Ten men on the field.
It’s a little too iconic.
The Bush Push. The clipping call on Rocket Ismail’s punt return. Ten men on the field.
Sometimes, a loss comes to be defined by one play. Plenty of other plays were played—upwards of 100—but one play comes to be the iconic one. It’s going to be a while before Notre Dame fans forget the missing defensive end.
As Stu shared, our seats were in the south endzone on Saturday night, in the lower bowl. Someone in our section noticed we only had ten men, and once they started shouting we all knew we only had ten men. Knowing we only had ten men, we breathed a sigh of enormous relief when Kyle McCord’s pass fell incomplete. We then found a few hundred pits in our few hundred stomachs when no one came out from the sideline to fill the gaping hole in the defensive line, the gaping hole through which Chip Trayanum did not burst but instead barely scraped, making the whole thing worse by coming so close to not reaching the goal line. It was an inexcusable gaffe, and though it was only one play, its self-inflicted nature made it more gutting than any other single play I can remember within my Notre Dame lifetime.
Part of what made it worse, for those who watched in person, is how few people knew at the time, and how fans therefore learned gradually, word spreading through campus and parking lots and side-streets in a shocking refrain of, “Wait, what?” Walking out to where we’d parked off of 23, gradually meeting up with those with whom we’d driven over that morning from Chicago, the scene repeated itself around us like a sick dance.
Person 1, looking up from phone: We had ten men on the field.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: We had ten men on the field on that last play.
Person 2: *pauses*
Person 2: *doubles over*
It was not the only single what-if. There was the miscommunication on Notre Dame’s final offensive first down, when neither back received the handoff and Sam Hartman ended up on the turf, nursing a five-yard loss. There was the incomplete screen pass which was nearly intercepted. There was Notre Dame’s own dropped interception, the DJ Brown one. There was the missed field goal and all sorts of other little plays throughout the game. But at the end of a brilliantly coached game, execution broke down, and as Marcus Freeman said today, that ultimately falls on Marcus Freeman.
There is nothing to be happy about, but there are a lot of encouraging details. The game, again, was well-coached. Notre Dame went for it on fourth down when they should have and kicked and punted when they should have, and the offensive gameplan of throwing every running back into the melee up front worked exactly as you’d hope that kind of thing would work, the backs averaging 5.3 yards per carry over the game and 5.5 in the second half despite running into a defensive line which features three likely first or second-round picks. (5.4 yards per carry is Notre Dame’s season-to-date average, for context on these numbers, but that does include sacks and runs by receivers, unlike the numbers we’re citing.) Defensively, Benjamin Morrison appeared to strike fear into Ryan Day’s heart, the Buckeyes only getting the ball to the best receiver in college football three times. Mitchell Evans broke out. The defensive front fought to a draw in the trenches, stuffing Ohio State on two fourth downs of its own. Time will tell if Ohio State is as good as its talent allows it to be, but Notre Dame held its own with one of the three most talented rosters in college football, and it held its own in the physical ways, not through guile or luck or sleight of hand. Notre Dame narrowly outplayed Ohio State by all measures I’ve seen of postgame win probability. But Notre Dame did not win, and that is the thing that matters the most in every individual game.
I understand the immediate gut reactions of a subset of fans towards Freeman, and I would venture that he and plenty of others within the program feel that way towards themselves as well. By now, close to 48 hours later, I would hope we would have all come to a place of perspective on this. Marcus Freeman just almost brought us Ohio State’s head. Marcus Freeman just almost brought us one of Notre Dame’s two most impressive wins in the last twenty years. He didn’t, and sure, you can take an absolutist approach, but it’s undeniable that Notre Dame looks closer to a national championship this evening than we have since at least the Clemson victory in 2020. Arguably, it’s really the closest we’ve looked since that Bush Push game, back in the days of Charlie Weis. Are we close enough? No. But we’re getting closer, and after Brian Kelly brought the program consistently into top-five contention, there are only so many closers to get.
It’s a little campy to say things like the thing I’m about to say, but in college football, I think it’s unavoidable: You have to love your school’s head coach. Even in the most cynical way, it is important for there to be a love there. College football runs through its fans like no other sport does. The richest fans are—and have long been, in various permitted and not–permitted ways—responsible for the players’ pay in a more direct manner than exists in any other sport in the world except for college basketball (which is a lighter-hearted, less warlike version of college football). The broader fanbase is responsible for what makes programs valuable to the TV broadcasters through whom so much of the sport’s value flows. Mercenary coaches do exist, and they do sometimes succeed, and sometimes the love comes from lasting success, with the winning come first. But the best college football happens when a school loves its coach. That’s what Notre Dame had under Ara Parseghian and under Lou Holtz.
I think we’re getting there with Marcus Freeman. We don’t know him well, and the honeymoon has long been over, but the guy seizes responsibility for the program’s failings and he has the program playing right there with the best it played under his very successful predecessor. His biggest weakness last year—game management—has improved dramatically in his second year. The program’s biggest recent on-field weakness—defensive secondary—has improved dramatically since he started coaching and recruiting the defense. The program’s biggest weakness right now—recruiting against schools whose administrations aggressively support NIL efforts—is something the final result of which remains to be seen, but it’s being addressed. An attempt is being made. Marcus Freeman did not stand there today in front of the media and name the assistant coach or player most directly responsible for there being only ten men on the field for those final two plays. He talked about how there are systems for substitution and he is in charge of building those systems. Marcus Freeman is working on the things Notre Dame needs him to work on.
We don’t love the ‘hot take’ game around here. We hate being wrong, and we find the hot take business to be a disingenuous and conceited sport. Our hottest takes in Good Things Shrewing, specifically, tend to be more inferences than takes, things about NIL and the current importance of volleyball and the nature of various schedules. I say that to add context when I say I think we’re going to remember Marcus Freeman the way we remember Ara Parseghian: We will remember him as a good man. We will remember him as a good coach. We will remember him as a national champion. We will remember him in that order.
Credit to Jack Swarbrick
We’ve been hitting Jack Swarbrick hard on the NIL front these last six months, partly because we started this weekly post just as he and Fr. Jenkins were deepening their op-ed career. This is not about NIL. It is, though, about Swarbrick’s broader vision of college sports.
The atmosphere on Saturday night was better than anything I’ve ever seen at Notre Dame Stadium. The crowd was loud. The crowd was mean. The crowd did not sit down. I’m told the Clemson game last fall was similar, though I wasn’t there in person, and I believe that, but I would infer that it could not have been better than Saturday night’s. Ohio State’s magnitude is just too much bigger than Clemson’s, in the college football universe as a whole but also the Midwestern college football universe. This means that the atmosphere at Notre Dame Stadium met the moment more than it ever has in this most modern era of college football, with the lone possible exception being 2017’s meeting with Georgia, when the Dawgs supplied the atmosphere themselves.
Environments are important in sports. They move the needle—by three or four points, on average, coincidentally true in both football and college basketball—but they also give sports their soul. Jack Swarbrick’s administration built an environment on Saturday night that is right there with any other stadium’s in the country. That required some catching up, and it required jettisoning of some of the Country Club nature many Notre Dame fans fifteen years ago held oppressively dear. Notre Dame ran into a problem after Lou Holtz, and it started with the school getting stronger academically: The students became smarter, wealthier, and nicer. The alumni became older, wealthier, and more buttoned-up. Beginning with the introduction of DJ’d music into the stadium and continuing through the Campus Crossroads project and culminating with Saturday night’s unhinged atmosphere, Jack Swarbrick and his team helped turn Notre Dame into a modern college football environment while giving the older fans the most comfortable seats in the country via the luxury boxes. Rumor holds that Ohio State’s ticket allotment was scattered throughout the stadium to avoid any sections from looking like they belonged to the visiting team. Perhaps this is a verified report by now. Either way, Notre Dame’s administration showed up for football, and with fans justifiably a little spooked about that commitment, thanks to comments Swarbrick and Jenkins have made about NIL and realignment and parallel developments, that is something to celebrate. We’re getting there as a program, and it is slow, but it is progress, and sometimes that progress isn’t evident until eighty thousand green wristbands are flashing on and off and there’s Dropkick Murphys on the speakers and you may or may not be telling Kyle McCord something you aren’t going to repeat here in writing while he preens for an NBC camera in the pregame endzone shot.
The Playoff Situation
Joe wrote about Notre Dame in his Week 4 recap. Here’s an excerpt:
The question, then, is how big Notre Dame’s hole now is. Our model’s answer? 8.0%. 1-in-12, or thereabouts. The model had Notre Dame up around 1-in-7, it’s now at 1-in-12. The chance hasn’t quite been cut in half—we’ve known this would probably be Notre Dame’s hardest game—but it’s not a good chance. One thing with this? It wasn’t a good chance already.
If you break Notre Dame’s schedule up into parts, you get three seasons. There were the first four games—Navy, NC State, Tennessee State, Central Michigan—a series of tune-ups for Ohio State with one imitation of a test tossed in to add spice. There are the last four games—Pitt, Clemson, Wake Forest, Stanford—which boil down to “Clemson & Friends,” three games any ranked team should win punctuated by a trip to see a good–not–great Tigers team. These middle four—Ohio State, Duke, Louisville, USC—are the gauntlet, and it was going to be a gauntlet regardless of how this game went. Duke is better than anyone expected, and Louisville is meeting the high end of the expectation window, but road games against power conference teams in between visits from Ohio State and USC were always going to be dangerous, and the Ohio State and USC games were always going to be enormous. Had Notre Dame won, they were still only looking at maybe a 1-in-3 chance of a playoff berth. It was always going to be a situation where they’d have to beat a great team and even then possibly get help. It is still that situation.
So, yes, Notre Dame can still make the playoff, and they almost definitely need to win out to do that. The question—and we don’t need to answer this yet, because other things will probably answer it well before it’s relevant—is whether they’ll need help even if they do win eleven games. If Ohio State goes 10–2, if USC goes 9–3, if Clemson can’t finish the year ranked (and they’ll be 9–3 at best if Notre Dame beats them, sitting at 2–2 already)—Notre Dame’s schedule isn’t going to be as strong as it was at a glance. This isn’t a criticism of Notre Dame, but it’s part of the game they choose to play as an independent. They can put themselves in situations where they’re dependent upon their foes to help them out. It’s further complicated when one of those foes—Ohio State, in this case—is also their theoretical competition for that playoff berth.
That’s a lot—that guy’s editor needs to do his job and get those posts (and this one) down to a reasonable word count—but the long and short of it is that winning out is possible enough that we have a 2-in-25 chance of making the playoff, and it’s also possible we could win out and be left out of the final four. Barring a surprise (please be good, Ohio State, I cannot walk all this back if you are bad), this will be one of the best losses in the country, effectively a six-point loss (considering home field) to a team it would be shocking to see finish with a worse record than 9–3, and one whose average record in our model’s simulations is 10.7–1.6. (The model currently has the Buckeyes with a 3-in-10 chance to make the Big Ten Championship, which is why that doesn’t sum to 12.0.) The problem is that we only get to play twelve games (independence is good, but that part hurts) and we are highly reliant on USC having a great year. We do want Ohio State to win the Big Ten. For one thing, that means Michigan doesn’t win it, but the Big Ten champion is almost 100% certain of making the playoff, and if it isn’t Ohio State, that means Ohio State might be 11–1 itself, putting two Big Ten teams in front of us instead of one.
Win out, always win out, win out for the sake of winning out, but that’s the situation right now. If we do the hard part, we will probably but not definitely get in. We almost made the situation a lot better, but it still would have been a challenging path.
Quick Hitters
The receiver position took some licks, with Jayden Thomas nursing a hamstring injury and Deion Colzie having a scope done on his knee. Thomas is uncertain for Duke. Colzie is out, and may be out a few weeks.
Offensive line recruit Guerby Lambert has committed, joining the class of 2024. Lambert, a four-star out of Massachusetts, lifts the Irish to the 8th-place ranking in the 247 composite, but Notre Dame’s still only 12th in average recruit rating on that list.
Micah Shrewsberry had a nice cameo to fire up the crowd early in the game on Saturday. All indications continue to point towards Shrewsberry being the man.
Last Saturday—the day of the Central Michigan game—alum Yared Nuguse finished second at the Bowerman Mile at the 2023 Prefontaine Classic, out in Oregon. More importantly, he set the American mile record, running a 3:43.97. That’s the third-fastest time a human has ever run.
This Week
Duke is good. Movelor, our model’s rating system, has the line at 5.6 points, and bettors have it about the same after it opened at an even 2. Old friend Mike Elko has the team clicking on both sides of the ball, and by yards per attempt the defense is second-best against the pass in the whole FBS. That trend is probably partially a facet of the teams Duke has played (Clemson, Northwestern, Lafayette, UConn), but it’s an interesting number. Quarterback Riley Leonard is the big name, but he does a lot of his damage on the ground, with four rushing touchdowns so far this year (against only two through the air) and multiple runs of 30 or more yards. What would a great game look like? Movelor would have Georgia favored by 14 against these guys, so let’s say a win by two or more possessions. For these next three weeks, though, the competition is stiff enough that winning would be enough. This game will be the sixth of Notre Dame’s season, marking the regular season’s halfway point (not by date, only by game count). A 5–1 start would be really, really good.
The men’s soccer team hung with 4th-ranked Akron on the road on Tuesday, finishing with a 0–0 draw as Bryan Dowd made two saves. On Friday, they beat Virginia 3–1 to remain tied for the best record in the ACC. They’ll play NC State in Raleigh on Sunday. The Wolfpack are 1–2–0 in ACC play and did not receive any votes in last week’s poll (this week’s is not out yet).
The women’s soccer team beat Duke but tied Pitt, and like the men’s team sit 2–0–1 in the ACC, where they’re tied for first. They host Louisville on Friday night. The Cardinals are 1–1–1 in the ACC and did not receive votes in last week’s poll.
The volleyball team beat Boston College in five sets and Syracuse in three, opening ACC play with a pair of wins. They still haven’t faced much in the way of competition, but they’re 7–2 heading into a home matchup with 5th-ranked Louisville on Wednesday. They’ll then go to Raleigh on Friday to play NC State, who like Notre Dame has only lost twice but isn’t receiving votes in the AVCA’s poll.
The men’s golf team was in action today and will be again tomorrow in Northwestern’s Windon Memorial Classic. The women’s team is in action over at the Glass City Invitational in Toledo.
The men’s tennis team played a series of “hidden duals” out at Princeton, losing to the Tigers, another set of Tigers (Memphis), and Tulane. It’s unclear to me if Notre Dame was playing its best roster. I did not see Sebastian Dominko listed, for example. The women’s team was in action at the Milwaukee Tennis Classic, but there were no team results. The women host the Notre Dame Invitational this weekend, and the ITA All-American Championships are listed on the schedule for both programs.
The cross country program hosts the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invite on Friday. There’s generally a solid field for that one.
The swimming and diving team has its Blue/Gold/Green Meet this weekend. I’m assuming that’s intrasquad.
The softball team continues fall ball. They had Concordia yesterday, and they’ll play Michigan, Michigan State, and Loyola this weekend.
