Notre Dame-Duke: How Ready Will The Fighting Irish Be?
Over the past eight football seasons, and the last three in particular, Notre Dame has been extremely sharp in season openers, highlighted by a 40-point scoring average.
In last year’s 35-17 opening-game victory at Louisville, the Fighting Irish scored a touchdown on their initial possession of the season for the fourth consecutive year.
Prior to that, in four straight season openers from 2012-15, Notre Dame tallied two touchdowns in the first quarter — and did so again a third straight year at Louisville in 2019, marking the seventh time it achieved the feat in the last eight years.
The one time the Irish didn’t was the 50-47 double overtime loss at Texas in 2016, which again was a strong showing on offense.
Furthermore, in the seven openers from 2013-19, Notre Dame committed a total of only three turnovers, one apiece in each of the last three seasons.
The latter is particularly notable because whereas the 2019 Fighting Irish defense finished fourth among 130 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in turnovers forced with 28, Duke’s offense was 127th in turnovers committed — also 28.
However, this year with the COVID-19 battle there have been more unique challenges for college football teams throughout the country. It resulted in only one spring practice at Notre Dame and much more makeshift summer team workouts.
Furthermore, three consecutive practices from Aug. 19-21 were canceled after the school switched to online courses only earlier in the week (it returned to regular in-class sessions last week). Thus, team identity might not be as crystallized yet.
“We’re evolving later than we have in years past because of the distractions, but I think I’ve got a pretty good sense and feel for who we are,” Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said on Monday. “Strong leadership … young players who are going to contribute.
“This is going to be a long year, one that’s going to involve a lot of players actively involved in what we’re doing. I think we’re going to see a group that has a lot of experience coming back, but you’re going to see some young players be part of this as well.
“Defensively … I like the athleticism and the speed. From an offensive standpoint, the physicality, especially when we deal with the group that we have coming back on the offensive line.”
The “physicality” part is of particular intrigue, and it was reflected in Monday night’s 55-3 rout of Navy by Brigham Young. The Midshipmen avoided all contact-type of work in the preseason to err on the side of safety, and it was demonstrated with an uncharacteristically and extremely poor showing on both sides of the ball.
“We knew we had to be physical up front, tackle well and block well on offense,” BYU head coach Kalani Sitake said. “All of camp, our offense was doing this — and it made our defense better.”
As for Navy head coach Ken Niumatalolo, he took the opposite approach during August.
“Boy, that game was 1,000 percent my fault,” Niumatalolo said. “Obviously, we weren’t prepared. One team was playing football. There’s nobody to blame but myself. I erred on the side of trying to keep our guys safe. I’d say it’s the worst Navy football game we ever played.”
Opening games generally can be ragged before reaching what is referred to as “mid-season” form, but it probably is even truer this year. How rusty a football team might look with less practice time and repetition will be a point of interest, and Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly earlier in training camp expressed concerns about the tackling aspect.
“As you can imagine, the one thing that you can’t work on is the thing that we need to work on — and that’s tackling,” Kelly said this August. “There wasn’t anybody that didn't go into that first tackling scrimmage and think we were going to be flawless in that. You can’t duplicate tackling if you don’t have that skill down and work on it.
“We know that’s something that has to be a priority for us, and it will be as we continue to move forward.”
Kelly noted how third-year defensive coordinator Clark Lea has made a “tackling circuit” part of most every drill.
“We didn’t have a spring practice, which I don't know that anybody is really going to be able to tell what that does in terms of the effect it has on your football team, particularly in these early games,” Kelly added. “The second thing is we didn't get all of our early practices [in August] in. I don’t know who will, but there are those distractions that we had to go through — and other teams will have those same distractions.
“The basic tenets of having a really good football team, potentially a great football team, are in place. Now we’re going to have to go prove it.”
What he has been uplifted by is the overall team discipline and concentration level. In the last two rounds of testing for the coronavirus at Notre Dame, perfect scores resulted, including all 215 on Monday.
“I don’t think you can go through what we’ve gone through without some composure,” Kelly said. “You can get rattled easily — rattled when there’s a positive test, or rattled with the media information that comes out relative to school closing or football shutting down or the troubles that we're having in our country.
“This group has done an incredible job of managing that. That doesn’t mean they’re immune to what’s going on around them. They’re tuned into it, but they’ve done a really good job of parking a lot of that. When it’s time to get to the football field, by and large, they’ve done a great job.”
The final step is going from a practice mindset to a game one this Saturday versus Duke. Last night, Navy played in front of an empty stadium. That won’t be the case at Notre Dame Stadium, but the cap for attendance will be 20 percent, or 15,525 in a structure that holds 77,622.
“We're going to go into a stadium that is unlike any other stadium that we’ve been in before,” Kelly said. “… Your sidelines are going to have to create a lot of that energy. You’re going to have to create a lot of that energy. You're going to have to get into the right zone individually and find your zone.
“There's still a lot of work ahead of us to show that composure and show that maturity when we get to game day, but that's the next challenge for this team.”
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