The junior linebacker is projected as a first-round pick after leading the Irish in tackles during the regular season.
Tags » ‘Notre’
Kansas introduces former Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis
December 10th, 2011 by adminCharlie Weis was introduced as the Jayhawks’ coach Friday, about 24 hours after he accepted the job.
Notre Dame QB Dayne Crist seeks transfer
December 5th, 2011 by adminNotre Dame quarterback Dayne Crist has received permission to talk with other schools about transferring for his final year of eligibility.
USC’s Galippo apologizes for saying Notre Dame ‘quit’ at end of game
October 25th, 2011 by adminStatement came after the Irish did not call timeouts in the final minutes of a 14-point loss to Trojans.
Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma has a problem with Notre Dame
October 20th, 2011 by adminAuriemma thinks it’s time for the Irish to make a commitment to the Big East for football or leave the conference.
Game Day Keys: The triple option’s back in South Bend. Will Notre Dame get fooled again?
October 8th, 2011 by adminThe day’s most pivotal players.
• MANTI TE’O, Middle Linebacker, Notre Dame.
The last two times the Fighting Irish have faced the triple option, they’ve been gashed for huge yards on the ground in back-to-back losses to Navy, and most of them have come straight up the gut: Fullbacks Vince Murray and Alexander Teich combined for 210 yards on just 19 carries in the Midshipmen’s 23-21 upset in South Bend in 2009, and Teich ripped the Irish again last year for 210 yards on 26 carries in a 35-17 rout in Baltimore. On both occasions, Irish coaches came in for a round of abuse for botched game plans that fundamentally misunderstood how the option works.
Air Force isn’t Navy — the Falcons are much more diverse overall — but the attack it brings into South Bend today is still fundamentally a triple option-based scheme that’s averaging 365 yards per game on the ground and has no problem repeatedly feeding the fullback on the dive if it’s moving the chains. Air Force shouldn’t be able to handle Te’o or anyone else on the Notre Dame line athletically. But it can influence him, and he was personally singled out last year for consistently picking (or being directed into) the wrong gap against the Midshipmen. As the anchor whose initial reaction to the dive can determine the course of the play — and as an upperclassman with his eye on the NFL at season’s end — the right decisions by Te’o can set the tone for the entire defense.
• CHRIS RAINEY, Tailback / Kick Returner, Florida.
Against Tennessee, Rainey looked like the second coming of Percy Harvin, going for 232 all-purpose yards and a touchdown as a rusher, receiver and return man, and setting up another score with a blocked punt in an impressive, 33-23 Gator win. Against Alabama, he was virtually invisible in a 38-10 disaster.
LSU’s defense has been slightly more forgiving than Alabama’s, but only slightly. And with a true freshman quarterback making his first start — whether it’s Jeff Driskel or Jacoby Brissett, who’s yet to take a snap in a college game — today’s trip to Baton Rouge stands to end even more disastrously unless Florida finds a way to get its best playmaker free in space and he creates an adventure or two of his own on special teams.
• BLAKE GIDEON and KENNY VACCARO, Safeties, Texas.
The rest of the regular rotation in the Longhorn secondary consists of freshmen (Quandre Diggs, Leroy Scott, Mykkele Thompson) and sophomores (Carrington Byndom, Adrian Phillips) who have yet to face a more imposing quarterback than Iowa State’s Steele Jantz. The pass rush is among the most impotent in the Big 12 with just five sacks in four games. If the veterans on the back end get caught in the wrong place by Oklahoma’s pedal-to-the-metal passing game, it will be lights out in the Cotton Bowl in a blink.
• MICHAEL DYER, Tailback, Auburn.
The Tigers passed their way out of a jam in the opening-day, shootout win over Utah State, but the offense has been Dyer’s stage since — especially last week, when he shouldered a career-high 41 carries for 141 yards and a touchdown in a 16-13 slugfest at South Carolina, Auburn’s lowest output on offense since October 2009. But the upset over the Gamecocks was also the first time this year the Tigers managed to win in time of possession, a valuable commodity tonight with leading receivers Emory Blake and Trovon Reed both likely out at Arkansas. The more opportunities Dyer has with the ball, the fewer for Tyler Wilson and a white-hot Razorback offense.
• JARVIS JONES, Outside Linebacker, Georgia.
Jones’ counterpart, Cornelius Washington, is suspended today at Tennessee on the heels of a drunk driving arrest after last weekend’s win over Mississippi State, leaving the pass rush almost exclusively in the hands of the Bulldogs’ other athletic terror off the edge. Jones and Washington have accounted for more than half of Georgia’s eleven sacks through five games, and if Vol quarterback Tyler Bray doesn’t feel the heat, it’s going to be a very long night for the UGA secondary.
- – -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Fact-checking: Just how important is Michael Floyd to Notre Dame?
September 29th, 2011 by admin
Michael Floyd is one of the leading receivers in the nation, owner of every major Notre Dame receiving record and likely bound for the first round of the NFL Draft. His surprising return for a senior season was one of the reasons the Fighting Irish were widely pegged for the top ten by the summer pundits. His eligibility was the subject of a months-long vigil that dominated the Irish’s offseason right up to the start of preseason practice. After Floyd caught just one pass over the final three quarters of last Saturday’s ugly, 15-12 win at Pittsburgh, coach Brian Kelly reemphasized this week that he wants to get the ball to his best player as often as possible.
So when we encounter the suggestion today by CBS Sports’ Tom Fornelli that Notre Dame should actually be working to reduce Floyd’s touches…
While Michael Floyd is the most prolific receiver in Notre Dame history, there’s an alarming trend for the Irish and Floyd when he’s making so many receptions. In his four years in South Bend, Floyd has caught 10 or more passes in a game six times. In those six games Notre Dame has gone 1-5, the lone win coming against USC last season when Floyd had 11 receptions for 86 yards.
[…]
While it may not sound right, the numbers show that Notre Dame may be better off not relying so heavily on their biggest playmaker.
…we can dismiss it as a bit of tongue-in-cheek, counterintuitive trolling, right?
Not so fast, my friend. Fornelli’s basic premise — Notre Dame is more successful when Floyd accounts for a smaller share of the offense — is overwhelmingly correct: The Irish are 3-8 since 2009 when Floyd goes over 100 yards receiving, and 13-5 when he doesn’t. They’re 4-2 in that span when he doesn’t play at all.
This is not because they’ve been conservative when things are going well and forced into must-pass mode when they’re not: In 13 Irish losses since ’09, all but two have been tight, one-score defeats that were still in doubt deep into the fourth quarter, and Floyd didn’t even play in one of those two. (Over the course of his career, according to cfbstats.com, Floyd has consistently been at his least productive in the fourth quarter, and he’s been about equally productive when the Irish are winning as when they’re behind.) It’s not because the running game has picked up the slack: Rushing numbers are nearly identical when Floyd goes over 100 yards as when he doesn’t. It’s not because he’s called on more often in shootouts: The defense has only allowed 3.7 points and 15 yards per game more when he goes over 100 yards as when he doesn’t.
There’s no way here to measure Floyd’s effect on defenses who overcompensate to take him out of the game, thus opening things up for the rest of the offense. (Though again, the numbers for the offense as a whole have tended to be better when Floyd’s are better; when he’s not as heavily involved, his production isn’t being fully replaced by a long shot.) But in any macro sense, Michael Floyd’s success in any given game has no correlation with Notre Dame winning or losing. In fact, there’s no correlation with the success of the entire offense and Notre Dame winning or losing: For the second year in a row, the Irish are averaging significantly more total yards in losses than in wins, and the difference was almost negligible in 2009.
The factors that have consistently made a difference in Notre Dame winning or losing are a) The defense and b) Turnovers. Handful of flops notwithstanding, the offense has moved the ball on a fairly consistent basis dating back to the end of the Charlie Weis era. But the Irish have lost 12 straight games when giving up more than 21 points, compared to 12 straight wins when yielding 20 or less; during the late turnaround in 2010, it was the defense that carried the day with four straight gems to close the season opposite a very pedestrian offense. Before Saturday’s win over Pitt (in which the Irish were —2 in turnover margin), they’d dropped eight of nine when finishing —2 or worse, including each of the first two in their 0-2 start this year.
Not that it doesn’t help to have a future first-rounder who represents a one-on-one mismatch against virtually every cornerback he faces. But forcing a presence for Floyd isn’t going to get the Irish nearly as far as improving the areas that will actually make that production count.
- – -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Life On the Margins: One last call for the real Notre Dame to please stand up
September 15th, 2011 by admin
To describe Notre Dame’s rapidly descending start to the 2011 season, you have to tell a tale of two teams. Team A is averaging more than 500 yards per game and has outgained its first two opponents by more than 300 total yards. Team B is 0-2 with five turnovers in each loss, more than any other team in the nation. Unless they rip off ten consecutive wins to finish the regular season, neither one is going to a BCS game.
But if Team A ever figures out how to leave Team B stuffed inside of a locker, that may not be so farfetched — or so says at least one skeptic who thinks the turnovers have distorted the reality of how good the Irish really are:
Kirk Herbstreit did not expect an echo-waking season from Notre Dame. He then saw every snap of the first two games — including a view from the broadcast booth last Saturday at Michigan — and watched the Irish tumble to 0-2.
And the ESPN analyst feels better about Notre Dame than he has at any other point.
“I was not among the folks that was thinking BCS or bust prior to this season,” Herbstreit said on a conference call Wednesday. “I just didn’t quite see that or have that expectation of them, before the season started. But after watching them the first two weeks of the season, I actually like them better now than I liked them prior to the season starting. …”
If that sounds a little … I dunno, forgiving at the moment, remember that Herbstreit has always been a “trust your eyes” sort of analysts, and what his eyes saw Saturday night in Ann Arbor was mostly the “Team A” edition of Notre Dame dominating the Wolverines for the first three quarters before falling victim to Denard Robinson’s X-Box audition in the fourth. (After charting every play of the game, even Michigan super-blogger Brian Cook described the Wolverines’ strategy in the final 15 minutes as “chuck it up and hope.”) For the second week in a row, the Fighting Irish controlled the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, consistently moved the chains and came out significantly ahead in the box score by almost every measure — and lost.
Which brings us to the inescapable theme of their season to date: Turnovers. More specifically, red zone turnovers that negate all the positives of a long drive into opposing territory. Against South Florida, Notre Dame failed to score on four different trips inside the USF 10-yard line, including a goal line fumble that was returned the length of the field for a USF touchdown, an interception into the USF end zone and another interception that bounced off the intended receiver’s helmet inside the USF five-yard line. Against Michigan, quarterback Tommy Rees was picked off at the Wolverine two-yard line in the second quarter and later fumbled for no reason at the Wolverine nine, on either side of a fumble by running back Cierre Wood at the Wolverine 30-yard line. Six golden opportunities to score, seven points for the other team.
Of course, “could been” has been the mark of struggling teams from time immemorial. But in this case, it’s also the mark of one that’s doing a lot right and can still be very good if it curbs its tendency to shoot itself in the face when it’s put itself in position for something good to happen. As coach Brian Kelly said Tuesday, “they can see the body of work is there,” obscured by a handful of big errors that have undermined the whole thing. Vegas can certainly see it, installing the Irish as 4.5-point home favorites Saturday against 2-0 Michigan State on the bet — literally — that the “real” Notre Dame is the one that’s dominated the stat sheet rather than the one that’s fallen short on the scoreboard.
Still, that’s the Irish’s last chance to salvage the benefit of the doubt: If the giveaways persist in another high-profile loss, the reality will be all too clear.
- – -
Top photo via The Shredder.
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly under fire for language
September 6th, 2011 by adminNotre Dame coach Brian Kelly’s language during the Irish’ 23-20 loss to South Florida in South Bend on Saturday drew enough attention that he …
Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly tabs Tommy Rees to start against Michigan
September 6th, 2011 by adminIt took one half for Dayne Crist to play his way out of the starting quarterback job at Notre Dame. Tommy Rees will start Saturday at Michig …