Refreshed Jonathan Doerer Feels A Return To His 2019 Form Is Here
Jonathan Doerer had nothing else to do.
Sent home from campus in March 2020 with the rest of his Notre Dame teammates, Doerer passed time that lonely spring by honing his craft. May as well when the other aspects of college life ground to a halt.
A well-intentioned decision, undeniably.
But Doerer, now a graduate student and Notre Dame’s primary kicker, felt he paid for it during the second half of the 2020 season.
“I think I got myself in trouble with all that time at home,” Doerer said Tuesday. “I kicked too much because there was nothing to do. As the season went on, I got weaker and a little more burned out than normal.”
And that, he said, led to his dip in accuracy and reliability. Doerer made just four of his final nine field goal attempts to end last season and missed one in each of his last six games. He misfired in just about every way possible. Doink. Shank. Short.
He pulled a 32-yard attempt wide right in the second half of the 31-17 win at North Carolina Nov. 27 that would have given the Irish a 10-point lead. He clanged a 24-yarder off the upright in the ACC Championship Game. A 51-yard try in the College Football Playoff against Alabama plopped down in the end zone.
“Just toward the end of the year, it’s like, ‘I’ve been thinking about this with no breaks. There’s nothing to do,’” Doerer said. “Usually I’m not thinking about kicking from the spring game until the start of June, then it’s intermittently through the summer.
“When you’re going from March to whatever and putting those reps on your legs and don’t have the opportunity to work out, that started to wear on my leg.”
One year after nailing 85.0 percent of his kicks (17 of 20) and both his 50-yard attempts, Doerer hit just 65.2 of them (16 of 23) in 2020. A reliable weapon turned untrustworthy because he grew tired and couldn’t reboot himself. Special teams coordinator Brian Polian noticed.
“Looking back on last season, I underestimated the mental, emotional and sometimes physical toll of what we went through,” Polian said. “We kept them in a bubble from June until January.
“I kind of felt like, ‘Ah, they’re 22, They’ll be fine. They’re resilient.’ It wore guys out. Jon was an example, physically and I think mentally and emotionally.”
None of Doerer’s final five misses was too consequential. In that span, Notre Dame won three games by at least two scores and lost a pair by 17 or more points. To a kicker, though, that doesn’t matter. Misses are frustrating, and even more so when they pile up.
Furthermore, Doerer’s counterparts across college football also endured bizarre offseasons last spring. And many of them still produced standout seasons and week-to-week consistency. Perhaps going too hard during the height of COVID-19 and the resulting exhaustion is an explanation for Doerer’s 2020 woes, but no one’s interested in making it an excuse.
“In the end, we have to make the kicks,” Polian said. “He knows that. We’ve looked back, talked about it at length, looked at tape, done a lot.”
Polian indicated during the spring he and Doerer identified a mechanical issue that arose during the season. Doerer also said he got mechanically out of sorts on kickoffs, which went for touchbacks just 27.14 percent of the time last year. That ranked 80th out of 100 qualified Football Bowl Subdivision kickers and was an 18.8 percent year-over-year drop.
“I circled my kickoffs a little bit,” Doerer said. “It didn’t really hurt us, but that was something I knew I wasn’t doing up to my standard. When I started to think about that a little more critically, that’s when I started to second-guess myself on field goals a little more and the general burnout came into play.”
It shouldn’t be a factor this year. Doerer had a full winter and summer in the weight room with strength and conditioning coach Matt Balis. He had a normal spring season. He has breaks and distractions to break up the monotony. Chief among them is school, where he’s now working on a master’s degree in management after returning for a fifth year under the NCAA’s COVID-19 blanket waiver.
Part of the decision to return was rooted in making his final college season a more successful one. More like 2019 and the first half of 2020, when he looked like one of college football’s premier kickers. Doerer made 82.3 percent of his field goal attempts (28 of 34) from the start of 2019 through the win over Clemson Nov. 7, 2020. He has a strong track record. Polian wants him to lean into it.
“All we can do now is move forward and remind Jon that you’re the guy who made [three] field goals against USC [in 2019], all beyond 40 yards,” Polian said. “You were the guy who went 4 for 4 against Clemson — take the 57-yarder out of it. We don’t win those games without you. I need him to get that confidence back.”
This month’s camp has offered encouraging signs mixed with less inspiring misses. Doerer’s final kick during the open portion of Tuesday’s practice was a 52-yard field goal that split the uprights halfway up the net. He missed two shorter attempts beforehand, though. The former result is more indicative of his overall fall camp performance, he says.
“This has been the most consistent I’ve been,” Doerer said. “Not just in the field goal period, but in warm-ups, in the kicks I’m doing off to the side, in my drill work. The challenge obviously is keeping that going through the whole season.”
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