Kelly Notebook: Preparing For LSU
Notre Dame will end the 2017 season the same way it did its 2014 campaign, with a bowl matchup against the LSU Tigers of the Southeastern Conference.
Brian Kelly’s squad won that matchup, breaking a four-game losing streak to beat LSU 31-28 when then senior kicker Kyle Brindza drilled the game-winning field goal as time expired.
Notre Dame and LSU both finished that season with 8-5 records, but both enter this matchup better teams, and both are shooting for a 10th win to end the season. It is a matchup that gives Notre Dame a tremendous opportunity, and one the team is ready for after a grueling 2017 season.
“We’re super excited,” Kelly said of the matchup against the Tigers. “I’m proud of our football team, to go from where we were, unranked … It was a long year for our guys. They persevered. We had a long schedule, a tough schedule. Finished our last six games with four nationally ranked teams. Then Wake Forest is a pretty darn good football team, and Navy.
“Just really proud of our football team to be rewarded to play in the Citrus Bowl,” continued Kelly. “One of the older, more prestigious games on New Year’s Day, on national television.”
The bowl was first played in 1947, when it was known as the Tangerine Bowl, the name it held until 1982. Since then it has been called the Florida Citrus Bowl (1983-2002), the Capital One Bowl (2003-14) and the Buffalo Wild Wings Citrus Bowl (2015-17).
Getting an opponent like LSU will certainly catch the attention of the Notre Dame football team. The Tigers are 9-3, ranked 17th in the country and have won six of their last seven games, with the only loss coming to Alabama.
“You don’t need much motivation from our football team,” Kelly said of the matchup. “Our guys are pretty motivated. They know what’s in front of them in terms of playing LSU.”
The game was announced prior to the press conference, so naturally Notre Dame has yet to do a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of the LSU program, but Kelly knows enough about the Tigers philosophy and staff to expect a physical matchup.
“I know LSU. I know the type of athlete that they have on their football team,” explained Kelly. “Derrius Guice is another version of Leonard Fournette in the sense that power, speed. He’s big, but he has the power, speed. Their front seven is going to look like a Georgia, SEC team. This is going to be a SEC-Georgia type football team.”
Kelly believes the schedule his team faced in 2017 has prepared it for this matchup. The game will come down to execution.
“Physicality won’t be an issue for us,” Kelly stated. “We have to take care of the football. The games that we struggled, we didn’t care take of the football. We were ahead in the fourth quarter in two losses (Georgia and Stanford), so not really concerned about that. It’s about being clean, efficient, and taking care of the football.”
Other notes from Kelly’s press conference:
FINISHING OFF THE SEASON
Teams look at bowl games differently. For some, it’s about finishing off the current season on a high note, for others it can be about using the game as a springboard for the next season. For Kelly and Notre Dame, it’s all about putting a cap on the 2017 campaign.
“It’s a cap on this season,” Kelly said of how he will look at the bowl game. “It’s a quest to be special in a sense of getting to ten wins, and that’s really going to be on the backs of the guys that got you to where you are.
“So if you break it up in terms of how the pie would look, I still think this is about getting your team ready and prepared for a 13th game,” he continued. “Along the way, if you can accomplish a couple other things and get a glimpse of some other players that haven’t gotten a lot of work, you’ll certainly do that. But you don’t have a ton of time to do that.”
GETTING BACK TO BASICS
Notre Dame will go a month without having played a game, and that comes after a final three game stretch that saw the Irish go away from the things that allowed the team to climb to an 8-1 record and as high as No. 3 in the College Football Playoff Rankings.
Protecting the ball, good technique, tackling and other fundamental areas were important to Notre Dame’s rise, and struggling in those areas precipitated its fall. The 15 practices leading up to the bowl game should provide the program with a chance to reboot and get back to basics.
“I think you’re trying to get the rust off your team that’s going to have a two-week layoff,” explained Kelly. “So skill development will be important early on. Tackling will be important, so working tackling drills. So it will be more fundamental work.”
EXPECTING ALL HANDS ON DECK
In recent seasons teams have had to deal with certain players deciding not to play in the team’s bowl game in hopes of avoiding injury as they began to transition to their preparation for the National Football League.
As of now, none of the Notre Dame players are expected to not play for this reason.
“Nobody has approached me about it,” Kelly said. “I’ve met with all of my captains today, and none of them gave me any indication that that would be the cause … But we’ll proceed as if everybody’s going to play. If there are any individual cases that need to be dealt with, we’ll support our players 100 percent.”
EARLY SIGNING PERIOD FAST APPROACHING
The NCAA made a significant rule change this season, and we are about to find out how that rule will impact how Notre Dame goes about its recruiting.
There will still be a National Signing Day in February, as has been the case for years, but this year there is an early signing period that begins on Dec. 20 and runs through the 22nd.
Notre Dame has encouraged all of its 18 committed players to sign in the early period, and it knows how it will handle those that don’t.
“We expect, if our players are committed, they’ll sign in December,” Kelly stated. “If they’re not committed, they won’t. … We’ll have to keep recruiting you.”
The early signing period could provide a major boost to the program if all the current commits do in fact sign in December.
“Our response has been really good in terms of guys signing in December,” continued Kelly. “So if they’re committed, they’ll sign in December, which frees up that time that I’m normally on the road in January chasing these guys down for a February signing to really focus on [2019 recruits]. Then the remaining spots that we have left.”
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Kelly made an interesting comment about his team running down mentally late in the season.
““No, I think we were really good,” Kelly said of his team’s physical condition late in the season. “We continued to make strides physically. There were no questions about where we were physically as a football team. We were emotionally and mentally -- we had a long year.”
“I remember addressing the team before the Monday of the Stanford week with so much on the line and a 10th win and a New Year's six, and it looked like they were in biology class. They were staring at me like, Really? There was no juice, there was no excitement. And they were tired. They were tired mentally.”
“It's a long year, and I've got to do a better job of pacing that out for them.”
BGI senior editor Lou Somogyi will have more on these comments later in the week.
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