How Brian Kelly’s Embrace Of What’s Next Gave Notre Dame A Jolt
Brian Kelly broke free from the coachspeak chains. In his postgame remarks after Notre Dame’s demolition of Pitt Oct. 24, he leaned right into the message he fed to his team all week: The Irish should look ahead on their schedule. Specifically to Nov. 7.
It even caught a few players by surprise.
“They’re always preaching, ‘What’s important now,’” safety Kyle Hamilton said Tuesday. “But he had more of a ‘What’s important next’ mindset and told us we need to step our game up and that we are in fact a top-four team in the country.”
Kelly went there not to overlook Pitt and this week’s opponent, Georgia Tech, but to hammer home Clemson’s visit to South Bend is fast approaching. And to make clear the first four games weren’t good enough to give Notre Dame much of a chance at toppling the Tigers from No. 1.
Kelly is not naïve to think his players are unconcerned with the game’s magnitude. There’s a schedule in a team meeting room they see every day. It’s human nature to look ahead.
Instead of trying to push back on unavoidable tendencies, Kelly turned them into a motivation tool. Up the play and there’s a chance. Don’t and there’s not. Win that game, and Notre Dame’s footing on the national championship track it desires gets firmer. Lose it, and the Irish will be knocked backward like a sideswiped bumper car.
“It was the right message to get guys to understand that game has been circled on the list for a while and is an extremely important game,” quarterback Ian Book said. “The guys are extremely excited for it. That’s why you come to Notre Dame to play in huge games like that. We have an opportunity to go out there and play our best. It’s something you see on the schedule, see it circled.”
Added Kelly: “That was implicit in that conversation without having to say, ‘Hey guys, in a couple weeks, we have to play Clemson, wink, wink, wink.’”
Notre Dame can’t control some of the reasons Clemson will be favored – like the Tigers’ overall talent and likely top draft pick quarterback – but it left Pittsburgh looking like a team that has a shot at a win. A passing offense awoke and delivered chunk plays. Notre Dame was productive on the ground when it needed to be against a stout defense. Both of those are ingredients in whatever the recipe is for a win in 11 days.
A 42-point win speaks for itself. Notre Dame did plenty well. It had an edge. A strut in its step. A desire to prove to themselves and to the nation that No. 3 ranking isn’t a balloon inflated by good-but-not-dominant wins against middling Power Five teams straying too close to an open door of a butcher shop.
“It hyped us up a little bit,” Hamilton said of Kelly’s change in tone. “We stopped going into games thinking, ‘OK, let’s get a win this week one week at a time.’ He has confidence in us and gave off the message that we’re a good team and we’re trying to win games, but we’re trying to win games by a lot and dominate other teams.
“His message put something in our minds saying that 12-7 wins over Louisville, we need to do better than that and we are better than that. We showed it last week and hopefully we continue on this week.”
The Irish are 19.5-point favorites over 2-4 Georgia Tech on Halloween, a favorable setup to flex their muscle once again and head into Clemson on the ideal trajectory. If last week was about lighting the flames, this one is about throwing more gas on them. Or as Kelly put it, “continue to ascend.”
That means reaffirming the impressive day against Pitt wasn’t a one-off, that the apparent long-awaited synergy between Book and his receivers is here to stay and a defense that doubled its season turnover total can generate takeaways with more frequency. Heightened pass-rush productivity is surely at the top of Kelly’s wish list.
But above all, Notre Dame’s passing offense needed to be more of a threat to have a chance at a title, and therein a victory over Clemson. Book admitted to his frustration after a 106-yard game against Louisville, the lowest single-game output in his 28 career starts. He missed reads he shouldn’t miss, he said.
He turned around and averaged 19.5 yards per pass. He pushed the ball. He trusted his receivers, particularly grad transfer Ben Skowronek and freshman tight end Michael Mayer. Book threw the pass on Skowronek’s 73-yard touchdown before Skowronek even looked back for it and tossed a 14-yard touchdown to Mayer in traffic after initially missing him.
Book’s performance, a now-healthy Skowronek’s emergence and a growing role for Mayer took some of the sting out of expected top receiver Kevin Austin’s season-ending injury and another hamstring issue for speed threat Braden Lenzy.
“It’s just the right time for it,” Book said. “We want to keep doing it every week. We don’t want to have a season that’s up and down, up and down.
“A win is a win, but we want to win in the right fashion.”
A step back and embrace of what’s next sparked a victory that sure fit the criteria.
“If you’re always under a microscope, you can’t really see the big picture,” linebacker Bo Bauer said. “Together, it just really helped us focus on our long-term goals while not forgetting being in the moment is key to our success.”
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