Analysis: What Notre Dame can glean from Georgia's latest championship run
Former Notre Dame wide receiver Robby Toma’s late-night Twitter commentary on Georgia’s 65-7 steamrolling of TCU felt more self-deprecating than introspective.
Unwittingly, it was a little bit of both.
“Thank you TCU…I don’t feel SO bad now,” he posted shortly after the Bulldogs put the finishing touches Monday night on not only the most lopsided national title game outcome in college football history, but the most-decisive margin in any bowl game ever.
This from a player who laughed off and put up with his name being misspelled on official Irish rosters and depth charts for a couple of years (as Roby).
The implied reference in Toma’s tweet was Alabama’s 42-14 mauling of the 2012 Irish a decade ago in the BCS National Championship Game, in the final game for Toma in an ND uniform. It was also the last time Notre Dame spent time at the No. 1 spot in the polls, and that after a nearly two-decade absence.
Those who followed fighting for the Irish in the ensuing years were tasked with closing the gap that was exposed that January night in Miami Gardens, Fla. Then-Irish coach Brian Kelly and, more recently, successor Marcus Freeman have used clues from the 10 national title games since in part to decode how to make that happen.
So, here are the three most important takeaways as Notre Dame looks to build off its 9-4 record in 2022 and No. 18 final ranking in both the AP and coaches polls.
► Wake Forest transfer Sam Hartman beginning spring-semester classes next Tuesday and winter workouts with his new Irish teammates shortly thereafter should be and has been celebrated — for what it could turn into in the fall.
There are five key statistical metrics that teams, which reach the national championship game and win on college football’s biggest stage, tend to excel. And pass efficiency remains as relevant as ever, perhaps ever more so.
The others are rush offense, rush defense, total defense and turnover margin.
Inclusive of the 2012 Bama-ND title game, 10 of the last 11 national champs ranked 18th or better in team pass efficiency. Seven of the 11 were sixth or better.
You don’t need to necessarily have a quarterback with five-star recruiting pedigree, but you need a QB who plays like one.
Hartman finished 15th nationally in pass efficiency in 2022 with a rating of 159.4. That’s one spot ahead of TCU’s Max Duggan (159.2), the 2022 Heisman Trophy runner-up at 16, and four spots below Georgia’s Stetson Bennett (161.2), another Heisman finalist and title game MVP. On top of that, they’re all dynamic playmakers, not simply game managers in achieving those efficiency marks.
So, if Hartman, as a sixth-year veteran, simply plays in 2023 at the level he did at Wake in 2022, he satisfies one very important ingredient the Irish have long been lacking. Incidentally, none of those three was a Rivals250 player coming out of high school, much less a five-star prospect.
The Irish ranked a respectable, but hardly elite, 43rd in team pass efficiency in both seasons in which they reached the College Football Playoff (2018 and 2020), and were again blown out once they got there.
And in 2012? Of the 50 teams that have played for the college football national championship in the 25 years of the BCS/Playoff Era, Notre Dame’s team pass-efficiency ranking of 74th that year — with the tag team of sophomore Everett Golson and junior Tommy Rees — is the worst of them, and by more than 30 spots.
Meanwhile, Bennett’s, Duggan’s and Hartman’s 2022 marks all fall between the Notre Dame single-season school record (161.4) shared by Jimmy Clausen (2009) and Bob Williams (1949), and the next rung down in the ND record book, Brady Quinn’s 2005 season (158.4).
For the record, Notre Dame’s standing in 2022 in the key metrics were 32nd (PE), 35th (RO), 37th (RD), 22 (TD) and 85th (TOM), trending upward in all five in the second half of the season.
► Elite pass efficiency alone is not enough. Defense still matters.
TCU came close to checking the rush offense and turnover margin boxes as well, but its rushing defense ranking (79th) and total defense ranking (95th) finally caught up with Horned Frogs Monday night and then some.
Both marks are the worst for a team reaching the national title game in the 25-year BCS/Playoff Era. The low-mark for run defense for a national champ is 40th in the past 25 years. And going back ever further, to ND’s 1988 national championship season, only three teams weren’t 25th or better in that key stat category.
The same goes for total defense back to 1988 (at least), with 2020 Alabama (32nd), 2019 LSU (31st) and 2010 Auburn (60th) as the outliers. Each of those teams, though, had the Heisman Trophy winner from that respective season on their offense.
Georgia’s 2022 title team ranked first in rushing defense and 10th in total defense, and its 2021 national champs were second in both categories.
That helped account for the Bulldogs’ Monday night statistical dominance — in total yards (589-188), rushing yards (254-36), first downs (32-9), third-down efficiency (9-13 to 2-11) … you get the idea.
All of which stirs angst among large portions of the Notre Dame fan base, as they extrapolate what that might mean for their own team’s football future, and caution for those who put together those “ridiculously-too-early” top 25s for 2023, with the Irish generally ranging from 10th to 14th, even with Hartman at QB.
While Notre Dame was moving in the right direction at the end of the season defensively, it needs to be better in 2023 to get to the College Football Playoff — and better right out of the gate.
With the Irish defensive players having to adapt to three different defensive coordinators and three different schemes in three years in 2022, a little continuity may go a long way in ’23. And it’s reasonable to assume coordinator Al Golden will have a more nuanced approach to the college game in his second year back in the collegiate ranks after spending the six prior to coming to ND in the NFL — and two of those on offense.
That’s the potentially good news.
The scary unknown is the ceiling and depth of the ND defensive line and how that might play into pass rush, run defense and total defense next season.
The Irish are still trying to add from the transfer portal, with the start of spring-semester classes less than a week away. There are high-ranked prospects coming out of high school on the roster already — eight Rivals250 players among 17 D-linemen (four among the 10 rovers and linebackers) — but most of those are among the youngest players on the defensive roster.
Then again, of the big three D-linemen leaving the roster — All-American Isaiah Foskey, and twins Jayson and Justin Ademilola — only Jayson was a Rivals250 prospect coming out of high school.
So, player development, at that position group especially under second-year D-line coach Al Washington, becomes a critical piece this offseason toward 2023’s bottom line.
► Freeman’s second offseason as head football coach will look much different than his first, and probably a lot less hectic.
In looking at the two title-game teams for cues in how they were built, Kirby Smart is a defensive guy and a dynamic recruiter. His first complete recruiting cycle as a head coach (2017) resulted in a top five class at Georgia as did every one since then — including three straight at No. 1 (2018-2020). The Bulldogs had just six transfers (two of which were jucos) on their roster in 2022.
Sonny Dykes is an offensive guy and a veteran head coach in his first season with the Horned Frogs. His predecessor at TCU, Gary Patterson, didn’t recruit a single top 20 class involving any of the players on the 2022 TCU roster. Meanwhile, there are 37 former transfers, 12 of whom came from the junior college ranks.
Notre Dame doesn’t match either model, but it’s far closer to the Georgia template and Freeman can learn much more from tracing Smart’s head coaching evolution.
His teams were elite defensively from his very first season. No. 16 in total defense in Smart’s debut season of 2016 was the worst statistically among his seven teams. His first Georgia team offensively was not impressive at all — 102nd in scoring offense, 87th in total offense, 98th in pass efficiency.
But there was tremendous growth from year 1 to year 2 in his involvement and understanding of offensive football concepts. And since Todd Monken came aboard as offensive coordinator in 2020, Georgia’s improvement on offense, and subsequently Smart’s, has been seismic.
The Bulldogs finished 2022 fifth nationally in scoring and total offense, sixth in team pass efficiency (which includes reps from the backups) and 19th in rush offense.
Freeman’s offseason to-do list is extensive, but there’s an opportunity to immerse himself in offensive football, to eventually better affect the outcomes of games rather than delegating a sizable chunk of it, which Freeman can’t afford to pass on.
Knowing how open to and thorough he is about self-scouting, self-correction and self-awareness, it’s a good bet he’s already taking significant steps in that direction.
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