Notre Dame-Texas: Tempo Time
In Notre Dame’s 38-3 demolition of Texas in last year’s opener, the Longhorns ran a meager 52 plays for a paltry 163 yards.
It was the lowest output on offense by any team that week in college football. Shortly afterwards, head coach Charlie Strong said co-offensive coordinators Joe Wickline and Shawn Watson would no longer handle the play-calling duties, and receivers coach Jay Norvell would handle that aspect.
While Texas displayed some flashes of improvement during a 5-7 campaign, especially with the ground attack, none of those assistants is with the operation anymore. Strong cleaned house on offense at the end of the year — it was second to last in the Big 12 in offense in 2014 and third-to-last in 2015 — and brought in a new staff for the line, backfield, receivers and, most notably, selecting Tulsa’s Sterlin Gilbert to coordinate the offense and mentor the quarterbacks.
Gilbert was not actually the play-caller at Tulsa last year, which was among the nation’s top 10 in plays run per game (83.3), opening with a 47-44 overtime win over Florida Atlantic, closing with a 55-52 loss to Virginia Tech in the bowl game, and in between losing another shootout to Playoff bound Oklahoma, 52-38. However, he is a disciple of former Baylor coach Art Briles, whose fast-paced offenses took the Bears from Big 12 doormat to two conference titles and four Top 15 finishes nationally the past five years.
Strong is hitching his coaching wagon to Gilbert, who also apprenticed under Dino Babers’ (now the first-year Syracuse coach) fast-paced attacks at Eastern Illinois (2012) and Bowling Green (2014) in dramatic first-year turnarounds. In his first season at Tulsa last year, Gilbert saw the Golden Hurricane go from averaging 24.7 points per game the year prior to 37.1, a jump of 70 spots nationally from 91st to 21st.
With last year’s tape of the Texas game deemed almost irrelevant, the Fighting Irish coaching staff extensively studied Tulsa’s 2015 season game by game, leading head coach Brian Kelly to conclude that Texas’ offense is going to be “North Carolina fast.”
That refers to the 50-43 Notre Dame win over the Tar Heels in 2014.
After Notre Dame’s 5-0 start that year, first-year defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder was hailed as a genius with his NFL-style complexity that limited opponents to 12.0 points per game. Alas, the Irish also were also against some of the weaker offenses in the land, and all slow paced. North Carolina came out firing with a no-huddle, up-tempo attack that ran 84 plays for 516 yards on 84 plays (42 passes, 42 rushes) — and other teams soon followed that template while Notre Dame’s injury-ravaged defense fell apart to finish the regular season 7-5.
During the bye week that year, VanGorder was candid that the Tar Heels' style was a bit of a culture shock for him after having seen mainly standard offenses in the NFL where various packages for first down, third down, third-and-long, third-and-short could be implemented easier.
“Honestly, that was on me,” VanGorder said of North Carolina’s confounding pace. “I didn’t do a good job. We've got a lot of packages and a lot of players, different ways and schemes, and that wasn’t the game really to do that.
“[Up-tempo offense is] the enemy, that’s what defensive coaches don’t like. It takes some of the football away from us, takes your inventory and shrinks it way down … We need to win third down against teams like that and get them off the field. We didn’t succeed there.
“Trying to go from a third-down package back to a first-down package, it’s hard to do. That’s what [up-tempo] does, unfortunately. It just removes some of the strategy of the game.”
VanGorder adjusted in year 2 to enhance versatility where defenders can’t be just “first- and second-down” players or “third-down players.”
“It’s been evolving since two years ago where we felt like we may have gotten caught a little bit against North Carolina with the inability to be multiple in our calls,” Kelly said.
Over the past three seasons, VanGorder and the Irish have recruited to his system that demands the ability of players to line up in one-size-fits all roles to counter fast-paced offenses, and the confidence has grown that it can halt the attack that will see the Longhorns use both freshman quarterback Shane Buechele and veteran 249-pound Tyrone Swoopes.
For junior Mike linebacker Nyles Morgan, whose job description includes lining up the front, he will be challenged right out of the gate in Austin.
“Tempo throws you off as far as getting guys lined up properly, which is what they’re trying to do,” Morgan said. “As long as we get aligned we’ll be fine. If you get two stops, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s not working, let me do something else.’ If you can stop it, it’s over.”
The tricky aspect is going to be that the temperatures throughout the game, even in the evening, are expected to be in the 80s, maybe the 90s. While much is talked about Notre Dame having an elaborate rotation along the defensive line — possibly subbing every six plays or so in order to combat fatigue and have fresh legs — Kelly compared it to a line shift in hockey where the timing has to be ideal so that the substitution pattern doesn’t look like the Keystone Kops.
However, the plus to VanGorder’s scheme is that it does have the complexity and vast inventory to confuse a young quarterback such as Buechele.
“He’s going to get a variety of different looks that will challenge a quarterback that’s getting the first look at our defense,” Kelly said. “In normal circumstances, if you just said no-huddle, tempo offense, it’s pretty good because you can kind of just roll with it, and go because there’s not a lot of checks; just get the ball and go.
“But if you don’t have a way to get into some checks, they’re going to have some negative plays against our defense.”
Senior cornerback Cole Luke is approaching the up-tempo attack with a glass-is-half-full attitude.
“We have a saying: If you want to hurry up, then you can hurry in your four downs and get off the field,” Luke said. “If they want to go fast, that’s fine. We’re used to that. We play a lot of teams that have a hurry-up, tempo offense. So if you want to run four plays as fast as you want, it doesn’t really matter because after those four plays it’s going to be in the [Notre Dame’s] offense’s hands.”
Hopefully after a punt, and not a kickoff.
----
• Talk about it inside Rockne's Roundtable
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, Blue & Gold Illustrated.
• Follow us on Twitter: @BGINews, @BGI_LouSomogyi, @BGI_CoachD,
@BGI_MattJones, @BGI_DMcKinney and @BGI_CoreyBodden.
• Like us on Facebook