SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The culinary choice of Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman during his open Saturday of the first of two Irish football bye weeks this season never was revealed earlier this week, at least not publicly.
The lessons learned by the third-year ND mentor, however, were front and center during a seemingly viral losing spell by ranked teams last Saturday, with most of those falling to teams outside of the Top 25.
“I didn't get a chance to watch all the games,” said Freeman, whose 11th-ranked Irish (4-1) will keep him occupied this Saturday when they face Stanford (2-3) at Notre Dame Stadium. Start time is 3:30 p.m. EDT (NBC/Peacock) for the first-year ACC convert’s third trip to the Eastern Time Zone in a four-week span.
“Saw bits and pieces of each game,” Freeman continued, “just being at home with the family. But I think for me, I've really tried to research: Hey, what are the coaches saying? Like, what are the reasons that they didn't succeed on that Saturday?
“And as you look, there's a common thread of not starting fast, getting behind early in the game. They struggle, maybe on third down, MAs [missed assignments], penalties, turnover margin. And as you go back and you look at what happened with us versus Northern Illinois [a 16-14 Irish upset loss on Sept. 7], there were very similar reasonings behind the outcome.
“So, we have to understand, as a program, as a head coach, our players: Hey, these are the areas that really factor into the result of a loss, and use that to attack practice. Use that to prepare the right way so that on Saturday, we don't let one of those things happen.”
Freeman’s teams have been very good after the bye week in a small sample size, beating a ranked BYU team in Las Vegas (28-20 in 2022) in the only one of the three that wasn’t a blowout.
“There is no magic formula, but I think every bye week is different,” he said. “Where it occurs in your season, what injuries you have going on, your upcoming opponent. There's a lot of different things that you have to focus on during that specific bye week.
“We have another bye week after three weeks coming up, and what we do during that bye week, although probably the overall focus will be similar, the details of what we do during that week will change — just being where it's at in the season and the upcoming opponent after that.”
Notre Dame’s second bye week Saturday falls on Nov. 2, three days before the first set of College Football Playoff rankings of 2024 are revealed, and seven days before heretofore underachieving Florida State comes to Notre Dame Stadium.
“Most importantly, you have to evaluate your team at this certain period that you get the bye week,” Freeman said. “You can't just say, 'Hey, this what we did last year. Let's just throw it right here in this window and do it this year.'"
The WSBT Gameday SportsBeat pregame radio show precedes the ND-Stanford game from noon to 2:30 EDT (wsbtradio.com/96.1 FM). Inside ND Sports has you covered after the game with our Postgame Takeaways show on our YouTube channel, dropping late Saturday night with Eric Hansen and Tyler James.
In the 38th meeting between the two schools, there are plenty of individual players worth highlighting. Our practice at Inside ND Sports is to funnel those down to four, two for each team. Here they are:
Notre Dame defensive end Josh Burnham
Notre Dame finds itself down its two best pass rushers for the balance of the season — vyper ends Jordan Botelho and Boubacar Traore — and the need to improve its run defense from its current meh national ranking of 49th.
Josh Burnham may eventually be part of the solution for both, though Saturday’s game against Stanford might not be a fair litmus test. The 6-foot-4, 251-pound junior has played just four snaps since suffering an ankle injury late in the Northern Illinois loss on Sept. 7.
So increasing his snaps gradually might be the more prudent course of action as he is now cross training at both end positions, vyper and field end. Long term this season he may end up being ND’s best healthy option at both.
Last season, playing almost exclusively vyper in a rotation with Botelho, Junior Tuihalamaka and a sprinkling of Traore, Burnham accrued 18 tackles with four for loss and a sack and two QB hurries.
Irish defensive coordinator Al Golden intermittently and consistently has said he believes the best football for the former high school quarterback/linebacker is ahead of Burnham. The time for him to make longer strides into that projection seems to be upon the Irish.
Stanford quarterback Ashton Daniels
Stanford was the only power conference scholarship offer for the 6-2, 215-pound former three-star prospect coming out of Buford (Ga.) High School, but he’s developed into an intriguing dual threat at the college level this season.
The Irish defense had their way in a 56-23 rout of the Cardinal in last year’s regular-season finale in which Ashton Daniels threw a pick, was sacked four times and outrushed by Notre Dame reluctant runner QB Sam Hartman 47 net yards to 1.
But if Stanford is going to pull the kind of shocker they did in 2022 at Notre Dame Stadium before Daniels’ ascend up the depth chart, they’ll need a healthy Daniels who’s at his best. In a 31-7 smackdown by Virginia Tech in Palo Alto, Calif., last weekend, Daniels was an injured bystander when the Cardinal was held to season lows in points (7), first downs (16), passing yards (122) and total yards (258).
Notre Dame tight end Mitchell Evans
The post-bye week version of Mitchell Evans should reflect at least a shift in his approach and confidence level, if not performance as well.
The senior tight end and ND’s leading receiver in 2023 is fourth in receptions, five games in, with a modest 10 for 82 yards with no TD and a long of 19. That would be a trajectory of 16 for 131 through eight games.
Last season in eight games, Evans amassed 29 catches for 422 yards and a TD with a long of 36. That before tearing the ACL in his right knee on Oct. 28 in a 58-7 post-bye week waxing of Pittsburgh.
“I think the bye week was good for him. I do,” Irish offensive coordinator/tight ends coach Mike Denbrock said earlier this week. “I think it gave him a chance to kind of take a deep breath and go, ‘You know, I’ve got to get better here. I got to get better there.’ And he's got to play more consistently, and I think he's got to just trust that he's healthy enough to play as consistently and as fast as he wants to play and needs to play.
“I think he's better because of the bye week, because he got a chance to kind of reassess. We got a chance to kind of cut some film up, sit down, go over it, and look at the areas where I thought he needed to kind of excel a little bit more. And he's completely on board and ready to do that, so I look forward to it.”
Stanford linebacker Tristan Sinclair
The sixth-year grad linebacker got deep into the 2019 recruiting cycle with Notre Dame still in the mix, though eventually picking homestate Stanford, where his father, Andy, was an offensive lineman in the 1980s.
The 6-1, 235-pounder has shown up in the stat column in each of the past three meetings between the Irish and the Cardinal, but this season he’s showing up prominently in a lot of box scores. Tristan Sinclair leads the Cardinal in tackles (36), tackles for loss (4.5) and quarterback hurries (5). He also has a sack and a pass breakup.
As a defense, Stanford ranks 12th nationally in rushing defense and leveraged that in a 26-24 upset of Syracuse on the road in its first-ever ACC game. But the Cardinal struggle against the pass, ranking 115th (out of 133) in pass-efficiency defense, worst among Irish opponents, past or upcoming.
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