Notebook: Notre Dame's offensive guard competitions enter crucial stretch
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — As Notre Dame pushes into the final third of its spring football activities Saturday, the starting Irish offensive line remains a work-in-progress. Both starting guard spots have been up for grabs all offseason following the departures of left guard Jarrett Patterson and right guard Josh Lugg.
In recent weeks, sophomore-to-be Billy Schrauth and graduate senior Andrew Kristofic emerged as the leading candidates at left guard and right guard, respectively, but the competition hasn’t come to a close. Offensive line coach Joe Rudolph sees the final five practices, which include this Saturday’s closed scrimmage and next Saturday’s public Blue-Gold Game, as significant tests for all the contenders.
“There’s been a really good battle at left guard,” Rudolph said. “Billy Schrauth has been working along with Pat Coogan. They’ve gotten the majority of the reps there. It really freed Pat up going to guard. I see his footwork getting better and it’s a little bit more natural for him. But it’s been a really good battle. And yet I know I can take Tosh [Baker] if need be and give him an opportunity at guard as well.
“On the right side it’s been a really good battle between Andrew and Rocco [Spindler]. Andrew has been really steady. He’s been out there before and knows it, and Rocco continues to get better. From where he started to where he is now, [Spindler] and Ashton Craig have probably made the most growth. That’s been really cool to see, the guy’s earning their own confidence and getting there. And at the same time, Aamil [Wagner] is someone that could be one of those five best guys.
“There’s a lot of competition going forward. This Saturday will be big and next week will be big, and those are kind of your tests. That’s what you’re evaluating off of to see who’s going to be able to do it in the moment.”
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Senior Michael Carmody fell out of the guard competition momentarily with an apparent shoulder injury. But Rudolph keeps striding forward trying to identify possible options.
The last 10 practices have been about finding linemen capable of competing — whether it’s Spindler entering his junior season with little experience or Coogan, also a rising junior, starting the spring as the No. 2 center. Each one of the contenders has their own strengths and flaws.
“What you want to do is identify who could be ready,” Rudolph said. “Ready could mean different things. There’s physicality. There’s the ability to execute with technique. There’s the ability to be consistent in technique and physicality, and then there’s a mental side. Do you know what to do and how to do it?
“When you find that group of guys, who can consistently be the best when everything’s moving, guys are shifting, and there’s yelling — who won’t flinch in that moment? Just because a guy isn’t there yet doesn’t mean he won’t get there in time. That’s why you have to keep working to develop.”
The 6-foot-5, 304-pound Schrauth, who Rudolph unsuccessfully tried to recruit at Wisconsin, has created buzz for himself this spring despite being the youngest of those truly competing for one of the starting guard roles.
“What is different about Billy is he has an edge,” Rudolph said. “He has an edge that truly brings a feeling of physicality, a toughness, a grit.
“He's a young man where all of the things that are going on with the movements and patterns and stuff, I have to really help him not to get lost in all that. It's a lot. You kind of hope to teach him the fundamentals, so you can teach him the rule, and then you can get him good at that.
“Then you go, 'Hey, now look, man, this can happen.' And now you're teaching them the exception to the rule, instead of maybe day one, when there's seven exceptions to the exception. You have to calm him down. Go, 'Hey, look, I know this was a tough look. But here's the detail in it.’
“Get him to trust the process of it. If we can not guess, and we truly trust our eyes, our eye progression, we understand the communication and the detail within the call, every rep is valuable. When we're guessing, we just waste a lot of time. Because guessing won't get you where you want to get.”
And it’s still anyone’s guess who will start to the right and left of fifth-year center Zeke Correll in the season opener against Navy in Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 26.
The pros and cons of spring blitzing
Correll described Notre Dame defensive coordinator Al Golden’s spring strategy as practically a blitz on every play. That’s created challenges for Notre Dame’s offensive line to handle as it works on its own cohesion.
Is it too much or exactly what the Irish unit needs?
“There’s a good and a bad,” Rudolph said. “The good to that is you have to be on your Qs — your communication, your execution. You have to play well, not only to help this guy play well but to survive practice. If you don’t play well enough, you’re going to get the guy next to you beat up and worn out.
“There’s a lot of responsibility that falls on your shoulders in being able to execute through that. That’s a positive. You have to be ready to go and detailed up, because you’re not going to get one thing that’s not extremely challenging, from a mental and physical perspective.
“Now, on the negative side, you can’t let a lot of things moving around, and guys dancing in and out, and three-man twist games — like you can’t get lost in the gray. You have to find a way to physically execute your assignment through some of the most difficult movement patterns that you may see. You might see harder things in one day than you see in a whole year. That’s factual.
“But can you execute? Can you stay true to it? Can you work with pad level? Can you find your landmark? Can you get your feet down? Can you do the little things that matter and not let it get gray? That’s where you learn about whether someone can do the right thing at the right time in the heat of the moment.
“So it’s pretty good. Sometimes it can stunt some guy’s growth. Because you want them to see. You tend to teach the exception to the exception to the rule before you get to teach the rule. That’s a hard way to teach sometimes. But it’s what’s presented, and that’s what you have to do.”
If Rudolph has any qualms with how much blitzing is occurring, he hasn’t made them known to Golden or head coach Marcus Freeman.
“My job’s to coach the O-line,” Rudolph said with a laugh. “I’m going to coach them to be the best we can be, and we’re going to take responsibility to be the best we can be in the moment. The rest of it’s over my head.”
While the overwhelming blitzes may result in some rough days for the Irish offensive line, it should prepare them for the many different looks that will be thrown at it in the season. Hopefully, Rudolph still has enough confident offensive lineman in those positions come late August.
“What we try to do is try to trust our eyes, trust our execution. We anticipate but truly execute with detail. That's great,” Rudolph said. “Going against this helps you the most to prepare you for what you have to have. Because you are going to get challenged in a million different ways. That's the positive of it.
“You better be on from a mental aspect. You better be on from the technique aspect. And you better be on five guys at a time and sometimes seven and eight with the tight ends and with the back. It challenges you, but it's a good challenge.”
Keeping Tosh Baker involved
There can’t be very many players in college football more certain that they probably can’t beat out the starter ahead of them on the depth chart. As left tackle Joe Alt’s backup and likely the next option to replace right tackle Blake Fisher as well, Baker’s most clear path to playing time would involve something unfortunate happening to the junior anchors of the offensive line.
But Baker, a 6-8, 310-pound senior, has hung tough and shown improvement throughout the spring.
“Two things,” Rudolph said of the mindset Baker needs to have. “One, you have to concentrate on always having a plan together in terms of what are the things you need to address. I’m not worried about who’s in front of me. I’m worried about how do I get better at the things I need to get better at.
“And then you have to have trust that there’s a vision that sees you and always as a vision of trying to put the best five guys on the field together. Those things probably need to go hand-in-hand. Things that I’ve shared with him along the way — told him he’d get most of his reps at tackle, but he’s someone that absolutely could go inside. That’s what we’re working through this last week-and-a-half.”
Guards are rarely as tall as Baker, but Rudolph won’t hold that against him. There are ways he can prove capable of playing guard with opportunities.
“He'd have to be able to bend,” Rudolph said. “He'd have to be able to give the fits you needed. There will be some absolute advantages that he’d have being inside. Then there'll be some things he'd have to really work on to kind of clean up and make sure that he would be able to play strong for us.”
Getting balls involved
The Irish offensive line wasn’t practicing yoga or Pilates, but recent practices have incorporated large exercise balls, sometimes called physio balls, in drill work.
When Notre Dame’s offensive line aren’t wearing the full shoulder pads, Rudolph likes to reduce the amount of collisions with each other. He does so on occasion by having the defender in a drill hold one of the large balls in front of his stomach and chest. Then the offensive linemen block their teammates through the ball.
“I can't have those guys running full speed into each other, but I want them to feel the violence and the velocity that they need to move with and play with,” Rudolph said. “And it's kind of funny. The physio — if your feet aren't in the ground, and you hit that thing, you'll go. It'll bounce you the opposite way.
“And it kind of teaches that in a way in which you're really not taking on a great collision, but you are forced to kind of be cored up, have your feet through the ground and be able to make contact at full speed and run through it. It’s just an easy way to get them running and hitting and getting off right at the beginning of a workout. But still bringing detail and understanding how this drill fit exactly to how they needed to execute the given play.”
The drill can be seen at 1:54 in the video below.
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