Good afternoon from Austin, Texas, where things have turned around for the locals. Hopefully they’ll do the same for us.
A lot’s happened since we last talked Notre Dame football. Notre Dame beat Purdue. There was a lightning delay. My infant son attended his first Notre Dame football game.
We’re going to start by talking about that last part—a Notre Dame kid’s first Notre Dame game—and then get into the game itself. Then, Arkansas talk.
My Child Is Undefeated at Notre Dame Football Games
I can’t remember if my first Notre Dame football game came on November 4th, 2006—against North Carolina—or if it was November 18th—against Army. I know I went to the Army game that year, but I don’t remember if my family went to two games or just one. Whenever it was, my brother was a freshman, and my family sat up in the upper bowl. A seventh grader, I was mesmerized by the whole day, from the big things like the player walk to the simple little things, like the half-dollar the concession stand gave as change when I bought popcorn and a Sprite. It’s surprising I don’t remember the exact game, because for months afterwards, I could have told you every detail of the day.
My son won’t have those first-game memories. He’ll grow up within Notre Dame in a way my brothers and I didn’t. Will he love it the way I did? Will he love it the way we do? We won’t know for a long time. But it will be a part of his life. That’s one of the special things about college football: There are a dozen ways to join a particular tribe, and only one of them is to attend the school.
Nineteen years later, there aren’t any half-dollars in the cash registers. There isn’t cash; there aren’t cash registers. There’s no scoreboard above the north endzone that cycles through Top 25 games as the sky starts getting gray. My family doesn’t go out to dinner on Grape Road before driving the long drive back to Crystal Lake. The grass is long gone. There’s music besides the band.
It didn’t happen slowly—the changes were mostly big and dramatic, sparkling boxes and Crazy Train and shinier gold on the helmets—but it’s still a shock to look back at how old-fashioned 2006 seems. Combined with my neglect to bring my kid those noise-canceling headphones babies wear at NASCAR races, it left me wishing that once a fall Notre Dame might call a game Family Day and play it with only music from the band, only to catch myself and remind myself that Family Day would have come the last few years against teams like Marshall and NIU.
Notre Dame is becoming more modern, and that is good for the football program, which is a big piece of what we want. Is some soul being lost in the process? I don’t think so. Not in the world of football. Soul has been lost, but it’s been lost outside of Notre Dame Stadium, sometimes in fair ways and sometimes unnecessarily. We’ve belabored all of that before. Inside the stadium, it’s still about football, and right now the football stadium makes us proud.
I miss the half-dollars, though. And I hope my kid at some point feels the same sense of wonder I felt, whatever this school and this program and this stadium become.
Should you bring an infant to a Notre Dame game? It’s a good question. My wife and I didn’t know the answer. I will say:
- You don’t get to watch that much of the game, especially if you are the mother of a breastfeeding child who takes two naps a day.
- You have to buy a seat, even for lap children. This is strange, and I haven’t heard any kind of explanation despite lobbing out a few questions about the policy to people who might know the decision-makers. No one even offered a coherent theory. Maybe child-exclusion is the norm in the Midwest. Here at Texas, babies can go to football games.
- You should probably bring those noise-canceling headphones. I don’t know if our baby needed them, but I wondered, and that distracted from the experience a little.
- If your kid likes being lifted in the air, post-touchdown pushups will be very fun.
- If your kid likes applause and looking around at lots of people, they will have the time of their life.
- If Notre Dame means something to you, it will mean something to you to see your child there. I was surprised how this manifested. I thought I would be sharing something from my life with my child, like when I brought him to my hometown this summer for the first time. Instead, it felt like I was seeing the start of his own Notre Dame experience, whatever that becomes. The latter actually meant more than the former.
The Defense Stinks
Thoughts from the game itself:
- Still miss Xavier Watts. Also the Rylie Mills–Howard Cross tandem. There’s some encouraging stuff out there—Dallas Golden played well enough to dream of him subbing in for Christian Gray if Leonard Moore and Devonta Smith both get healthy; the interior defensive line seems like an area where we might be able to mix and match our way to competitiveness—but it’s jarring to go from Al Golden’s defense to Chris Ash’s. A little bit of that is personnel, but as someone who thought the early Ash reactions were slight overreactions, color me a convert. The defense is a disaster, and it’s hard not to pin that on Ash.
- I thought it was weird this week when Marcus Freeman, in a longer response about the defense, referred to Ash as “Chris Ash” and not “Chris” or “Coach Ash” or something else that isn’t his full, first–and–last name. It sounded like Freeman was talking about a guy he doesn’t know that well. I probably read too much into that.
- Freeman’s shown a capacity to address the problem once it hits him in the face. We seem to be at that point? The defense should get better?
- The offense is fun. That opening drive play-action was perfect. CJ Carr’s making some youth mistakes, but the offense is fun. He’s perfectly capable back there. Still stands a good chance of being the best Notre Dame quarterback since Jimmy Clausen.
- I understand the hand-wringing over Jaden Greathouse’s touches, but not everybody can get every touch. Get him the ball, yes. But get Jadarian Price the ball more, too. And Jeremiah Love. And Will Pauling. And Aneyas Williams. This is the deepest skill position group Notre Dame has had in a long time. It’s creating some unfamiliar things, like that one of our top receivers isn’t getting the ball very much.
- I think the line looked better, even with a couple whiffs in there (Knapp specifically comes to mind again, unfortunately). We should be able to bully every defensive front we see from now through November. That’s nice at this stage in the offensive line life cycle. It should be stronger next year. It should get stronger as this year goes on.
Arkansas?
Turning to tomorrow…
- Yes, terrible recipe, this is not the time we want to face an explosive offense. It does seem like everybody knows Arkansas has an explosive offense, which is good. They shouldn’t catch us off-guard. But…yeah. Nervous about that.
- Thankfully, Arkansas’s defense looks even worse than ours. This is a large, large defensive tackle getting dragged around by Memphis’s quarterback. Yes, the approach was to try to strip the football. But that guy got carried up the football field.
- It looks like it could get humid tomorrow in Fayetteville, which is unfortunate given how poor our conditioning looked against Miami. It doesn’t look that hot, and the humidity’s not a guarantee, but something to keep an eye on.
- Arkansas is getting close to a coach-firing, one of those awkward “he’s not doing a terrible job; this is kind of a terrible job because we keep having to play an SEC schedule; we need to introduce variance but the next guy probably won’t work either” moves that happens in Fayetteville and Columbia and Starkville from time to time. This can cut both ways. It can be a rallying cry. It can open the door to even more distraction than already accompanies college football players. There is blowout potential for Notre Dame, but we are nowhere near banking on that.
- Overall? We probably don’t need a touchdown every drive. But it’s going to feel that way until we establish some separation. Hopefully we do.
- If you’re going, I’m jealous. Fayetteville’s a great, great town. Wanted to be there. Had tickets. Lost a lot of money selling those tickets when scheduling didn’t work out. Alas! Have fun, represent Notre Dame well (be a good dude if you’re a dude; be a good person either way), and Go Irish.
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