The more things change…

In this latest installment of Notre Dame football’s ongoing re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus, Notre Dame had every reason to expect to notch a top ten win in front of a ravenous home crowd over a program they haven’t beaten since the Great Depression. They had momentum and control of the game. This was a chance for Notre Dame to make a statement, loud and clear with the nation watching, that things were gonna be different under Marcus Freeman. Instead, we got more of the same. 

Despite a clear buzz on campus, there was a distinct sense of unease leading up to the game, perhaps due to the fact that ND has not had a great track record in these spots of late. Unfortunately, the Irish once again proved that stereotype true. 

It sure didn’t look like it with about five minutes to play. The Irish somewhat inexplicably had the lead, racing back to score two unanswered touchdowns after taking over two-thirds of the game to get points on the board. The Buckeyes were on the ropes, a third & 10 with a quarterback in his first hostile environment, needing to make something happen against an Irish defense that had played as well as anyone could have possibly asked for. A stop forces a punt and gives an Irish offense that had found a real rhythm in the running game a chance to bleed clock or, god forbid, score. 

So what does Al Golden, master of the poorly-timed blitz, do? Dial up a corner blitz that sent Benjamin Morrison, yes that Benjamin Morrison, the cover guy, the guy who had spent most of the night winning maybe the toughest matchup in football against Marvin Harrison, Jr., rushing the quarterback on a pressure that had no chance of getting home — it hadn’t all night — and leaving the guy he lined up against as wide open as a scarecrow in an Ohio cornfield for an easy catch and a huge run. 

Somehow, miraculously, the bust didn’t result in points, in part due to an almost as inexplicable play call from Ryan Day on fourth down that the Irish snuffed. Turnover on downs, four minutes to play. About two first downs to ice it. 

But then. Oh, but then. 

After picking up about twenty yards in two plays, one with an ill-advised but still successful sideline throw and another with Audric Estime just gashing the Ohio State defense, Gerard Parker somehow thought the next call should be this weird zone read play with the ball either staying with Hartman or getting handed off to another back. Hartman kept it and got dropped for a loss of six. Now, way behind the sticks, Notre Dame basically has to throw, so Parker dials up a screen pass that is almost picked but only falls incomplete. I didn’t mind the screen call in this situation, really, (usually you complete that without an athletic play from a defensive lineman who hadn’t shown up all night), but how in the world the first down play even entered Parker’s mind is beyond me. At that point it was just a scramble to see how far out of the self-inflicted hole Notre Dame could dig. 

Not very, as it turns out. The third down run went nowhere, letting the clock run 

And then ND lined up with only ten defenders on the last two plays of the game. After a timeout. 

Huh? What? How?

It would’ve been hard to script a worse final five for Notre Dame’s coaching staff. Ohio State had about one path to win the game, and Notre Dame led them right down it. 

Is any of that on Marcus Freeman directly? I dunno man — I’m willing to believe the disastrous first down run call was more on Parker’s shoulders directly, since Freeman doesn’t have an offensive background and as far as I know he doesn’t call plays on either side of the ball. And as I’ll get into below, the rest of Parker’s night was far from stellar. 

The defensive stuff is harder to waive away. At the very very least, Freeman can override his DC when he wants to send the best cover corner on the team to blitz on a critical third down, leaving the middle of the field wide open for an easy catch and run to set up Ohio State in scoring position. He has the defensive acumen and the authority to say that’s a horrendous idea, and he didn’t use it. Then, how in the everloving name of Touchdown Jesus do you have ten defenders on the field not once, but TWICE on the one-inch line? How does no one on staff see this? 

No matter who is directly to blame, at the end of the day Freeman hired these guys. He’s on the headset. It’s his program. The buck stops with him. 

He’ll have at least two more opportunities this year to prove he can avoid the same mistakes. The bet with Freeman has always been that he’s a quick learner, as evidenced by his defensive coordinator career, and so far that’s born out in other ways. I have no doubt he’ll learn from this. I’m still rooting for him. I still believe he can be the guy. But, man… you just simply cannot play the last play of the game a man short. 

It’s a banner egg-on-your-face moment that will be near impossible for Freeman to live down unless or until he wins a properly big game. What’s unfortunate is that it will overshadow the colossal foul-ups that came right before it that were arguably far more costly. The fact is the game should never have come down to a goal line play with under ten seconds to go. 

As OSU learned the hard way in the playoffs last year, even if you manage a situation right, there’s still no guarantee everything goes to plan. That’s football. But if you manage a situation wrong, as the staff did Saturday night, you have no one to blame but yourselves. 

---

I don’t want the flaming dung heap of the final five minutes to override the myriad missed opportunities that riddled the previous fifty-five though. As catastrophic as the end of the game was, it should’ve never even been that close. 

There were probably half a dozen times ND was in a position to make a massive, game-changing play, and couldn’t do it. You can read into this whatever you want — recruiting failures of years past coming home to roost, bad coaching, or worse luck — but it doesn’t change the play on the field. There were dropped interceptions, missed fourth downs, and points left on the field all over the place. The Irish generated two scoring chances in the first half, and couldn’t convert either. Spencer Shrader absolutely shanked as down-the-middle a field goal as you’ll find. No points. You’ll never convince me Hartman didn’t make the first down on 4th & 1 on ND’s first series, and it was the right decision to go for it regardless, but hey at the end of the day no points there either. 

So yeah, ten men on the field will get all the headlines, but if I told you Notre Dame wouldn’t score until the waning minutes of the third quarter, would you have expected them to win?

Leading up to the game, a lot of attention focused on Sam Hartman and how the Irish would finally have a quarterback advantage in a big game. The expectation was that Notre Dame could finally let loose offensively, that they’d be able to make the plays need to win a game like this instead of hanging on for dear life. 

Instead, offensive coordinator Gerard Parker turned in the most baffling offensive gameplan — or lack thereof — since the disastrous 2019 trip to Ann Arbor. 

I was probably in the bottom decile of Hartman hype in the offseason — I thought he would be a really good quarterback, and miles better than Notre Dame’s other options at the position, but wouldn’t be a game wrecker. Trevor Lawrence, he is not. But regardless, the underutilization of Hartman on Saturday still sticks out. Wasn’t the whole point of bringing in Hartman that we wouldn’t have to play these weird, lurching, ball control kind of games against top opponents all the time? It’s not exactly a great recruiting pitch to barely play to the skillset of the best quarterback you’ve had in some time in the biggest game of the weekend. 

ND played scared on offense for far to long, looking more like the 2020 or 2022 offenses than this year’s much preferable version. Hartman had some moments, but was it felt like he had one hand tied behind his back all night. Is this on Parker? Hartman himself? OSU having too strong of a defense? Wideouts not getting open? (Del Alexander, the gift that keeps on giving.) Hartman never had a game changing play. Even his touchdown involved finding a wide open Rico Flores on one of Parker’s few good play calls of the evening. There was a lot of finding guys in soft spots in the zone and check downs. There was, I think, only one deep shot all night. 

It all amounted to feeling like still more of the same, a run-heavy gameplan that took too long to click. Just like last year, just like too many games at the end of the Kelly era, the offensive did jack squat for a half and relied on the defense to carry them through. To be clear, establishing the run was always going to be part of the path to victory, but it was supposed to be in tandem with letting Hartman cook in the passing game. That never quite happened. 

I’m not sure the gameplan amounted to playing not to lose, because I’m not sure what it amounted to. I couldn’t tell you what Notre Dame’s plan was on offense. They passed when they probably should have run and run when they probably should have passed. There was no sense of direction, no sense of purpose. It felt like they were just kinda doing stuff. The inexplicable zone read call was only the cherry on top of a vapid sundae. 

In a game like this, not everything needs to go right, but more things need to than did. The offensive did precious little to bend the needle in Notre Dame’s direction. 

---

Game aside, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.  

Twenty-first century Irish fandom has been defined by a series of sudden, momentum killing catastrophies. Everytime it feels like the program either has or is about to turn a corner something goes horribly wrong. Overnight offensive momentum and a top-ten matchup with USC? Here, have the Bush Push. New coach hired to right the ship goes into an offseason with momentum after finally beating USC? Hey, let’s lose to South Florida in the opener. Undefeated season with a national title game berth? Let’s take the Manti Te’o scandal, Kelly flirting with the Eagles, and Everrett Golson’s suspension in rapid succession. Shuting out M***igan and nearly beating the defending national champs in Tallahassee? Hey, let’s get a critical injury on defense and implode the second half of the season. Nearly make the playoff the following year? Whoops, 4-8. 

Blowout win over USC and a running game churning behind the best offensive line in the country? Don’t look now, blowout in Miami. Trying to run back a playoff team with only a narrow loss to Georgia. Whoops, torrential downpour loss in the Big House. Knocking off #1 for the first time in a quarter century? Joke’s on you, you’ll get crushed in the rematch and lose to Alabama again for good measure. Program so stable it gets to a point where maybe the weakest team in five years can screw around and go 11-1? Whoops, your coach left in the middle of the night for LSU. 

New coach re-energizes the program? Uh oh, lost to Marshall. Finding his footing midseason? Yikes, here’s a Stanford loss. Huge, energizing win over Clemson? Let Southen Cal win another Heisman on ya. Oh well, at least he recruits well, right? Yeah, about that…

And now we finally have a quarterback who’s supposed to be able to hold his own. Notre Dame’s looked as close to clean and efficient as a college football team can in the first third of its season. It’s getting a top program breaking in a new quarterback at home. Well, howdy doody, let’s blow the game in the final few minutes. 

When’s it gonna stop? 

In a vacuum, this doesn’t feel like a wholly catastrophic loss, but we don’t live in a vacuum. In the context of Notre Dame football in 2023, this is bad. Real bad. Not only do we uphold the narrative of “Notre Dame can’t win the big one,” but now Marcus Freeman will be known for a massive error at the end of a big game. It’s a stain that will stay with him for a while. The jokes practically write themselves.

In the moment, this feels closest to that 2019 bludgeoning by the skunkkbears. That night in Ann Arbor was a program loss, a mirror image of everything that had been working for Notre Dame over the past two and a half seasons. This feels much the same — it’s an inversion of everything that gave Irish fans optimism heading into this season. This is a loss squarely on the feet of the coaching staff we’ve spent so much time investing in, a loss in which arguably the team’s biggest asset on the field barely showed, in which Notre Dame’s purported strengths along the lines took too long to show. It feels like almost like a parody. 

And as if to drive the point home, we got this delicious one from the college football gods shortly after the game — the Irish recieved a commitment from a four-star edge rusher who could have literally fit right into the formation where the eleventh player was supposed to be. “Here’s your eleventh guy, Irish.” Gotta crack a smile at that one, despite it all — here we are, trying to Charlie Brown our way back into a national championship contender, only to have what we seemingly need dangled in front of us just outside our grasp. 

And that, dear friends, might be the crux of the issue. It feels like the fanbase is always looking for a silver bullet, that one thing that will send Notre Dame right to the top. “Oh, we just need a quarterback. Oh, we just need a head coach that recruits. Oh, we just need to make a few extra plays.” It should be clear by now there is no silver bullet. Notre Dame is not gonna just wake up one day and find itself atop the college football world again. This is a long, long climb back to the top. All we can do is make incremental progress up the summit. (There’s probably a hackneyed analogy for how that represents life in general to be made here, but I’m too grumpy and tired to make it, so just pretend I said something smart here ok?)

Just like life, though, football goes on. This feels like as big a test for Freeman’s abilities as a coach as the aftermath of Marshall last year. Can he keep the team together enough to still play for the goals their talent and experience suggest they should be able to achieve? Can he replicate the dynamism of the first four weeks? Can he not waste the one year we’ll have with Sam Hartman? The silver lining of that game from hell I mentioned above was that the Irish ripped off fifteen straight wins after. Does this team have it in them to muster a similar response? I don’t know — starting that effort with a drip to Durham, home of a very undefeated Blue Devils team, is a hell of a way to start to find out though. 

But what else are we gonna do? Stop watching? Hell no. That’d be as big an error as sending ten men out on the field.

– EC