On Friday morning, before leaving for College Station, I wore a “Win one for the Gipper” t-shirt to a Target here in Austin. Exiting self-checkout, a greeter—a woman of retirement age—acknowledged it.
“Nice shirt! I’m old enough to know what it means.”
It was probably an innocent, self-deprecating joke, but the comment bit. It’s been a while, eh? In our world, the Notre Dame world, the program feels like it’s rising from those Davie, Willingham, and Weis-era depths. It’s been ten years since we lost five games. Only once in the last seven seasons have we failed to reach ten wins. We recently finished five consecutive campaigns ranked in the top twelve, and we made the four-team playoff twice in its ten-year history. Objectively speaking, only eight or ten programs can claim a better last decade than Notre Dame.
That number used to be a lot smaller than eight or ten.
Notre Dame may have made the national championship at the end of the 2012 season, but the last time Notre Dame fielded a championship-caliber team was 1993. We’ve more than doubled up our previous longest title drought. Our last coach left because he believes it’s no longer possible to win a national championship at Notre Dame.
It’s been a while.
Saturday does not change how long it’s been, nor does it put our boys back at the top of the sport. Texas A&M is probably one of the 25 best teams in the country, and Kyle Field is one of the loudest scenes in the game, but Georgia would be favored by two or three touchdowns on a road trip like that. The Irish victory was no fluke. Notre Dame also didn’t exactly dominate.
What Saturday does, though, is move Marcus Freeman’s program one step closer. It makes a playoff appearance an even stronger likelihood. It gives Notre Dame a head on a pike from deep in SEC country, something which might move the needle with a Mississippi-based QB recruit under pressure from Auburn. It shows Notre Dame is better than the talking heads believed, throwing the College Gameday graphic back in some faces even as those talking heads already ranked Notre Dame around the top ten. Marcus Freeman’s team established itself a little bit more on Saturday night in Texas. It was the biggest win of the young Freeman era.
What comes next?
As good as USC looked against LSU, Notre Dame is the favorite in each of its next twelve or thirteen games, spanning from this weekend’s visit from Northern Illinois to the College Football Playoff quarterfinals or semifinals. If Notre Dame simply meets expectations every time out between now and New Year’s Day, the Irish will more likely than not find themselves in the Orange Bowl or Cotton Bowl against the SEC or Big Ten champion, playing for a spot in the national championship. Plenty can go wrong. But that’s the expectation right now.
To get hyper-specific for a minute, there’s a chance Notre Dame could be favored against a Big Ten champ. Michigan is rebuilding from a strong place, but it’s still rebuilding. Oregon was a lot of fun last year, but there are reasons it lost to Washington twice. Ohio State assembled quite the roster, but Ryan Day has a bad habit of getting a little stupid sometimes. Penn State? For the last ten years, they’ve been a lot like us, except they were stuck in the Big Ten East. I say that to say: There’s a chance Notre Dame might not only be favored in the next 13 games. Notre Dame might be favored in the next 14. Already 1–0, hoping for a 16-game slate, that leaves one matchup as an underdog.
Would Notre Dame be a massive underdog in that dreamt-of 16th game? Maybe not massive, but a sizable underdog, yes. In a neutral-site game against Georgia played this Saturday, the Bulldogs would be favored by somewhere around ten or fourteen against the Irish. In this hypothetical, however, the national championship’s not on a neutral field. It’s on Georgia’s second home field, Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where the Dawgs spent their Labor Day weekend suffocating what’s probably a decent Clemson team.
For Notre Dame to win a national championship this year, one or two things has to happen: Either Notre Dame gets a lot better over the next four months or Notre Dame catches a massive break. I’m not sure yet whether the latter is more or less possible in the 12-team playoff era. Last year, fate shined on Michigan. Alabama upset Georgia in the SEC Championship while a glut of other teams achieved traditional playoff qualifications, closing the door on a fourth spot which in normal years would have gone to UGA. This year, there’s virtually no chance that the best team in the country is left out. Still, that best team will have to navigate an extra game or two against quality competition. A break is possible, whether it’s likelier than it used to be or not.
It’s fair to hope on a national title, then—it’s always fair to hope—but the reasonable goal for the Irish is not to win it all. It’s to get back to that stage and keep the growth going. Georgia cannot last forever. There will be a new best program soon. Brian Kelly would disagree, but there’s no reason that best program can’t be Notre Dame.
The Game
The questions coming into Saturday were 1) how the offensive line would hold up against A&M’s front seven, 2) whether Riley Leonard would show improvement as a passer from last year at Duke, and 3) how Notre Dame would handle the barrage of noise in that skyscraper of a stadium.
Number 3, of course, went great. Notre Dame was flagged for only two false starts, and there were no outright debacles in the communication world. Mike Denbrock prepared his offense for the environment, and all 18 offensive players who saw the field executed. We might have doubts about Leonard’s accuracy and decision-making from the pocket, but if anyone was worried about his composure, those concerns should not exist. Even if Notre Dame didn’t immediately answer the A&M touchdown that tied it, the offense did get an important first down which allowed an inexperienced James Rendell to flip the Aggies back inside their own 20. The defense won the game, but the offense did enough, and it was the offense who more immediately had to answer the bell when the momentum flipped and the stadium came back to life.
The jury’s still out on 1 and 2. The offensive line got an inconsistent push but opened enough good-enough holes for Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price to put up strong aggregate efficiency numbers and break a few big plays. The sample is small, and what to make of it depends on how good Texas A&M’s defensive front turns out to be. Are the Aggies as good as their athleticism allows? Or are they closer to NIU in their ferocity than they are to Michigan or Georgia? Ironically, NIU might turn out to be a better test, not in that the Huskies will challenge Notre Dame more than A&M did but in that it’ll be easier to gauge Notre Dame’s performance against them. They’re a more certain rubric. NIU should have one of the best defenses in the MAC (they should be one of the MAC’s best teams), but they’re still a defense that a high-quality offensive line should overpower. If ND puts up another big number in yards per carry, we’ll be feeling pretty good.
As for Leonard: I remember only one terrible throw, and it was more of the decision-making category even if the accuracy was also an issue. It was that throw to his left I think came early in the second half. I’d guess the whole stadium believed it was about to be a pick-six. Thankfully, the defender dropped it, and Leonard made two good throws on that game-winning drive, one of which led to the massive Beaux Collins catch. Those were his two highest-leverage attempts of the day. He was everything on the ground we want him to be, and a healthier Mitchell Evans could prove a crucial safety valve, but we don’t yet know what kind of passing game Notre Dame will have. Again, NIU will be a handy test. If Leonard and Collins (or another receiver) pick on JaVaughn Byrd, a preseason all-MAC cornerback, it’ll be a good indicator. We don’t need Leonard to be Jimmy Clausen as a passer. But to make the leaps the program needs to make, he probably needs to be better in that aspect of the game than our beloved Ian Book.
Overall, it was a triumph for game preparation, for discipline and focus and players’ bodies holding up perfectly fine in the humidity and the heat (providentially, the game was at night and the heat wasn’t what it can often be down here at the end of August). I loved hearing Riley Leonard talk about trying to see the top of the stadium. The best thing one can do in an obviously difficult situation is respect its magnitude without becoming intimidated.
Importantly, the team didn’t look worse than we expected them to look. The on-field play itself was about what we expected. The game was won by Conner Weigman playing a lot worse than he was expected to play (surely in part thanks to Al Golden’s merry band of quarterback castrators) and by Notre Dame maintaining composure both times the emotions favored Texas A&M. The Irish are 1–0, and the toughest or second-toughest test they’ll face this regular season is now behind them.
Notre Dame’s Foreign Relations
College Station might not be the nicest town, and A&M’s definitely a little weird, but in my personal experience, I’ve never encountered nicer opposing fans at a big Irish road game. Georgia was great in 2019, but A&M fans were probably nicer. For what it’s worth, I did not go to Norman in 2012. I felt a little ashamed leaving College Station, having developed some Longhorn sympathies these last six years in Austin. At the same time, though, I can see why Texas would particularly hate A&M. Maybe A&M’s identity wouldn’t be so tied up in their status as Texas’s little brother if their fight song talked more about the Aggies than the Longhorns.
In a way, though, it’s bad to be welcomed so graciously. It’s bad to not be nationally hated. In the 90’s, every college football fan knew Notre Dame as an arrogant powerhouse. This weekend, the last two generations of A&M fans seemed to know ND better as a team who used to be good. Notre Dame fans shouldn’t be obnoxiously arrogant—for one thing, Notre Dame hasn’t earned it—but it would reflect better on the football program’s performance if A&M fans expected that kind of attitude.
A number of A&M fans did comment on how well Notre Dame traveled, and after all the A&M fans left the stadium, the amount of green in the stands did look rather large, diluted though it was by Kyle Field’s size. I’m curious how much of this is due to A&M no longer being new to the SEC. I wonder if they get more visitors when it’s a program’s first trip to Texas A&M in a couple decades. Kyle Field is worth the journey, but College Station isn’t one of the better college towns.
I really loved watching the players sing the Alma Mater to the fans in the band’s seats. That was a cool moment.
The Season Ahead
Some probabilities from our model…
Game-by-game:
| Opponent | ND Win Probability |
| NIU | 99.7% |
| Purdue | 91.6% |
| Miami (OH) | 97.7% |
| Louisville | 90.1% |
| Stanford | 99.2% |
| Georgia Tech | 86.9% |
| Navy | 99.0% |
| Florida State | 81.2% |
| Virginia | 97.2% |
| Army | 97.6% |
| USC | 74.2% |
Regular season win total:
| Win Total | Probability |
| 5 | 0.01% |
| 6 | 0.07% |
| 7 | 0.32% |
| 8 | 1.34% |
| 9 | 4.77% |
| 10 | 15.30% |
| 11 | 33.51% |
| 12 | 44.68% |
For what it’s worth, our model’s rating system—Movelor—is a little higher on the Irish than ESPN’s SP+ and FPI, both of which are a little more established in the arena of present-tense ratings. It’s a little higher on Georgia Tech as well (suddenly one of the four toughest remaining games), but it’s a little lower on USC and Louisville. Where our model is more useful is that I believe SP+ and FPI treat their ratings as static in future-looking calculations, not allowing for the ratings movement that happens as the season progresses in the real world. Our win total probabilities probably better assess the uncertainty than what you’ll get from ESPN. Teams change over the course of the year, and none of Movelor, FPI, and SP+ have a great track record across various seasons’ first three weeks. I’m unaware of a ratings system that thrives in August and early September.
Overall? Our model’s bullish on the Irish, but it’s probably a little more bearish on Louisville and USC than it should be. Thankfully, the more immediate concerns are handling business against NIU and doing something mean to Purdue. It’s going to be very easy to underestimate Purdue.
The Status of Good Things Shrewing
We’re going to try to do two editions of Good Things Shrewing a week for the foreseeable future. Usually, we’ll try to publish those on Monday and Friday. Normally, we’ll have something on Notre Dame’s non-football sports as well, most notably men’s basketball, our focus here. Apologies, as always, for our sporadicity.
Nicely written, Mr. McGrath.