Analyzing Notre Dame defensive struggles in Marcus Freeman’s Irish DC debut
One game doesn’t tell the story of an entire season. Especially the first one.
Notre Dame quarterback Jack Coan and the Irish passing attack was great in the season-opening, 41-38 win over Florida State, but it still has 11 regular-season games to prove that the 366 passing yards and four touchdowns through the air were not an anomaly.
On the flip side, junior running back Kyren Williams and sophomore Chris Tyree will be out to prove running for a combined 3.2 yards per carry on a healthy 25 attempts was not their status quo. That was not as advertised, but that duo's body of work from last season would suggest it was an outlier performance that will be greatly improved upon going forward.
And so, switch over to the other side of the ball and look at first-year Notre Dame defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman. His unit allowed 442 total yards to the Seminoles, 264 of which came on the ground at 5.5 yards per pop. Is that an aberration or a sign of things to come?
Freeman’s defense at Cincinnati allowed as many yards in a single game as Notre Dame did on Sunday just once last season. Georgia racked up 449 in the Peach Bowl. No other team eclipsed 400. No team rushed for 5.5 yards per carry against Freeman’s 2020 Bearcats, either. Tulsa tallied the best mark in that category at 5.4. Next best was Army at 4.2. The average was 3.2
What’s the point, here? This isn’t Cincinnati anymore. And the opponent wasn’t Austin Peay or Easy Carolina. This was Notre Dame versus Florida State. The game has changed for Freeman. The players have, too. Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly thought that might have had much to do with the Irish’s defensive struggles.
“Well, you get to know your personnel better,” Kelly said when asked what Freeman can learn from the narrow win over FSU. “You know what you can and can't do. You know there are some things that, 'OK, I got to be really careful making some of these calls in these situations.’”
Those were Kelly's initial thoughts on the matter immediately after the game. Twelve hours later, after he had sleepless time to assess the situation in greater depth, he said it might not have been an issue of Freeman knowing his personnel as much as the personnel itself not playing assignment-sound football.
"Let me just take you to where we were defensively last year," Kelly said. "Essentially the structure of the defense was, your position by virtue of where you played, your role was you always had that gap. That's what you do. You have that gap.
"This defense, six different players have that gap depending on what the call is. It's the corner. It's the safety. It's the end. So when you're moving, it changes what your responsibility is. It requires all 11 players to be locked in and focused every single snap. And it puts you in a position where you have to make that tackle. You're putting all of those players in a position where they have to make those plays."
Freeman didn't do himself any favors employing a three-man front Florida State was content to run all over en route to erasing an 18-point deficit in the fourth quarter. Notre Dame abandoned its four-down looks, and it paid the price for that on the Seminoles' 264 rushing yards — by far more than Freeman's Cincinnati defense allowed in any game last season.
But it wasn’t a Notre Dame clinic on tackling form, either. That's putting it lightly, and it's concerning considering the offseason is when technique and fundamentals are supposed to be nailed down.
But with the athletes Notre Dame has, it’s not unreasonable to think that can be fixed rather easily once the collective lightbulb goes off for the Irish under Freeman's guidance. Kelly truly believes it was a mindset mishap rather than a rash of uncorrectable errors.
"We got back into this, 'OK, we're going to layer this off. I'm going to try not to make a mistake. We're going to keep it in front of us' [mindset], and that's not the way we want to play," Kelly said. "We want to play with havoc on our defense. We did that early on, and we kind of fell back on our old way of thinking. Marcus is going to get that turned. Hard to turn it in week one. We'll get it turned, and it'll be fun to watch."
Freeman trusted every player to make plays by simply asking them to stick to the game plan, but not all of them followed through like Coan did for offensive coordinator Tommy Rees. Senior safety DJ Brown missed a tackle on Florida State’s 89-yard rushing touchdown, for instance.
Fellow senior safety Houston Griffith was left on an island with a Florida State speedster out of the slot. The Seminoles’ running-back-turned-wide-receiver got the best of him, burned him down the sideline and caught a 60-yard touchdown pass.
Those things happen in the first year of a new system. And when they do, especially early in the season, Freeman finds out what formations he can and can’t call with the players he has. Maybe he entrusted too many individual responsibilities to players who couldn't handle them this early in the season. Maybe he has to dial it back a bit until they're ready to be fully unleashed, say, at the end of September.
It's one thing to speculate on the composition of a defense and the understanding it has of the scheme from scrimmages and offseason practices. It's another thing to see what it looks like against a true opponent. Sunday was a learning curve in many ways for Freeman and the Notre Dame defense.
The list of those who thought Coan would go out and break Rees' program record for passing yards in a season opener probably wasn’t a long one. The list of those who thought Notre Dame would struggle as mightily as it did to tackle was probably on the shorter side too.
Do those things level themselves? Does Coan come down to earth a bit while the Irish defense increases its production? That's probably more likely than Coan continuing to light up every defense while the Notre Dame defense gets lit up itself. But the reality likely lies somewhere in the middle.
Coan might be better than most thought while the Notre Dame defense could be a little worse than originally prognosticated in large part because of the transition from Clark Lea's system to Freeman's. But again, the truth in both situations won't manifest itself in one night. These are ever-evolving circumstances.
Notre Dame has time to work the kinks out. It won a game in which it allowed more total yards and first downs to the opposition than it gained itself. That’s not a sustainable formula for success, but it lets the Irish know that when those statistics turn the other way around then Notre Dame will be in pretty good shape.
Kelly is adamant that will happen. So is his best defensive player.
“First game in a new defense, I think we played well when we were really needed,” junior safety Kyle Hamilton said. “I think we have a long way to go, and we’re going to get a lot better. This was only a start for us.”
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