Friday Five: Irish’s 2021 WR Rotation Heading In An Upperclass Direction?
Offensive coordinator Tommy Rees emitted one reminder after another in his Thursday press conference that Notre Dame’s 2021 identity is not going to be a rehash of 2020's.
Outside of some RPOs (run-pass options) in the three-minute practice videos Notre Dame provides, specifics of the philosophy aren’t too clear yet. Rees himself won’t have a finished product until deep into fall camp.
Among those tweaks could be more time in 11 personnel or — gasp! — even some four-receiver sets. Head coach Brian Kelly mused about the latter earlier this month. To do both, Notre Dame needs more juice at receiver than it had in 2020. Right now, the Irish are looking at a trio of seniors-to-be who posted fewer than 200 total yards last season to provide it.
“Receiver, to me, it’s about more than anything else getting [Joe] Wilkins, [Braden] Lenzy and [Lawrence] Keys at the next level,” Kelly said last week.
The lone bankable asset practicing this spring is slot receiver Avery Davis. Fellow senior Kevin Austin Jr., last year’s buzzed-about breakout candidate until two foot fractures derailed him, will get every chance to be a go-to target when he is healthy this fall. But right now, those three Kelly mentioned plus Davis are taking most of the first-team spring practice reps.
Yes, it’s April, but it’s not the best sign for Jordan Johnson, sophomore Xavier Watts and top-50 freshman Lorenzo Styles Jr. earning major 2021 roles. They’ve taken zero visible first-team 11-on-11 reps in the 12 practice videos. Johnson missed a few practices before he was spotted in Thursday’s video, which Rees said will “slow his development down.”
That’s not to say the youngsters have gotten zero looks or can’t fight their way into the rotation before Sept. 5. The gap between them and that senior trio has four-plus months to close, but right now, it feels like a chasm more than a crack.
Lessening the panic for the time being, though, is Rees’ and Kelly’s indications the seniors have seized their opportunity.
“Lawrence Keys has had as good a spring as anyone on offense,” Rees said. “He has shown the ability to stretch the field and make explosive plays. That’s one of the things we challenged him with.
“Braden Lenzy in the last couple days has really come on. I’m excited about the trust we’re building there for him to be in an expanded role.”
The senior class deserves a public showcase like the Blue-Gold Game before they’re written off as inadequate primary weapons. At the same time, some skepticism is understandable. Lenzy, Keys, Wilkins and Austin have battled injuries in their careers. They’ve struggled with consistency. They have been in the program for a while, but have middling production between them.
If Notre Dame is going to rely mainly on them this year, at least one has to have a Miles Boykin-type senior explosion.
2. Marcus Freeman
As Kelly’s season-ending press conference confirmed, The Gap is a fickle subject.
But Marcus Freeman leaned into it.
A good sign from the man who was brought in to help close The Gap with his recruiting activity as much as his defensive coordinating.
“I think at times, it can be easy to recruit at Notre Dame because you're Notre Dame,” Freeman said. “There's a certain group of kids that would die to come to Notre Dame. For us to continue to elevate and be national champions, to be able to close that gap with Alabama, we have to continue to acquire some of the best football players in the country.
“Those guys might not always be dying to come to Notre Dame, but if we understand they're the right fit and we do our research and they can be successful here at Notre Dame - our job is to convince them.”
In essence, Freeman isn’t limiting himself to making sure players who are “Notre Dame kids” come to Notre Dame. Such parameters will keep Notre Dame at its high-level but shy-of-championship-timber status. He’s taking aim at anyone and trying to make any player from any background see his point of view. That’s how to push upward in the recruiting rankings and shorten The Gap.
3. Explosives...And WRs, Again
Asked about his offense’s search for explosive plays, Rees offered a slice of wisdom.
“The biggest farce going is to create explosive plays, every throw has to be 55 yards,” he said. “That’s not really the case. You can watch whoever you want, a lot of those explosive plays come when you create opportunities for your best players to have space and be in a one-on-one opportunity.”
The last game he participated in sure supports him. Alabama hung 7.9 yards per play and 9.9 yards per pass on Notre Dame’s defense with quarterback Mac Jones attempting just two passes that traveled farther than 20 yards past the line of scrimmage. Jones threw almost twice as many behind the line (13) as he did 10-plus yards downfield (seven).
Of course, he had the Heisman winner, a running back who averaged 9.9 yards per catch and a tight end who averaged 15.9 yards per reception at his disposal.
Potential 2021 Irish starting quarterback Jack Coan’s deep passing is a strength, but Notre Dame won’t get all its chunk yardage via shot plays. It will have to create space. And here’s where the receiver question and the jonesing for Johnson and Styles to play comes up. They’re top-50 prospects who the game’s most explosive teams recruited and aren’t blocked on the depth chart by many proven commodities.
It’s plausible for these outcomes to happen: Lenzy is healthy and puts his game-breaking speed to use, Austin is dynamic downfield and in space, Keys is a field-stretcher and can make defenders miss, Davis keeps his 8.0 yards-after-catch per catch with a larger volume and Wilkins is slipperier than expected.
But how likely is it all of those occur? Is it any more unlikely the opposite happens and they provide more of the same? Rees’ emphasis on creating space and matchups is a needed one, but it’s hard to say we know what the receiver position can do in those spots right now.
4. Rees, Again
Let’s go to another Rees highlight.
“This system is one where we’re always going to play to our strengths,” Rees said. “We’re not handing them a playbook and saying, ‘Hey, you’re fitting into a peg.’ That’s not what we’re about. We’re going to evaluate what our strengths are, going to evaluate where we need to improve and that’s how we’re going to build the offense.”
He’s a 28-year-old coordinator with one year of experience running an offense. Last year was never his finished product or long-term identity plan. Any idea he wouldn’t try to evolve from it wasn’t true. The question is how successful he will be in evolving with the pieces at his disposal and the unknowns that need solving.
5. Lou Somogyi
The venerable Lou Somogyi resonated with many of you readers and Notre Dame fans because of his talent, fairness and boundless wisdom on the subject he covered.
He stood out as a coworker and friend because of his character.
Pick a positive trait, and he had it. Patience. Grace. The purest of kind hearts. The ability to see the absolute best in everyone he met, even if it took some digging. He was preconditioned to lift people up.
What I’ll especially remember from the 14 months I spent around him is his belief in me. I’ve never met anyone in our industry – or maybe outside it – who has believed in my skills and staying power more than Lou did. He would go out of his way to prop me up, tell me he liked a story I wrote or tell me I can have a lengthy career in sports media.
Frankly, there are plenty of moments where I wonder if those are true. It’s no stretch to say he believed in me more than I believe in myself. That’s who he was. He inspired you to keep going when self-doubt or the grind of our job hits. His presence made you want to do better in life.
You could see it in his work too. He could find a captivating angle and write 1,000 words on the 85th man on the roster because he believed that player still was worthy of mention and didn’t want to write him off. It wouldn’t be a labor for him either. It’d be a task he would’ve already dove into by the time you asked.
Lou set a standard for having passion for a job, taking pride in the product and riding the bumps in an often-turbulent industry without ever breaking his optimistic disposition. There were countless all-nighters, wire-to-wire work days and 50-something page magazines for which he supplied at least half the content. He complained about it zero times.
And if you invested the effort to read him or had the pleasure of spending any amount of time around him, he brightened your life.
The days are dimmer without him.
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