Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly addressed the media after a 45-3 win over Pittsburgh.
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Kelly on the win blowout win over Pitt:
"A great victory for our guys. I'm really proud of the way they elevated their compete level. The challenge was so much more about individuals and the team understanding that what's important now is also about what's important next. There's this understanding with this group now that everything they do now has bearings on who we are as a football team later in the season. We needed to elevate our compete level, and they certainly did that today.
"We needed to play fearless, we needed to play with great energy and we needed playmakers. We saw all those three things today. This is a very good glimpse of what this football team is capable of."
Kelly on his team's need to play better football with a matchup with Clemson just two weeks away:
"A lot of times you kind of get caught up in the grind of just trying to win football games. We kind of said, 'look, we're past this. We're not interested in just winning football games. We're interested in being a championship football team.'
"Just playing to win games is not good enough anymore. We need to elevate our compete level. We need to coach better. We need to play better. We need to play at an elite level. It starts with playing at a level that allows you to not all of a sudden play your best when you have to but have that ready to go because you are playing at a high level. And that hasn't been the case. So that was the challenge.
"That's it's risky, right? Because you're in some instances, people would say, 'well, you're looking ahead.' Well, we are looking ahead a little bit. We needed to get this football team to understand that they are really good."
Kelly on the importance of having wide receiver Ben Skowronek make a few big plays now that Kevin Austin is out for the season:
"It was the point of emphasis all week. We lost Kevin on Thursday after we had finished practice. It was a blow, but we were very confident in all of our other guys. Ben came up with the big play, right? Certainly, we can talk about it, but you got to go do it, too. We've had great confidence.
"Ben had not been healthy, but we knew what he was capable of, and he went up and took the ball away and set a great tone for how we were going to be moving forward. We're going to continue to need to see that from him and McKinley. We're going to need to see it from all of our wide receivers."
Kelly on how the Notre Dame offense handle the Pittsburgh pass rush:
"They're one of the best defensive fronts in the country. I think they were the number one defense. We knew that we were going to be challenged against a very, very good defense. But Ian's got great escape-ability and he's very difficult to handle. I have to watch the film to find out how we did against some of those one-on-one matchups, but it's not always offensive lines. Sometimes it's coverage sacks. Sometimes it's not getting the ball out of your hands. By and large, that's a really good offensive line."
On Notre Dame having limited production in the run game against Pitt:
"It's really the key areas of the field. We needed to be really good at third down and short conversions. We certainly needed to be really good in the red zone. And, an area where we gave up a couple of TFLs late in the game, [we wanted to] not to give up any negative plays.
"Those were the three goals in the running game, then we were going to be able to cover enough in the running game that was going to allow us to do the things that we wanted to do. This game plan was going to be centered around our ability to make plays down the field throwing the football.
"It's difficult to run the football when there are nine guys there and it's a man-to-man coverage, regardless of how good your offensive line is because there are free hats that they can't block for you. If I could get our offensive linemen to block those guys, too, I'd be fine but they're busy blocking the guy that they have to block, and we can't get to those safeties. So it was putting Mike Mayer on those safeties and exploiting those kinds of matchups and getting Kryen Williams one-on-one."
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