After making the national championship in 2012, Notre Dame was set up to make a leap. The heart and soul graduated, but the 2013 landing was soft. Michigan was crappy. Oklahoma had to come to South Bend. In the big picture, Notre Dame could even afford a little letdown. It was still the BCS era, and making a BCS bowl would be perfectly respectable. For the first time in Brian Kelly’s life, he was recruiting top-end talent at the depth necessary to compete for national championships. All Notre Dame had to do was win and the talent would grow. All Notre Dame had to do was compete through 2013 and the leap would come.
Instead, Notre Dame lost to Michigan, and Notre Dame lost to Oklahoma, and the season eventually spiraled, just like the next one did. The 2013 recruits would be Kelly’s only top-five class. The opportunity came, and Notre Dame missed it, run off the field by a guy named Devin Gardner.
Things are different now than they were in 2013. Marcus Freeman is not Brian Kelly, and the sport is different from what it was. In 2013, the national championship dream died when that interception bounced off of Jaylon Smith’s hands and landed on the Big House turf. In 2025, 0–2 Notre Dame has a realistic playoff path, with ranked opponents probably remaining and the losses coming to playoff contenders by a combined four points. Will it happen? Probably not. But it’s unlikelier that Notre Dame goes 10–2 than it is that a 10–2 Notre Dame books tickets to the ReliaQuest Bowl. Arkansas and USC are bigger problems than the committee.
Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that tonight was catastrophic, and I mean big-picture catastrophic, not just “Marcel Reed feels way too similar to Devin Gardner right now” catastrophic. To win national championships, a program either needs five-star athletes or some crazy strokes of luck. Last year, Notre Dame had some crazy strokes of luck. Just like in 2013, though, the program couldn’t bottle the last year’s magic. If Notre Dame misses the playoff, will the five-stars still come?
You can hire the best coordinators and use the transfer portal like a toolbox and develop talent like you’re BALCO in the early 2000’s, but we did all that last year. Where did it leave us? With Christian Gray in one-on-one coverage against Jeremiah Smith, and not even directly for the win. Now, Xavier Watts is gone, and the offensive line’s out of sync, and Jeremiyah Love isn’t sneaking up on anybody. Now Al Golden’s in the NFL, and Riley Leonard isn’t there to make every fourth-and-short a gimme, and these other programs like us—these other programs on that second talent tier, programs like Penn State and Tennessee and Miami and Texas A&M—are finding their own recipes to try to close that gap with the true big boys, to try to close that gap with Ohio State and Georgia and make lightning strike at the very right time.
There are plenty of reasons for optimism, and they start up top. If anybody should be trusted to lead a team back from a needlessly gutting early-season loss, it’s Marcus Freeman. If anything, this is too much a strength of Freeman’s. The man has done it every single year. I wish Marcus Freeman was not so well-versed in recovering from disaster. I feel like I’m on a plane with a pilot who’s survived four hijackings.
Elsewhere, that offensive line might not be clicking, but it’s loaded with talent, and if a piece is missing there’s more talent in reserve. At quarterback, CJ Carr looks more promising than Arch Manning, and that might not sound like it’s saying much right now but the point is that his shortcomings are the shortcomings of inexperience, not the shortcomings of a limited football player. We’ve shown an institutional ability to identify and unleash studs like Love and Jaradarian Price and Leonard Moore. We’re lacking on the interior defensive line, but there’s no other position group that raises alarm bells for next year. And while Arkansas does look like they’ll put up 40 on our guys, and while we should always handle Purdue like it’s a radioactive opossum, we could still win out through this regular season. There is nothing wrong with hope.
But the pressure rose a lot with the loss to Miami, and the pressure rose higher tonight, and it didn’t help tonight that all our weaknesses became so obvious. Jeremiyah Love is a great running back, but he’s a running back, a position highly dependent on another position to generate its success. Christian Gray had some big picks last year, but he is a traditional Notre Dame cornerback, not a second Leonard Moore. CJ Carr is inexperienced. Chris Ash’s unit isn’t clicking like Al Golden’s did. How many times can I mention how much I personally miss Xavier Watts’s presence in my life, how I yearn to see him roaming the defensive backfield again, how I fear I will die still dreaming of the second coming of the man who ended Caleb Williams’s football career before it could get off the ground?
It’s possible that Notre Dame can recruit five-stars after an 8–4 or 9–3 season. We better hope we can. But it’s also possible that the only way out of the second tier is to win your way up. That doesn’t have to mean playoffs every year, but in the year after the reincarnation of 2012’s magic? We need to make the playoffs. It’s at least a little out of our hands now. That’s very, very bad. And we’ve only been talking about the future. We’ve hardly acknowledged this season itself, a football team and a football season with value of its own. Tonight sucked for the future of Notre Dame football. It sucked even worse for Notre Dame’s 2025.
I think we should have confidence in Marcus Freeman. I think we should have confidence that we’ll come out next week and give Purdue a wedgie so bad its ass bleeds. I think we should have confidence that we can stop Taylen Green in Fayetteville, even if it might be even harder than stopping Marcel Reed. I think we should have confidence, too, that even if this letdown year does cause recruiting to stutter, Freeman and his council are adaptable enough and cunning enough to find a way back in fewer than twelve years this time. But we can’t coach to win in December if it makes us lose in September. We can’t let the sixth-best SEC quarterback torch us like Uncle Lewis smoking a cigar by the Christmas tree. We can’t miss tackles, can’t give quarterbacks all day to throw, can’t let the blogosphere dictate our offensive gameplan in Week 3, etc. etc. etc. I miss Xavier Watts. I miss him so much.
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