest-rated starting debut by an Irish quarterback in five decades.
And by not turning sophomore-to-be Kenny Minchey and early enrolled prodigy CJ Carr into spring afterthoughts.
And coaching his own position group — tight ends — and helping O-Line coach Joe Rudolph assess some attractive but mostly inexperienced offensive line options. And sifting through wide receiver roles and bodies with new receivers coach Mike Brown.
The good news is there’s some built-in chemistry there with Denbrock, Brown, QBs coach Gino Guidugli and Freeman all having overlapped at Cincinnati (cornerbacks coach Mike Mickens too).
The two biggest spring priorities, though, toward coaxing Notre Dame’s playoff-esque metrics into an actual playoff team is getting the offensive line right and evolving Leonard as a passer, assuming that he wins the job.
In the playoff era teams have won national titles with five-star QB recruits and three stars or below. There have been champs with top 10 rankings in passing yards per game, but more often teams ranked 50 or below, bottoming out with Alabama at 91st in 2017 — with Jalen Hurts as the starting QB that season and freshman Tua Tagovailoa coming off the bench and winning championship game MVP honors.
There have been both dual-threat QBs and pocket passers hoist the trophy with the cumbersome name and Dr. Pepper as its sponsor.
The constant is passing efficiency, in which each of the last five national champs all ranked in the top 10, and the lowest among the 26 national titlists in the Playoff/BCS years was 37th by LSU in 2007.
The lowest pass-efficiency ranking by a team that reached the national title game, incidentally, was Notre Dame, which was 74th in 2012.
Leonard’s rating in the last season in which he was fully healthy and played a full season — 2022 — was an average mark of 141.1. And yet he ranked higher that season than, notably, Quinn Ewers, Will Rogers, DJ Uiagalelei, Tyler Van Dyke, Spencer Rattler, Aidan O’Connell and Cam Ward.
It was also better than 2023 Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels of LSU and Heisman finalists Michael Penix Jr. of Washington and Bo Nix of Oregon concocted in 2021 in the final seasons at their pre-transfer schools — Arizona State, Indiana and Auburn, respectively.
The quarterbacks Denbrock has worked with since he became a full-time offensive play-caller in the 2014 Music City Bowl all have been dual threats. Everett Golson and Malik Zaire at ND in the bowl win over LSU, DeShone Kizer — who went on to become a second-round NFL Draft pick — in 2015-16, Hayden Moore on a rebuilding Cincinnati team in 2017, Desmond Ridder at UC from 2018-21 and Daniels in 2022-23 at LSU.
Moore went on to play briefly in the CFL. Ridder was a third-round NFL Draft pick. Daniels will be drafted this spring.
Leonard’s running skill set alone helps give Notre Dame one antidote to combat the eight-men-in-a-box defensive tactic that Parker never fully solved.
If Denbrock can add the accurate downfield passing game dimension, the whispers about Leonard being a high-round NFL Draft prospect would become statements and those Michigan/Notre Dame comparisons when it comes to playoff prowess would gain more traction.
And how well does this mesh with Denbrock’s vision for what an Irish offense should look like?
“He’s a team guy. That’s what I respect about Mike Denbrock,” Freeman said back on Dec 28, the day before the Irish dismantled Oregon State in the Sun Bowl and the day after Denbrock introduced himself to his new team.
“He is a competitive person. He finds a way to get his best players involved in what it’s going to take to have success. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, here’s my system, let’s recruit to it.’ It’s, ‘OK, who are the best players and how do we get them the ball? How do we find ways to do things that fit their skill set?’
“It’s important just to get leadership for our offense. Anytime you lose leadership, there’s uncertainty about the vision for the future. It was so important to get that position filled with the No. 1 guy that I wanted. … He was my top choice. To get him here is tremendous.”
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