Benjamin Morrison, arguably Notre Dame’s best player, is out for the season.
It’s a hip injury, one that required or will require surgery.
Marcus Freeman announced it today.
The Morrison Side
This sucks for Benjamin Morrison. The salary difference between being drafted in the middle of the first round and the back of the first round (a very hesitant guess) is something like a 40% decrease. That’s without mentioning the rehab process, the pain of the injury and surgery, or the frustration of not getting to play more college football. This is sad for Morrison and for his friends and family.
The Notre Dame Side
It’s been a little jarring to hear the secondary described as a strength for Notre Dame these last few years. That isn’t normally the case for us. Even when Julian Love was so good in 2018, Julian Love was a strength. The secondary wasn’t, as the Cotton Bowl demonstrated emphatically once Love went down. Four years later against that same Clemson program, Morrison’s pick six marked a turning point for Notre Dame. Since that play, Notre Dame’s secondary has been nasty. Mike Mickens seems to be an excellent defensive backs coach, but Morrison deserves credit for Morrison, and maybe for some of the other recent gains by the position group.
Can the secondary still be a strength without him? It’s not impossible. Leonard Moore has played well in his snaps so far and should get a decent on-ramp, with Notre Dame’s pre-USC opponents tough and talented but not game-breaking passing teams. The bigger issue is the depth behind Moore and Christian Gray.
The other season-ending injuries—those to Charles Jagusah, Ashton Craig, Boubacar Traore, and Jordan Botelho—all hurt, but the dropoff from each of those players to their immediate replacement wasn’t enormous. The offensive line was stocked with a lot of B+ options who didn’t have experience playing with one another. We were able to swap in former starters and proceed with business mostly as usual. The front seven was stocked with younger but still strong options. We subbed in athletes and football players strong enough to make teams like Stanford pay. (That game happened, by the way. Nice win.) At cornerback, it’s currently just Gray and Moore. Jaden Mickey already left the team to transfer. Karson Hobbs will get some snaps, and Jordan Clark might see more time there, as he did when both Gray and Morrison were off the field against Louisville. (I believe he was at corner and not nickel when he was allegedly spat on.) The depth is better than it was in 2018. But it’s not great, and it’s not as good as it is up front. It’s hard for a school like Notre Dame to build a nasty secondary. It’s also hard to keep it.
We don’t know the specific injury for Morrison, but there’s been some criticism lobbed towards strength coach Loren Landow, with five starters out for the season six games in. I’m not sure what role strength and conditioning might have played in any of the injuries (ACL’s for Craig, Traore, and Botelho; pec or shoulder for Jagusah; hip for Morrison). Maybe these are indeed on Landow in some capacity and he needs to change his approach. I will say, though: Notre Dame handled the heat in College Station very, very well. That falls under Landow too.
What This Means for the Season
USC isn’t as good as initially feared, but you want a good secondary when you’re facing Lincoln Riley’s offense. If Moore and Gray and everybody else holds up these next five games, then great, we should go to Los Angeles feeling ok about our lives. It’ll be a tough game no matter what, but if the current roster makes it to California, Notre Dame should be a favorite. Even this week, I’m not sure the betting line dropped by more than a point after the Morrison news broke. Our ceiling is now lower, but that probably wouldn’t be a dealbreaker until the College Football Playoff semifinals, and our ceiling probably wasn’t high enough to have a chance this year against a Texas or an Ohio State anyway.
The bigger fear is another injury. In our model’s latest simulations, Notre Dame makes the playoff 99% of the time if the Irish take care of business and get to eleven wins. At 10–2, the probability drops to 63%, and I’m not sure how confident I am in that projection, personally. I think it might drop when the first College Football Playoff rankings come out. That 25 is a significant data point for our model to digest. The model’s trained on precedent, and 1) we don’t have 12-team playoff precedent and 2) we don’t have very much precedent to apply to the loss to NIU. There’s a solid chance it’s home game or nothing for Notre Dame as far as the playoff is concerned.
There are also those five other opponents before USC. Of those five, two are undefeated, one opened the year in the top ten for a reason (its athletic talent), and the others are two-loss ACC teams, beginning with Georgia Tech on Saturday. We don’t need to play to our ceiling to win those five games, but Morrison raised our floor as well. Each of those five opponents was already at least a little dangerous. They’re now set to be even whiter-knuckle Saturdays.
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In news more pertinent to our namesake, the Irish show up 69th in the preseason kenpom rankings, released last night. The famously accurate site projects Notre Dame for a 17–14 regular season and a 10–10 conference record which would place them between 8th and 11th in the 18-team ACC. That’s NIT territory, and compared to the last two years, I don’t think anyone could reasonably complain about an NIT berth. Obviously, we at The Barking Crow would be thrilled, but even non-NIT believers should have a good time if that’s what ends up happening. The roster’s still young. The program’s still on the rise. This should be the fun year, the one with low expectations but reasons for optimism. This is the year the Irish should be “ahead of schedule.”
We’re looking forward to sharing that season preview in a couple weeks.
On the football side, Notre Dame flipped Cameron Herron and Blake Hebert today from Iowa and Clemson, respectively. Hebert is a four-star quarterback on the 247Sports Composite, a Connecticut product whom that Composite ranks 29th-best nationally at his position. He’ll sub in for Deuce Knight in the class, and while it’d be nice to have Knight, it’s a good sign that we could go muscle a guy away from Clemson like that. Herron is an offensive lineman from Warren Central down in Indianapolis. The Composite grades him a three-star and the eighth-best recruit in the state of Indiana, giving Notre Dame three of the top ten Hoosier Staters in the Class of 2025.
More on Georgia Tech later this week, barring unforeseen circumstances. Go Irish, and the best of wishes to Morrison and his family. If we’ve seen the last of him at Notre Dame, I don’t think it’s outrageous to say he changed the cornerback position for us. If someone wants to pitch him on a fourth year, though, I wouldn’t personally complain. The gold bars made an appearance again, this time in Hebert’s commitment graphic.
Benjamin Morrison is a very impressive young man. If you get a chance, watch the “Wake Up the Echos” show in which he appears. It’s on YouTube.