Notre Dame Coming Full Circle After Most Recent Trip To USC
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight again.”
—Sir Andrew Barton
On Thanksgiving week, Notre Dame senior linebacker and leading tackler Te’von Coney counted his blessings for experiencing the 2016 Notre Dame season.
Yes, the one where the Fighting Irish finished 4-8.
Yes, the one where they left the Los Angeles Coliseum in the rain to end the year with the dejection of realizing it was a season of supreme underachievement.
Yes, the one where Notre Dame’s loss total tied for the second most in school history, behind only the 3-9 fiasco in 2007.
“Anytime you have an awakening and adversity hits you, you have to be thankful for that, because it pushes you to another level,” Coney reflected earlier this week before 11-0 and No. 3-ranked Notre Dame returned to that same venue in Los Angeles, this time to try to clinch a bid to the four-team College Football Playoff.
“It’s pushing this program to another level where you have every guy wanting to get better and never wanting to feel that feeling again. It motivates you each and every day to work hard and to never be complacent.
“Things don’t go your way all the time. When it doesn’t, you find a way to get better. Since then we’ve found ways to get better, followed the process and worked really hard to make sure we never get back in that position.”
For junior cornerback Julian Love, a freshman starter back then, he knew there would be new opportunities, but at the time as a rookie starter he felt awful for the senior class.
“It’s crazy, it seems like forever ago,” he said. “It was a sad time. A lot of those guys like James Onwualu, Cole Luke, they taught me a lot. I felt so … I wish I could have done more for them.
“The life lesson is don’t take anything for granted. That was a rough year for us, and a lot of us have never experienced loss like that. What it allowed us to do was to learn and to really realize how hard it was to win college football games.”
Maybe no single individual is a better microcosm of how dramatically two years can alter a trajectory than current junior quarterback Ian Book. In November 2016, Book was getting red-shirted as a freshman but made the trip back to his native home state for the USC game. Starting quarterback DeShone Kizer still had two more years of eligibility remaining, sophomore Brandon Wimbush was the future, and five months earlier high school senior Phil Jurkovec, Notre Dame’s top target at the position in his class, unlike Book, who was maybe the eighth option, gave a verbal pledge to the Irish.
Book was neither as tall as soon-to-be second-round NFL pick Kizer, not as fleet with the feet or strong with the arm as Wimbush, nor as decorated or esteemed as a national prospect Jurkovec.
Yet here he is in his return to the Coliseum two years later ranked No. 2 nationally in completion percentage (72.6 percent, behind Southern Mississippi’s Jack Abraham at 73.3) and No. 7 in pass efficiency, a 165.5 mark on pace to eclipse Jimmy Clausen’s single season school record of 161.42 set in 2009.
“Awesome, it doesn’t get better than this, go back to my home state to play against a team I grew up watching,” said Book, who wasn't recruited by USC but was more partial to UCLA anyway. “It’s kind of surreal … It’s crazy to think about sometimes. We’re definitely in a really good spot this year and feel fortunate to be in that spot.”
The best part of it for Book is the offense hasn't quite yet achieved an optimum level, and is now striving to put together a complete game. Gradually, more has been added to the arsenal each week, with last Saturday’s win against Syracuse unveiling running backs coming across the field on routes or running the wheel in timing patterns. A third-and-15 crossing route to running back Tony Jones Jr. picked up 18 yards to set up a fairly identical touchdown pass to Dexter Williams later in that drive.
“It’s really hard to win in November in college football,” said Book of the collective team just now beginning to hit its stride. “I think we’re fortunate enough that we feel that we are starting to peak as an offense right now, just in terms of chemistry and just all facets of the offense getting better.”
What senior receiver Miles Boykin particularly remembers about the last trip to the Coliseum was how worthless the matchup against a red-hot USC team felt, with the Trojans in the midst of a nine-game winning streak that would place them No. 3 in the final AP poll.
“It really sucks playing football for nothing,” Boykin said. “Going all the way across the country to play in a game that doesn’t matter anymore — win or lose, you can’t go to a bowl game, we weren’t ranked … That feeling is what kind of drove us the next two years.
“One thing our coaches always say is you want to be playing meaningful football in November, and that’s something that few teams can say. We’re playing meaningful football right now. Each game we play in November has playoff implications for us.”
According to Boykin, there was not necessarily a “Come to Jesus” speech after the season. What was beneficial was to be stunned, miserable and “bleeding” while sitting at home during Christmas break — and then motivated to fight again when returning in January with a virtually new staff of assistants, coordinators and a new director of football performance with Matt Balis and his staff.
“We got back here and on day one there was a culture change,” Boykin said. “Coach [Brian] Kelly explained it to us. He introduced Coach Balis and ever since then this team has been rolling.
“The attention to detail in every little thing that we do, whether it’s checking in on time, going to your classes — things that don’t necessarily have to do with football that carry over to the football field. Things that you do off the field that you’re going to do on the field. If you’re accountable off the field, you will be accountable on the field.”
The 10-3 improvement in 2017 was merely a table-setter.
“We knew good things were coming, it was just a question of getting the right pieces in the right places,” Love said. “There was more on the table for us and knew we could shoot even higher than just 10-3. We’ve won 11 so far … It’s just amazing the growth and the buy in of everybody to those team goals.”
Achieving much more success last year was an appetizer, but also a lesson on how to avoid the hype this year while concentrating solely on the next task at hand.
“We’re very aware of the situation but it’s not something we talk about too much and create some type of pressure for ourselves,” said Book of the playoff implications this week at USC. “We know where we are, we know what we’ve got to do and we’ve just got to do what we’ve done every week — keep practicing the way we have, keep following this process that we’ve been following.
“When you’re bought in to do something special, I think that’s what we have going on.”
In retrospect, there is much to be thankful for from the 2016 debacle that ended in the Coliseum.
“Adversity elicits talent, which under prosperous conditions would have remained dormant.”
—Ara Parseghian
----
• Talk about it inside Rockne's Roundtable
• Subscribe to our podcaston iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, Blue & Gold Illustrated.
• Follow us on Twitter: @BGINews, @BGI_LouSomogyi, @BGI_CoachD, @BGI_DMcKinneyand @BGI_CoreyBodden.
• Like us on Facebook