Rack your brain for a moment.
Maybe it was a given in the locker room who would start for Notre Dame at quarterback against Virginia Tech and USC, but there certainly wasn’t a consensus among media members or the Fighting Irish fan base.
Sophomore Drew Pyne relieved graduate student Jack Coan in back-to-back weeks against Wisconsin Sept. 25 and against Cincinnati Oct. 2. He moved the ball more effectively than Coan did in the first half of those respective games. The numbers backed that up. So did the scoreboards — both of them.
So, when Coan started against the Hokies Oct. 9, it was a bit of a surprise. Especially considering he was replaced for a third straight game, that time by true freshman Tyler Buchner. And like Pyne, Buchner operated the offense at a higher level than Coan.
Then everything changed in a span of two drives. Three minutes and three seconds of game time. Fourteen plays. One hundred-ten yards. Eleven points. One last-minute victory at Virginia Tech thanks to two incredibly efficient scoring drives from the guy who was benched in two straight games and injured in the one prior to those.
All that to say this: tip your cap to Coan, Notre Dame fans. One month ago, many of you thought there was no way on earth head coach Brian Kelly should start Coan against a top-10 Cincinnati team that has since risen to No. 2 in the country in some polls. And maybe y’all were right. Coan didn’t play well in that 24-13 loss to the Bearcats. Both Notre Dame touchdowns were scored with Pyne on the field.
How many Notre Dame fans could imagine Kelly trotting any signal-caller other than Coan onto the field for majority of the Irish’s offensive snaps in the final three games of the season? Coan’s comeback against Virginia Tech and his effectiveness against USC won him the job back outright. He validated it in a win over North Carolina.
Remember when Kelly said he wanted to avoid a “flavor of the week” type of situation with his quarterbacks? Maybe Coan should thank his head coach for having the wit to stick with him through thick and thin. But Coan should also thank himself for proving it to Kelly and the rest of the country that he was the man for the job.
"I know you'll laugh when I say this, but I didn't know I needed to be vindicated," Kelly said. "So maybe I don't listen enough to the people that were talking about it. Jack was the guy.
"And I don't mean that in any other way. How you could you be the head coach at Notre Dame if you listen to all of this stuff every day? I would jump off my roof. It's crazy. I think more than anything else we thought Jack was our best option to win, and we just needed to continue to work with him."
If Coan had come up short against Virginia Tech, maybe Kelly would have rolled out Buchner as the starter against USC. Maybe Pyne would have reentered the conversation. But that didn’t happen. And if Coan’s start against USC was another midseason audition of sorts, he passed that one, too. He didn’t blow anybody away with his numbers, but he led scoring drives and had a hand in another Notre Dame victory.
Quarterbacks fail midseason auditions all the time. Look what happened to Spencer Rattler at Oklahoma. He went from Heisman Trophy frontrunner to backing up a true freshman.
Allow for a personal anecdote for a moment to further prove that point. I covered Mississippi State the last three college football seasons. Twice I covered a Bulldogs team that took on a graduate transfer quarterback only for that quarterback to lose his starting status midway through the season. Tommy Stevens formerly of Penn State lost the job to true freshman Garrett Shrader. K.J. Costello formerly of Stanford lost the job to true freshman Will Rogers. Coan could have easily lost the job to Buchner or Pyne. But Kelly stayed with him, and Coan rewarded his head coach for that.
Coan isn’t going to win any major national awards. He might not even do enough to get selected in the 2022 NFL Draft. But he has done enough to keep Notre Dame in the top 15 of the Associated Press poll through the first eight weeks of the regular season. He could very well do enough to extend the Irish’s streak of double-digit win seasons to five.
Sure, Coan came to South Bend with visions of taking Notre Dame to the College Football Playoff in what would be the program’s third such berth in the last four seasons. That feat could be out of reach. The Irish checked in at No. 10 in the first playoff rankings of the season.
But if Coan continues to start through the end of the 2021 season, nobody is going to look back on the season that was and deem it to be a failure. It was trending that way when Coan was benched in back-to-back games.
He saved himself. He saved the season. And he should be commended for it.
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