As usual, here’s a good assortment of news and notes from the week. If you have a good link you want to share, feel free to email me. (Address to your right.)
* Yesterday’s announcement that Chuck Martin was leading the recruiting efforts has to come as good news. Martin is a top-notch coach that will add a great deal of experience to the coaching staff, and has a personality that will make him a favorite of recruits.
Some of Martin’s quotes from yesterday’s media session were quite telling. Like this one about being behind on recruiting last year’s class and surprisingly, this upcoming season’s as well.
“Obviously we were behind, coming in in January to finish last year’s class,” Martin said. “What some people don’t realize is how far we were behind with this class. Our guys worked their tails off the last 30 days to try to get caught up. When we were sitting here on Signing Day, a lot of kids had 15, 20, 30 scholarship offers already and they hadn’t heard from the new staff at Notre Dame yet.”
Martin’s first big test is Notre Dame’s first junior day, which will be held in two weeks on March 20th. The Irish open spring practice a week later.
* Pete Sampson at IrishIllustrated.com is putting together a watch list for each position as the new coaching staff continues to make initial scholarship offers. It’s clear that there’s a method to the staff’s madness as it gets its first wave of offers out to elite prospects all across the country.
From Sampson:
If you’re looking closely, you can see it.
There’s a philosophical shift in Notre Dame’s recruiting on the offensive line as size makes room for speed. Being big is great if you’re a lineman, but in Brian Kelly’s spread offense there’s a major focus on agility. In other words, if that size can’t travel it can’t do much good stuck at the line of scrimmage.
The recruitment of jumbo tight end Tate Nichols offered a taste of the offensive linemen Kelly wants in his system. That Kentucky standout represented an athlete who just happened to block people well. In a pro-style offense, Nichols would have been considered a project. In the spread, he’s closer to a prototype.
Check out five of the offensive linemen on Irish Illustrated’s Watch List expected to attend junior day next month. Among the group of Michael Bennett, Matthew Hegarty, Tony Springmann, Anthony Zettel and Brendon Austin, each tips the scales at 275 pounds or less, with the average weight coming in at 262.8 pounds.
Aside from providing proof that Kelly trusts his strength and conditioning staff to put good weight on his linemen, it also shows how much the new staff values athleticism on the line.
Sampson has also done watch lists for linebackers and defensive lineman. Great reads for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of recruiting.
* ND blog Clashmore Mike had an incredibly in-depth piece on last season’s struggles in the red zone, written by contributor Anthony Pilcher. I’ve tried to find a snippet that’d be worth showing, but really the piece is an incredible piece of research, statistical analysis, and most importantly... pie chart usage.
If you’ve got a half-hour or half-ream of paper to spare, take the time to give it a read. If you get nothing else out of it, be impressed by the great usage of the Microsoft Office suite.
* Lorenzo Reyes over at IrishSportsDaily.com had a nice piece on the videogame playaction simulator that has been installed in the player lounge at the Gug. I know most college football coach’s probably show great disdain for the time-waster that videogames are, Kelly has gone the other way.
Since Brian Kelly was introduced as the Irish head coach last December, Notre Dame has incorporated the use of the XOS PlayAction Simulator, a product from XOS Digital, Inc. that combines the look and feel of EA Sports’ Madden and NCAA Football franchises with technology that the company has developed as a virtual training tool.
Kelly, who was one of the first coaches to use the software at Cincinnati, has now brought the system to the Irish program.
“From the players’ perspective, it’s just like the game they would play, Madden or NCAA,” Tsai said. “We actually use the same underlying engine from EA Sports. What we’ve done differently is made it PC-based so they can integrate with our technologies a little more cleanly. In terms of using a controller, the way you select plays and the way you actually run the game for the simulator, it’s virtually identical to what they’ve grown up with. That was on purpose. So the learning curve from the players is almost zero.”
Very cool idea and great story by the guys at ISD. I’m hoping Dayne Crist is spending some time with an ice-bag on his knee and a videogame controller in his hands.