:: Notre Dame Football: Irish Game Day ::
Notre Dame Has Must-Win Game at Boston College;
Irish Season Tipping in the Balance
Leprechaun Express: Notre Dame Football Intel Update Sept. 30, 2010
Notre Dame faces a must-win game at Boston College, its season one-third over and its record dangling at 1-3.
One loose definition of a "must-win" game is that, if you win it helps, and if you lose it's a catastrophe.
The Irish must finish at least 6-2 across the remaining eight games to be bowl eligible at 7-5. Notre Dame can also can be provisionally bowl eligible by going 5-3 across that stretch, to finish 6-6.
But if Notre Dame loses to what is a tough, big-time Boston College team with a new, and therefore unpredictable quarterback, the situation becomes even more precarious.
Notre Dame then would have to go 6-1 across the other seven games to be bowl eligible, or 5-2 to finish 6-6.
After Boston College, Notre Dame's slate includes Pitt, Navy, Utah, and Southern Cal, as well as Tulsa, Western Michigan and Army.
Now, the author has a sneaking suspicion that Notre Dame might just knock off Southern Cal this year.
And the author thinks the Irish are a bit greener than might be realized, or at least have a lot more room to grow, than might be realized, especially with what is essentially a rookie starting quarterback and the entire team learning a new system.
Even the players that looked pretty good so far, like Manti Te'o, have shown that their upside and room to grow is unbelievably high. Te'o, for example, had looked solid before, then performed in the losing effort against Stanford, at such a level, that he vaulted from being a solid player to being the #1 tackler in college football.
Notre Dame in the final weeks might look a lot different, and a lot better, than Notre Dame did against Stanford.
But nobody can count on that. They can work towards that, but they can't count on that.
So what's left is, to go ahead and work towards bowl eligibility, for example, on that third down play in the first possession of the second quarter against Boston College.
And Notre Dame has dialed up a certain kind of schedule for itself, not just in terms of a given opponent in a given week, but in terms of sequencing of back-to-back in-season bowl games.
Right now, Notre Dame is good enough to have a decent winning record if they play a schedule like Michigan State's or Boston College's schedule.
But they don't. The Irish play the Irish schedule. Their first four game were against four solid big-time programs, three of which are now ranked in the to-25, one in the AP top-10.
Against that schedule Notre Dame has been 1-3, including two losses they should have won.
And it's not at all clear that anybody really understood the situation until they saw one of the best coaches in football, Charlie Weis, pushing to stay at .500, followed by one of the winningest and most veteran head coaches in college football, Brian Kelly, blind-sided by a .250 winning percentage.
And make no mistake about it, for the most part, Kelly has done a good job getting Notre Dame trained, conditioned and ready.
It just appears that nobody really understood what was going on with Notre Dame's positioning in today's college football, with the sport's bigger, faster players, harder hits, and the weekly attrition from that Irish schedule.
It now looks quite interesting that the last time Notre Dame had 9-win seasons and went to BCS bowls, doing it back-to-back no less, was when Weis was quietly pursuing the NFL strategy of intense but low-contact, or no-contact, in-season practices.
Weis's first two years, Notre Dame reportedly hit hard during training camp, then following the NFL style of holding in-season practices that limited the hitting, to save the hits for game-day.
Undoubtedly an added incentive was that the roster had been gutted by poor recruiting under Weis's two predecessors. But the up-shot was, the last time Notre Dame went to BCS Bowls, even with a depleted roster, they were probably the only college program not hitting during the week once the season started.
During the downturn in Weis's third season, this news came out, and Weis, desperate for a change, started training camp again, hard-hitting and all, and also had #1's hitting #1's, just to get something going. In hindsight, Weis can't be blamed for any downturn that third season, given the balloon payment in the roster depletion.
There probably are not that many people alive who are better qualified than Kelly to figure out what Notre Dame needs to do now.
And it might be too late for the team to have loaded up more on summer courses and then take the challenging but minimum Notre Dame course load for the fall, to get the extra rest needed for the team to play at the level they are capable of.
So they are just going to have to be superhuman, and Kelly is going to have to innovate like nobody has innovated before, as a head coach managing the flow of the season for this most unique of college programs.
The interesting thing is, judging from the Michigan and Michigan State games, the Irish can actually do it. Let's get behind them.
Keywords: Notre Dame Football, Brian Kelly, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame
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