Eleventh-ranked Notre Dame still has six games left to figure out if it has the right combination of components and the ability to improve to play their way back into the College Football Playoff picture.
Saturday night at Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, N.C., the Irish left no doubt that they have the heart.
The litany of imperfections that littered the runway to one of the most improbable and magical finishes in at least recent Notre Dame football history ended up being offset by the number of heroes who rose to the occasion in an uncanny 21-14 triumph over No. 17 Duke.
Like grad senior nose guard Howard Cross III, who ended any chance of an encore of heartache with his second forced fumble of the game and career-high 13th tackle while taking down Duke quarterback Riley Leonard for a sack on the Blue Devils’ final offensive possession.
And doing all of it with a severe sinus infection.
“There were three or four plays where I’m like, ‘I can’t breathe, and I don’t know what’s going on.’” Cross said. “I just kept going.
“I looked at my dad in the stands, which I do every game, and all I see is just, ‘Keep moving. If you wanna feel better, run it out.’”
The son of former NFL tight end Howard Cross Jr. did one better than just running it out a week after Ohio State’s last-minute drive, combined with ND’s coaching blunders at the goal line, resulted in a 17-14 home loss and turned the matchup with the highest-ranked Duke team to take the field in 29 seasons into, at the very least, a character-defining game.
In front of a frenzied crowd of 40,768, stuffed several hundred people beyond Wallace Wade’s listed capacity, Cross set a template for his teammates of how to transcend. As did quarterback Sam Hartman, on a night when some of his top receivers were hobbled.
And running back Audric Estimé, after being bottled up for most of the night. And tight end Mitchell Evans, to name a few.
“Our mentality: champions respond,” said Evans, who connected with Hartman on a 19-yard pass play in a late game-charging, perhaps season-altering, 95-yard scoring drive and finished with a career-high 134 receiving yards on six catches. “That’s kind of the role we took on this week. We didn’t back down, and we didn’t give up.”
And on Sunday, they’ll be able to simultaneously smile and grit their teeth while reviewing the imperfections that included a 3-for-15 conversion rate on third down, 12 penalties, and getting pushed around on both lines of scrimmage in the second half with Duke (4-1) rallying from a 13-0 third-quarter deficit to lead 14-13 in the fourth quarter.
“What we can’t do is let the outcome cloud our eyes from the mistakes we’ve made,” an otherwise elated Freeman said. “We have to make sure we’re as aggressive in cleaning up our mistakes and attacking our mistakes and learning from them and realizing why we made those mistakes, as we were last week.”
With Notre Dame’s most dependable wide receiver, Jayden Thomas, out with a hamstring injury, freshman sensation Jaden Greathouse a late scratch due to a tight hamstring of his own suffered late in the practice week, key backup Deion Colzie undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery this past week and sixth year-grad Matt Salerno still on the mend, Duke coach Mike Elko felt confident enough to lean into stopping ND’s run and taking his chances with Hartman and the passing game.
The Irish (5-1), in turn, labored to concoct sustained stretches of offense. They did score on their first drive of the game, but only because freshman running back Jeremiyah Love executed a fake punt to perfection for a 34-yard gain. Until ND’s final drive of the game, that stood as ND’s only double-digit-yard run.
Estimé covered the final six yards of that scoring drive. ND’s only other first-half points, a 35-yard field goal from Spencer Shrader, came on an Irish drive that netted minus-four yards, following an interception by Xavier Watts.
It was a seven-yard run on fourth down by Hartman, of all people, that led to a 45-yard field goal by Shrader on ND’s first drive of the second half — the only points Duke’s defense has given up this season in the third quarter. That made it 13-0 in favor of the Irish
But while Duke scrounged together enough offense behind QB Riley Leonard, a projected first-round NFL draft choice next spring, to go ahead 14-13 with 9:17 left in the game, Notre Dame punted on its next three drives after their field goal, two of those being three-and-outs.
A miscommunication in goal-line defense — again — provided Leonard with an insanely wide open wide receiver Jordan Moore for what looked like might hold up as the winning score.
But the Irish defense had its moments and, this week especially when it mattered. Leonard rushed for a game-high 88 yards on 18 carries, but in his 19th college start, the Irish held him to his second-lowest pass-efficiency rating (92.0). That translated to 12-of-27 for 134 yards and a TD with one interception.
And when Leonard drove Duke to the Irish 31 — mostly with his legs — inside of three minutes, it looked like the Blue Devils were poised to put the game away. Instead on third-and-four Watts and defensive end Nana Osafa-Mensah threw Duke running back Jordan Waters for a two-yard loss.
Duke then tried to draw Notre Dame offsides on fourth-and-6. But the Blue Devils ended up having Leonard pooch punt the ball to the Irish 5. There Hartman took over with 2:35 left, and the Irish promptly committed an illegal procedure penalty.
“When Sam Hartman’s your quarterback, you have a lot of faith,” Freeman said. “He’s been in those moments. He’s not a first-time quarterback. The moment wasn’t too big for him, and I don’t want to just give credit to one person, but the plays he made on that series were huge.”
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One of them came on third down and 10 from the Irish 16 still early in the drive. The Irish had failed on 10 third-down conversion attempts in a row when Evans caught his 19-yarder. That was followed by a 24-yard pass play to freshman Rico Flores Jr.
That gave ND the ball in Duke territory at the 41, with 1:17 left. But on the very next play, Irish wide receiver Tobias Merriweather was flagged for offensive pass interference, a 15-yard penalty that pushed Notre Dame back to its own 44.
The Irish made up nine yards over the next three plays, bringing up fourth-and-16 from the Duke 47.
“There’s not a lot of good calls for fourth and that long,” Hartman said.
So with Duke dropping eight defenders into coverage and no one open, Hartman ran. And picked up 17 yards. It was the third Irish fourth-down conversion of the game in three tries after two failed attempts against Ohio State,
“When you drop eight like that, you build out a five-underneath wall at the sticks, and you have a hard time believing that a kid can scramble for 16 yards,” Elko said. “I just have to go back and look to see what went wrong. It was hard to see live.
“You drop eight in that long yardage situation, because you think the scramble is out of play and you just try to flood the coverage. In hindsight, maybe we should have just kept pressuring.”
With the ball at the 30, Freeman was content to run Estimé up the gut and set up a long field goal try. Instead, the junior running back broke from the mosh pit at the line of scrimmage and outran the defense to the end zone.
A two-point conversion pass to Flores and 31 seconds later, the Irish walked out of Wallace Wade Stadium with their 30th straight regular-season win against ACC competition, and with an opportunity for No. 31 coming up next Saturday on the road against unbeaten Louisville (5-0).
Leonard, meanwhile, left the field on crutches after the sack by Cross, with a bye week coming up- for Duke before hosting NC State on Oct. 14.
Hartman had lost on this very field last Nov. 26 with Wake Forest, in what turned out to be his final regular-season game for the Demon Deacons. In that game, a 34-31 Duke win, Hartman threw for 347 yards, but Leonard amassed 391 passing yards. And he threw his fourth TD pass of the game with 2:04 left to rally the Blue Devils. Hartman’s final pass on the ensuing possession turned out to be an interception.
He has yet to throw one in a Notre Dame uniform, with his 145 attempts without a pick now the fourth-longest streak in school history. His final passing stat line this time was a more-modest 222 yards on 15-of-30 passing with no TD tosses. But he had a critical 23 rushing yards on six carries.
“The ability to pull that ball down and run for it, I truly believe in my heart he learned from last week on the fourth-and-1, when we thought we got it and we didn’t,” Freeman said. “There can’t be a ‘maybe’ in that situation. I don’t care if it’s fourth-and-1 or fourth-and-18, if you’re going to take off, you have to make sure you’re going to get the first down. And that’s what he did.”
Hartman also had a heavy heart about the venue for another reason — his late adopted brother, Demitri Allison. Allison committed suicide on Nov. 11, 2015 — two days before Sam’s Charlotte (N.C.) Davidson Day School was to play for a North Carolina football state championship. The Hartman family had taken Allison in when Sam was 12 after knowing him and his tough and worsening family situation for years.
“This was one of the last times I — last places — I saw my oldest brother,” Hartman said of Allison, a former college football player at Elon. “The last time I saw him play back in circa like 2014, Duke played Elon.
“We have a picture, which reminds me to get a picture, just standing out there. It’s a lot of emotions that you can feel. I just feel so grateful for this team right now. We battled all night.”
And then, as Hartman often does, he pushed the spotlight away.
“The defense, man,” Hartman continued. “[Defensive coordinator Al] Golden, I just want to buy him a Ferrari or something … He just kept us in this game, and that defense just played their hearts out and gave us that chance.
“Obviously, the last play of the game, to get the stop, just surreal [and] so proud. These games aren’t easy to win, going on the road against a really tough ACC opponent. Just super, super happy and super happy going home with a dub.”
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