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Notre Dame’s Young Players Tasked With Defending Option

Freshman cornerback Julian Love held his own against Miami’s passing attack this past Saturday, but faces an entirely different challenge versus Navy this weekend.
Freshman cornerback Julian Love held his own against Miami’s passing attack this past Saturday, but faces an entirely different challenge versus Navy this weekend. (Bill Panzica)

There’s a system in place, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said, that helps the team’s young players learn how to defend the option.

That being said, it still makes for some of the toughest week of preparation.

“Well, you can’t just live through the experience, or you’re going to have a bad day, a real bad day,” Kelly said during his Tuesday press conference. “There’s late nights, and they are watching extra film.

“There is extra preparation for a team like this. This is a difficult week in preparation.”

The Midshipmen have already defeated then-No. 6 Houston this season and feature an offense averaging 35.4 points per game, which ranks 32nd in the country. They will stress the Irish from a formation standpoint.

Training Notre Dame’s young defenders — seven freshmen or sophomores played at least 30 snaps against Miami — is the challenge this week.

“They just make it very difficult because they are not traditionally looking offensive sets that these guys are trained to see,” Kelly said of Navy’s offense, which ranks fifth in the country, tallying 296.6 yards per game. “So they’re seeing something Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for the first time that they haven’t seen virtually their whole career.

“So what they’re seeing is as difficult as defending the play itself.”

Kelly said he’ll call on his young safeties this week, particularly Nicco Fertitta, a sophomore, and Jalen Elliott, a freshman. Fertitta saw an uptick in play against Syracuse and Stanford (88 snaps combined), while Elliott got some action against Duke and Syracuse (48 snaps).

Neither played against Miami last week as starters Devin Studstill and Drue Tranquill played 75 snaps apiece.

“Our safety position will be, certainly from a depth standpoint, called on to contribute more this week,” Kelly said.

Defending the quick-hitting option takes discipline. Notre Dame’s defense has made strides in recent weeks, but now it’ll see a whole new challenge. That task would be tougher, Kelly said, if many of the young players did not already have experience.

“They’ve had to learn to play with discipline in other fashions, so that has been built in, in a sense, of playing with discipline and other forms of offenses that we have faced,” Kelly said. “So this will be their first foray and obviously playing a very, very difficult offense.

“If it was week one or week two, there would be more hesitancy, but these guys are confident that they can do the job and do it with discipline.”

Even if Notre Dame is able to build a sizable lead, Navy’s option attack has the ability to gash the Irish backups.

In last week’s loss to South Florida, the Midshipmen fell behind 28-0 but scored 24 points in the fourth quarter and lost 52-45.

“That tells you a little bit about what you’re going to get from a Navy football team,” Kelly said. “They’re going to do everything to play to the final whistle. So four quarters of football.”

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