Column: Notre Dame Football Looking For 10 Again
An interesting thread recently made the rounds on the “The Lou Somogyi Board” at BlueandGold.com where subscribers debated whether Notre Dame can eclipse the nine total-win mark this season that many of the online betting sites (including DraftKings.com) have set for Irish regular-season victories in 2021.
After four straight seasons for Notre Dame securing at least 10 wins on its way to 41 victories in its last 46 regular-season games since 2016, of course the Irish will win at least 10 games again in 2021, right? Easy money?
Well, as veteran ESPN analyst Lee Corso often says during his prediction segment for the popular Saturday morning preview show, Game Day, “Not so fast my friend!”
Every successful college football coach each offseason faces the challenges of roster replacement, assistant departures and support staff shuffling in the same way Brian Kelly has and will this offseason. It’s an annual occupational hazard.
That said, a massive off-season to-do list for Kelly that includes replacing Ian Book and four offensive lineman on offense, along with Butkus Award winning linebacker Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah on defense provide the biggest reloading challenge of Kelly’s 12 seasons on the job at Notre Dame.
In all, nine former Irish were taken in the 2021 NFL Draft, the most in 27 years.
And on his coaching staff, Kelly must also oversee a defensive coordinator transition from Clark Lea to Marcus Freeman.
The challenges Kelly faces before and during the 2021 season are not unlike what Lou Holtz had in 1994 when the legendary Irish coach lost 10 players to the NFL Draft from his 1993 team — including Jerome Bettis, Aaron Taylor and Bryant Young — as well as both his offensive coordinator (Skip Holtz) and his defensive coordinator (Rick Minter).
After going 64-9-1 in the six seasons from 1988-93 — a stretch that included a national championship and a program-record 23-game winning streak — not even Holtz could survive the staff and roster churn. His Irish went 6-5-1 in 1994 and Holtz retired two years later.
Kelly accepts and recognizes his situation and challenges, and so far he refuses to lay any groundwork that this could be a rebuilding year.
“I don’t have a unique problem at Notre Dame,” Kelly explained. “Everybody’s got the same issue.”
Obviously, assessing the quality of a future schedule more than three months in advance leaves plenty of room for error.
That said, with consecutive games from Sept. 25 to Oct. 30 against Wisconsin at Soldier Field in Chicago; home against Cincinnati, which finished No. 8 in the final 2020 College Football Playoff rankings; at Virginia Tech; home against USC, which played for a Pac-12 title last season; and home against North Carolina, a program on the rise under head coach Mack Brown, navigating this minefield with a rebuilt offensive line and a new quarterback make 10 wins a high bar to reach in 2021.
All but Virginia Tech along that five-game stretch of teams are included in most preseason top-20 rankings. And three quarterbacks within that group rank among the top-six signal-callers in the country, according to ESPN NFL Draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr.: North Carolina’s Sam Howell (No. 2), Cincinnati’s Desmond Ridder (No. 6) and USC’s Kedon Slovis (No. 6).
Again, evaluating regular-season win total predictions, schedule rankings and early point spreads in late May can look silly by the time games are actually played September through November.
But to win more than nine games with so many new faces in new places, and against a schedule that could prove much more difficult than it appeared at first glance would provide more evidence that Kelly has this program the healthiest it has been since 1993.
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