Key storylines for Notre Dame football before Purdue matchup
The explanations provided Monday by Brian Kelly on the precarious start to this season stirred some flashbacks of the 4-8 debacle in 2016 when the Irish never won consecutive games and seemingly invented new ways to lose almost every time out.
Fortunately, this Irish team is 2-0 and any preseason dreams of a College Football Playoff run and a national championship remain fully in place, though it doesn’t necessarily feel that way after two thrilling yet unfulfilling three-point wins in games that could’ve slipped away in the same way eight did five years ago.
Kelly fell on his sword during his weekly press conference, saying that the Irish coaches need to do a better job if the Irish players are going to do a better job.
Simplification and a deeper rotation were two areas Kelly singled out as avenues to improvement, a strikingly similar get-well formula often suggested but never implemented as the 2016 season unraveled.
Memories of VanGorder?
It was almost exactly six years ago when starting Irish safety Max Redfield — and many of his teammates — frequently explained how difficult it was to grasp the complicated strategies of second-year defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder.
Redfield — who studied Chinese-Mandarin courses while at Notre Dame — was even benched late in the 2015 season because of his inability to learn and apply the confusing schematics that VanGorder crafted during his eight seasons as an NFL coach before arriving at Notre Dame in 2014.
“I would say consistently being successful in that defensive scheme is more difficult than learning Chinese,” Redfield famously said.
Even ace student, starting linebacker and team captain Joe Schmidt often spoke up in 2015 about becoming “paralyzed by thought” as a play went on around him.
VanGorder asked too much of his players mentally through scheme, and physically through his reluctance — no, actually his refusal — to adequately substitute and rotate his players.
So, when Kelly suggested this week that simplifying schemes and diving deeper into his rotation would improve performance and consistency, it was hard not to recall similar rhetoric from 2016.
“We’ve got to get rotations, we’ve got to get guys on the field, keep it more simple in a sense that we can get multiple players on the field,” Kelly said on Monday. “Even if they are a little more inexperienced, let them go play … on both sides of the ball.”
Sounds like a plan, but curiosity remains because the vow throughout this preseason from Kelly and first-year defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman was to dig deep into the roster and let the guys play, play freely and play confidently by not putting too much schematic stress on them.
“They know that this performance the last couple of weeks was good enough to get a win,” Kelly said of his players, “but it’s not going to take them to a championship level.”
Hopefully, Kelly can get his house in order and make this season more comparable to 2018 than 2016.
Speaking of 2018
Setting aside the doom and gloom connection with 2016, this season so far is actually playing out much more similarly to what happened in 2018.
No. 12 Notre Dame held on for a tough 24-17 victory over No. 14 Michigan in the 2018 opener before struggling to beat Ball State, 24-16, in the second game of the season then narrowly surviving another close shave in a tense 22-17 win over Vanderbilt in game three.
Notre Dame righted the ship, won its next nine games — six of those by at least 21 points — and eventually finished the 2018 regular season 12-0 before losing to Clemson in a College Football pPlayoff semifinals.
That 2018 season could provide Kelly with a reference point to share with his team while the players find their footing.
“There’s no panic,” Kelly said. “We have to get better. We know the things that we have to work on. We are transitioning some personnel. We’re committed to playing to a higher standard.”
Back to normal
Kelly expressed some relief and pleasure that Purdue week is the first time this season that his players and coaches are working under their usual Tuesday through Friday game-week routine.
The Florida State game was played Sept. 5 in Tallahassee on a Sunday in primetime, meaning the Notre Dame contingent didn’t arrive back on campus until about 4:30 a.m. Monday, then had to immediately dive into preparations for a veteran and talented Toledo team during a short and disjointed practice week.
“It’s not a great week to come back on against a really good MAC football team,” Kelly said in hindsight.
The coach insisted that he wasn’t going to use the disjointed prep week as an excuse to explain away the flat effort and near-upset to the Rockets, but he admitted that the extra challenges of prepping his team during a short week weighed on his mind.
“It wasn’t a great week,” he said.
So with consecutive home games and a return to the usual practice routine, Kelly explained that Purdue prep feels much more like it’s supposed to.
“We’re happy that we’ll have the normal week, and we have to up our level of preparation,” Kelly said. “It’s not about upping your level on Saturday. It’s about what you do on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and that has to be better.”
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