Marist Liufau had to wait. He had to stay patient, stay confident, assume his chance would come again.
All after his opening-day start at Buck linebacker ended with a whisper. Turns out, his apparent victory in claiming the job did not come with many assurances. Liufau, a sophomore from Hawaii, played 27 mundane snaps in a ho-hum win over Duke, making three tackles. Things moved fast. Maybe a bit too fast.
The next week, against South Florida, he was unavailable. Then the team shut down for about 10 days and, to the untrained eye, seemed to leave Liufau behind in its defensive plans when it resumed. Classmate Jack Kiser and junior Shayne Simon took most of the reps at buck. Between, Oct. 17 and Nov. 14 — a five-game span — Liufau played 35 combined defensive snaps, including zero against Clemson.
From the outside, another extended opportunity in 2020 felt a little harder to see with each week. Until Nov. 27 at North Carolina, that is, when any gloomy outlook was thwarted.
Notre Dame hadn’t forgotten about Liufau. And Liufau hadn’t cast aside hope. No time to waste. The result was a five-tackle, 0.5-sack day in a season-high 35 snaps one game after matching a season-low of seven. He disrupted passing lanes. He wrecked plays when he blitzed.
Liufau entered the game on Notre Dame’s third drive as one remedy for a defense that spent its first two drives in a blender, with missed tackles and undisrupted reads contributing to a pair of first-quarter Tar Heels touchdowns. He snatched his coveted opportunity with a wave of self-assurance propelling him.
“I felt comfortable, like I was playing free,” Liufau said. “I had a lot of fun. Do it for the guys around me.”
