Notre Dame Tight End Production: No Place To Go But Up In 2017
Earlier this week, a question was posed on BlueandGold.com on whether this was the worst season of tight end receiving production at Notre Dame. It was prompted mainly because the school has been college football’s Tight End U. since the 1973 campaign with All-American and College and Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dave Casper.
In 2016, Notre Dame tight ends combined to grab only 12 passes (one per game) for 159 yards, although senior Durham Smythe did snare four touchdowns, two of them versus Army.
The worst such campaign, though, was head coach Bob Davie's last season in 2001 (5-6 finish) when John Owens and Gary Godsey combined for six catches, 79 receiving yards and one score. Yet even Owens would enjoy an eight-year NFL career from 2002-09.
Although Lou Holtz had numerous tight ends play in the NFL — including first-round picks Derek Brown and Irv Smith — he was often eviscerated for not featuring the position enough as pass catchers. His stellar 11-1 team in 1993 saw the tight ends — two future pros in Oscar McBride and Pete Chryplewicz, plus Leon Wallace — catch nine pass passes for 78 yards and no scores. The next year they caught only eight passes for 78 yards and one touchdown (Chryplewicz was injured).
And in 1987, the tight ends, led by future first-round offensive tackle pick Andy Heck, grabbed only seven passes for 82 yards and one score.
One day in 1996, when the upper bowl around Notre Dame Stadium was being constructed, Holtz climbed to the top as a joke to see if someone up there could be heard on the field. What did he choose to scream from there?
“Throw it to the tight end!”
Yet despite the lack of pass catching production at the position in 2016, on paper it might be considered possibly the most experienced and deepest unit in 2017 — provided Alizé Jones is eligible.
• As a 2015 freshman, the highly celebrated recruit Jones snared 13 passes for 190 yards and made clutch 35- and 45-yard grabs in game winning drives versus USC and Temple. Declared academically ineligible in 2016, Jones was still able to practice with the scout team and is expected back this spring. His return would provide Tyler Eifert-like dimension — Eifert won the Mackey Award for the 12-1 Irish in 2012 — as a flex tight end. First-round pick Will Fuller at receiver noted that it was Jones who had “the best hands on the team.”
• Smythe took the lion’s share of snaps in 2016 with 633, while sophomore Nic Weishar, a former Parade All-American and all-time receiving leader in Illinois high school history, had 262 (about 22 per game).
• Tyler Luatua, who will be entering his senior year, was a productive blocker/H-back as a 2014 freshman, especially in the Music City Bowl win versus LSU, but took only 38 snaps last season. He would be a starter at many a Power Five conference schools.
• The incoming freshman tandem of 6-5, 238-pound Brock Wright and 6-6, 240-pound Cole Kmet is the best duo at the position to enter Notre Dame since first-round pick Greg Olsen (who would transfer less than two weeks later to Miami) and second-round selection John Carlson in 2003. Among the 17 current Irish verbal commitments, early enrollee and native Texan Wright has the highest overall national ranking on Rivals.com at No. 56, while Illinois product Kmet is third at No. 87 (Florida offensive lineman Robert Hainsey is in between at No. 79).
Wright had an outstanding week of practice at the Under Armour All-American Game, prompting former All-Pro cornerback Deion Sanders, a coach in the all-star game, to tweet that while he didn’t know much about Wright’s high school career, “he will play on Sunday 1 day.”
Since 2013, when Troy Niklas caught 32 passes for 498 yards and five touchdowns while Ben Koyack (who caught his first NFL score last week) had 10 for 168 yards and three scores, the tight end production has gradually declined.
Eifert caught a school-record 63 in 2011 and followed with 50 in 2012, while the Niklas/Koyack combo netted 42 in 2013. Then in 2014, Koyack made 30 of the 31 grabs at the position while totaling 317 yards.
In 2015, Jones caught 13 of the 20 tight end receptions, and this year the position total fell to the aforementioned 12.
In other words, the tight end position the last six years has dropped in catches (all involved, not just the starters) as follows: 66, 58, 42, 31, 20 and 12.
New Notre Dame offensive coordinator Chip Long, whose hiring might be made official by the university later this week, has also coached tight ends each of the last nine seasons, starting with Arkansas as a 2008-09 graduate assistant, at Illinois (2010-11), Arizona State (2012-15) and most recently Memphis (2016).
New blood at tight end just might aid a transfusion again in its production.
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