October never fails to bring the haunts, but instead of ghosts and goblins, we’ve got an undead football team shambling from door to door. 

Louisville’s L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium* served as the latest house of horrors for an Irish team that is increasingly without answers. A Cardinal home crowd, as juiced as they’ve been in years for a night game against a team that hadn’t lost a regular season game against an ACC opponent in six years, led by a hometown coach with a tendency to knock off highly ranked opponents, welcomed a team playing its third straight night game coming off an emotional win. Sound like a recipe for success? Sam Hartman threw his first pick of the season on the opening series and that might as well have been that. Sure the Irish kept it close until the Cardinals pulled away in the fourth, but did anyone really expect them to win after the opening exchange? We’ve all seen this movie before. I can’t even get mad about an unnecessary field storming, really. 

*Notre Dame, no matter how bad things get in South Bend, please do not ever sell naming rights to the House that Rockne Built.

I suppose we can take some perverse pleasure in the knowledge that the post-game scene probably isn’t gonna age all that well, since I’d feel way more comfortable picking Notre Dame to go 7-5 at this point than play their way into a meaningful bowl game. 

It’s become a bit of a recurring theme with Notre Dame over the last five or so seasons that its defense rises to meet the occasion in a big game, only for the offense to completely crap the bed. Both Ohio State games and Cincinnati 2021 fall into this camp, certainly, but Louisville might’ve been the most faithful re-enactment of the script yet. No, giving up 33 points doesn’t look good, but nine of those were from field goals the Cardinals kicked on drives they started in field goal range because the offense turned the ball over. The defense had some low moments, bad run fits, and worse tackling to be sure (which does not bode particularly well for Notre Dame’s prospects of winning the Jewelled Shillelagh, but let’s get to that later), but they did enough where a functional offense would have been able to win, even if ugly. Instead we got… whatever the hell that was. 

Look, when you have eleven players in the tackle box and at most nine guys blocking, it tends not to work out in your favor. It really isn’t going to if all you do is mindlessly hand the ball up the middle. The fact that this happened multiple times on Saturday is really all you need to know about the state of the Irish offense. 

I take Marcus Freeman at his word that he wants to be an offensive and defensive line-driven program, and that’s a pretty good grand strategy for Notre Dame. The problem is, when “offensive line driven” translates as “only wants to run the ball” the margin for error gets real small. At some point you have to have a functioning passing game (and guess what, pass protection is an offensive line thing too) if you want to have an offense capable of winning games. Even in 2017, when Notre Dame was seemingly allergic to the pass and had two top-ten draft picks on the offensive line to bully their way behind, the Irish still had Miles Boykin and Chase Claypool as legit receiving threats. It worked for a while… until it didn’t. 

Maybe a lackluster offensive outing passes muster against Ohio State and their bevy of talent. Maybe it passes muster against Duke and Mike Elko’s high-end defensive coaching. Against Louisville, a team that gave up 34 points to Georgia Tech? Inexcusable. Don’t care how spent the team is or how rough of a spot you’re playing in, you cannot turn in 55 points in 12 quarters of football (for those keeping track at home, that’s under five points every fifteen minutes). The fact is this team, and this offense especially, are just not well coached right now. 

I don’t want to throw Gerard Parker totally under the bus here, because what in the world was Joe Rudolph doing with the offensive line? At a position that’s more than any other on the field grounded in chemistry, the Irish suddenly decided not only to mess with their starting lineup, but to rotate multiple guys through multiple positions within the same game. Huh? What? Why? I get the need to find the best combo, but if you don’t have it halfway through the season why are you coaching football? (And if this idea was Marcus’, man, please just let the offensive staff cook in future, this ain’t your scene.) It added up to a horrendous night for the big boys, who were unable to get any push up front at all and had possibly a worse time protecting Sam Hartman. Two future first round picks were shoved around like a melting stick of butter, and a veteran presence at center was unable to get anything in the middle of the field open. If the foundation of an offense is the line, Notre Dame’s foundation is shakier than the San Andreas Fault. 

The result is an offense that for all intents and purposes is dead in the water. At the moment, they don’t seem to be able to do anything well, except throw to Mitchell Evans who’s doing his damnedest to replace Michael Mayer and is basically the only reliable receiving threat. A stable of running backs that is the deepest and most talented Notre Dame has had since… maybe ever? looks hapless, unable to find even a crease. Sam Hartman can see the field as well as anybody, but he has to be able to have time to do so. And his receivers… yeah. Same story as usual on that front. 

This all feels particularly crushing because the offense looked so crisp towards the start of the season, and even though we all knew it was Navy and Tennessee State it just felt so smooth and silky. It looked at first glance like the kind of offense we’ve been hungering for up here for a decade. But holes started to appear as soon as NC State, which, while the final score looked gaudy, was a 3-0 game in the second quarter and multiple drives were helped out by really short fields. Ohio State looked like a deliberate game plan to be overly conservative that was a bad idea, but now it looks like the offense was maybe just bad? That turned into two straight weeks of uncreative run games, near zero output from the passing game, and less than stellar offensive line play that I can’t help but blame in part on Parker’s decision to not run the ball to ice the Buckeyes, a legendary vote of no-confidence in a unit if ever I saw one. It’s wasted what has really been pretty solid defensive play against some higher-end quarterbacks, though their occasional horrendous lapses and comical inability to recover a fumble casts a pall on that side of the ball as well. 

Unfortunately though no matter how good a defense is you do in fact have to score points to win a football game, and unless you’re Iowa and can manufacture defensive points like they’re ethanol that means a defense can’t win a game by themselves. And unfortunately no matter how good your quarterback is, he needs time to throw and open targets to throw to. 

While I never thought Hartman was gonna be a silver-bullet kind of quarterback, I’m not sure you could put Peyton Manning on this team and have it make much of a difference. The wide receiver situation has been in crisis mode for years, so much so that I’d honestly give Chansi Stuckey a runway into 2025 before I seriously start questioning if he’s the right guy, 

We talked about the line’s pass protection struggles above, but ideally you’d have running backs to help with blitz pickup and with the benefit of hindsight this may be the part of the Kyren Williams experience we took the most for granted. At the end of the day, though, here we are, with an offense that appears to have no clear path forward and two massive games, plus three other very important ones, still to go. That bye week can’t come soon enough. 

So what’s a fanbase who really loves its head coach as a person and as a leader, but that has now watched him turn in now three games where the team has looked absolutely lost, lose two more because of offensive incompetence, and execute an all-time blunder in the biggest game of his tenure to do? (Other than fall to its knees and thank god he’s not Mario Cristobal.) Hope that everyone in the Gug has the good sense to recognize that changes need to be made. One supposes this starts with a second offensive coordinator search in as many seasons, one that hopefully won’t end with a very public falling through of a hire-to-be. Freeman will hopefully have learned his lesson that he needs a heavy-hitter on offense, an equivalent to himself or Clark Lea before him who can elevate both the talent on hand and recruit at a level so that we never find ourselves in this kind of situation with a key position group ever again. Gerard Parker, while seemingly a nice guy and probably a fine tight ends coach (though, to be fair, who could tell), is not that guy. 

As has been the theme of the year so far, though, there is no fast lane to happiness. A quarterback does not an offense make, nor does a coach a national title contender overnight. And a real offensive coordinator won’t fix this right away either. There’s still a path forward for the Freeman experiment to work at Notre Dame, but he needs to have the good sense to see it and follow it and keep following it. It may go against some of his best instincts, and it may not always be pretty. It may involve being the bad guy on occasion. It will definitely involve work along multiple aspects of the program for multiple years. And as fans, we need to have enough patience until it’s clear he’s irredeemably off the path. Think of how big a mistake it would have been to put Niele Ivey on the hot seat after going 10-10 her first season (if Saturday night broke something inside of you, take a look at a women’s basketball scholarship chart for 2025 and be at peace), or if Georgia had let Kirby Smart go early in his tenure, or if Clemson had canned Dabo Swinney at the height of the “Clemsoning” meme (ok, that one actually might not have been so bad…). I’m not saying Marcus is any of those coaches by any stretch — but until we know for sure he can’t be, it probably makes more sense to stick with the guy rather than tear it all down yet again. 

(If you would like to pull a Warren Zevon and meet Marcus Freeman’s tailor, though, I have good news for you.)

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I suppose there’s a chance this was just the latest installment in the ongoing “Jeff Brohm boatraces a much more talented opponent” series, and Notre Dame is fully capable of turning around and dropping sixty on their archrival at home like 2018 Ohio State, but can anyone honestly tell you with a straight face that’s gonna happen? Even for me, a guy who perhaps got the ultimate “careful what you wish for” treatment last year as I waxed poetic about the USC rivalry, this game feels decidedly gross. 

Can this team keep up in a track meet with Southern Cal? Not as in “do they have the ability to” but like literally, physically, can they? Nothing about the last three weeks has suggested that. This team is pretty clearly exhausted after four night games in seven weeks, the last two of which came down to the wire, and a five-hour jaunt in Raleigh to boot. And that’s not even getting into the emotional toil sparked by Ten Men on the Field followed by an escape at Duke, neither of which had to install a tremendous amount of confidence in the coaching staff among the locker room. So instead of a bye week or a manageable comedown game, we get… arguably the biggest game of the season. Against the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, leading the best offense in America. To add to the bad vibes, Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff, featuring not one, not two, but *three* participants in the most infamous edition of this rivalry this century, is coming to town.

Oh and its midterms week. Touchdown Jesus, take the wheel. 

So yeah Saturday night’s probably not gonna go great. It would, of course, be extremely on brand (for Notre Dame and for college football writ large) for Notre Dame to somehow boondoggle their way into a win, but there’s exactly one reason to think that might happen and many many more to think it won’t. That one reason? The Irish offense, the most stoppable of forces, meets an extremely movable object in the Trojans defense, in a matchup that feels like prime content for the Sickos Committee. But even at its best, could the Irish offense keep up in a shootout with Caleb Williams? Or, perhaps more accurately, sustain enough drives to keep him on the sideline long enough for the defense to have a prayer of slowing him down?

Yeah I’m not so sure of that either. Nothing would make me happier, or restore some semblance of momentum to the program, than giving Lincoln Riley a long quiet plane ride back to LA Saturday night, but nothing has inspired a great deal of confidence in that actually happening. No, we’re probably looking at another week of nightmares, but this time at the hands of one of the two teams it hurts the most from. 

But hey. With some luck, maybe the Trojans are in for a haunting of their own by the ghost of their archrival.

Beat SC. 

– EC