Cheers coming from somewhere inside Bank of America Stadium muffled a portion of Brian Kelly’s postgame press conference over Zoom. But the Notre Dame head coach still took the 34-10 loss to Clemson on the chin. He came across as earnest and avoided any embittered responses, even to questions that outright questioned his game plan and player personnel choices.
Kelly only pushed back once, when asked how this Notre Dame team will pick up the pieces after such an embarrassing loss in the ACC Championship Game.
“Picking up the pieces, I think that's a bit over the top,” Kelly said.
“This is one of the best teams in the country. They'll bounce back. They're disappointed. They've got to play more consistent and I'm quite confident that they will.”
This is a reasonable assertion. Notre Dame appeared destitute after a 45-14 loss to Michigan in the Big House last year, only to rattle off six-straight wins and play the team’s best ball of the season. That carried over to 2020 and Notre Dame strung together a 16-game winning streak.
But it is fair to wonder where the Irish go from here on a macro level. For more than a decade, Notre Dame has proven to be a program that can get close to the pinnacle of College Football, only to fall flat at some.
One of the most pronounced blemishes on Kelly’s tenure at Notre Dame is that, once a season, his teams lose a game by a sizable margin.
This is somewhat worrisome in more recent seasons, where Notre Dame has regularly put itself in contention for the College Football Playoffs. Dating back to 2017, the Irish have produced a 10-win season but also succumbed to an opponent by at least 24 points and looked lackluster in the process.
Some of this is the result of regular-season success, which has earned Notre Dame postseason matchups with College Football powerhouse Clemson in the College Football Playoffs (2018) and in the ACC Championship Game (2020). The Irish lost the pair of games by an average of 25 points.
It's worth noting that even the top College Football programs get blown out, especially in the postseason.
The same Clemson team that defeated Notre Dame 30-3 in 2018 also obliterated No. 1 Alabama in the College Football National Championship by 28 points. 2020 is to be determined. A year later, Clemon was run off the field by a transcendent LSU team 42-25 in the National Championship.
But Notre Dame's four-year streak also includes regular-season losses on the road to Miami (2017) and Michigan (2019) by 33 and 31 points. While certainly solid teams, neither were considered dominant, with both finishing outside of the AP top-12 at the end of the season.
A trend of two-touchdown losses to big-name college football programs runs through each season of Kelly's tenure at Notre Dame.
To clarify, Notre Dame was competitive in some of its double-digit losses. The Irish fell to USC in 2011 and Oklahoma in 2013 by 14 points but both were one-score games at some point in the fourth quarter.
This also isn't meant as an indictment on Kelly. The vast majority of teams suffer a lopsided defeat at least once a season. College Football has a very apparent food chain, and those teams at the top are able to consistently attract the most talented high school prospects and don't face many of the academic limitations Notre Dame does.
But blowout losses once a season also represent how far Notre Dame still needs to climb if it wants to return to College Football's mountaintop. Undefeated regular seasons look great in record books and marketing materials, but that doesn't necessarily indicate that a program is nearing the peak: a National Championship.
"Tonight wasn’t our night," quarterback Ian Book said after the loss to Clemson in the ACC Championship. "Everybody who's played football before understands there's bad nights and that was tonight."
The good news for the Irish is this season's 24-point loss didn't eliminate them from contention. They'll match up with No. 1 Alabama in the College Football Playoffs on Jan. 1, with their one bad night per season already out of the way.
How will this program respond?
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