The good, the bad, the ugly: Notre Dame vs. Oklahoma

If it took a little longer to get this column up, it’s because I’m still trying to process the football game Notre Dame played. This is far from an original thought, but Brian Kelly‘s troops played as close to a perfect football game as you could have ever imagined, putting together near flawless execution in every segment of the game.

Even the head coach, a notoriously picky grader, had to acknowledge that this was the most complete performance his team has played by a longshot.

“In the four areas that we’ve asked our kids to play this game, it was on point,” Kelly said. “We wanted to be smart, disciplined physically, and mentally we wanted to be tougher than our opponent, and we hit all four of those. As it relates to what the message was and what we wanted to accomplish, it hit all four points for us.”

Let’s take one more look at No. 3 Notre Dame’s victory over Oklahoma, with plenty of good and not too much bad or ugly.

THE GOOD

Team Intelligence. Kelly’s quote above hits on this, but how refreshing was it to see the Irish as the team that wasn’t swallowed by the moment? Last year against USC and Stanford, Notre Dame shot themselves in the foot, started slow, and never had a chance to win. Against Oklahoma, it was the exact opposite. After weathering an early barrage by the Sooners, the Irish let the opponents implode.

The Irish committed only one penalty in the entire game, an innocuous five-yarder by Louis Nix, who bulldozed the Oklahoma offensive lineman for good measure. It was as close to perfect as a team performance, and the Irish offensive line cleaned up any problems they had over the past few weeks, which caused more than a few false start penalties.

Kelly and his staff work incredibly hard on the mental aspect of football. Saturday night, that effort was paid back in full.

The Run Defense. It’s a bit of a broken record at this point, but the Irish are playing historic run defense right now. Giving up just 15 yards on the ground to the Sooners is one of those stats that make you check for typos. Even if you take out the two gigantic negative plays that skew those stats in the Irish favor, Notre Dame held Oklahoma to 53 yards on 21 carries, with Sooner ball carriers getting only 2.5 yards per play. Perhaps more impressive is the long run of the day, a lowly seven yards, a shocking number against a team that wasn’t far from averaging that number heading into Saturday evening.

When asked Sunday if he can remember a stat sheet with as dominant of a running performance, Kelly came up empty.

“I can’t remember one that would have a stat like that,” Kelly said. “You would think the quarterback sometimes is going to scramble for seven yards. So, again, I think when you look at what we’re doing defensively, it starts up front. And the ability to control the line of scrimmage, and it just allows us to do so many things in the back end.”

The building blocks of Bob Diaco‘s defense is stopping the run. That Notre Dame was able to do that so completely helped set the tone for the passing game.

The Pass Defense. Sure, Landry Jones threw for 356 yards. But it took him 51 attempts to do it, and outside of Jalen Saunders 35 yard catch and run, it took until garbage time for the Sooners to hit on another long completion, when Kenny Stills was stopped just shy of the endzone and then the Irish defense kept them out.

In a game where just about everyone thought Notre Dame’s youthful secondary was going to be exposed as the weak link of the Irish D, the group played terrific football. With a game plan that gave Oklahoma the underneath throws, the secondary had an excellent night tackling, and played a huge role in limiting the Sooners to just 4 of 14 on third downs.

Kelly talked about the strategy going into limiting the Sooners’ offense to just 13 points.

“We wanted to keep the points down,” Kelly said. “We dropped 8 quite a bit in the coverage, so that’s going to match more with our three down. Our four down is our base nickel package, so we run coverages out of that front. So it’s really matching some fronts with some coverages that we wanted to run.”

Everett Golson. It was a heck of a night for the youngster. His 13 of 25 passing numbers aren’t terrific, but it sure was nice to watch Golson throw the ball away after escaping from the pocket and playing like a veteran when his team needed him. Kelly talked about his young quaterback’s reaction to the victory and what had him excited about his progress.

“I think what we were most pleased with was he was smart and he was disciplined,” Kelly said. “Some of the things that we were talking about between the art and science of the position. He threw the ball away when he was under duress made good decisions. So I think he’s feeling pretty good today.”

Just as important, Golson’s ability to run with the football and make plays with his legs was instrumental to the Irish offense being efficient. While his ball-carrying technique leaves plenty to be desired, his 64 yards of rushing, an impressive 5.8 yards a carry, was a difference maker. Even better, there were a few schematic wrinkles added to the game plan to take advantage of Golson’s legs, and the young quarterback helped the Irish be incredibly efficient on third down, converting 7 of 15.

“It allows us to do is to continue to be more balanced as an offense. We talked with some of the weaknesses we had on throwing the football, particularly on third down. We were much better in this game,” Kelly said. The mental development has been really good. If we continue to go that way, it’s going to give us an offense that’s going to be difficult to defend because we’ll have great balance. That’s what we’re trying to get with Everett in there. Not an offense that throws it 50 times, nor an offense that runs it 50 times. One that is really balanced and more difficult to defend.”

The offensive line. It’s hard to technically evaluate the play of the Irish front five, but the stats tell you all that you need to know. A terrific 5.5 yards a carry. 215 yards on the ground. Over 32 minutes in time of possession. Only one sack, a two-yard loss when Golson scrambled trying to get to the end zone. After struggling a bit as a unit earlier in the year, the Irish offensive line has galvanized, turning the rushing attack into a true weapon.

Hats off to Zack Martin, Chris Watt, Braxston Cave, Mike Golic, and Christian Lombard.

The wide receiver play. It’s time to start giving this group a little bit of credit. Lumping All-American Tyler Eifert into this group, the wide receivers made some huge plays Saturday night, with TJ Jones, Davaris Daniels and Robby Toma coming up big. This wasn’t a dink and dunk offense. And each guy made some big plays in one-on-one match-ups, situations many thought would favor the Sooners.  No catch was bigger than that of freshman Chris Brown, who went vertical on a 50-yard post that was the game’s biggest play.

It’s time to give Mike Denbrock some credit for what he’s done with another position group, and the veteran assistant coach has really helped turn one of the team’s biggest question marks into an asset.

KeiVarae Russell stepping up. The play of KeiVarae Russell was absolutely terrific as well. Russell had nine tackles on Saturday night, including half a tackle-for-loss. The Washington native is a terrific football player, and his switch from running back the day before fall camp is one of the best — if not the most under-discussed — stories of the year.

At this point, you should expect Freshman All-American accolades for Russell, who is holding down the field-side corner position on one of the nation’s best defenses, and putting up some impressive stats while he’s doing it.

***

Not to short change anybody’s performances, but let’s go rapid-fire through a few more.

Kyle Brindza: Heck of a response after looking shaky early. Those touchbacks were huge against a dangerous return team.

Cam McDaniel: Notre Dame’s ultimate Swiss Army Knife, McDaniel played in the secondary, returned kicks in place of George Atkinson, and earned the game ball after switching jerseys with Jalen Brown to honor a former teammate that drown. Gritty, emotional performance by one of the team’s unsung heroes.

Cierre Wood: At this point, he’s not going to become the feature back of the offense. But he certainly played like one Saturday night, bursting away from a team supposedly filled with elite speed and running for over 10 yards a carry.

Bennett Jackson: Gritty game by the team’s boundary corner, playing through a banged up shoulder. For those that wondered why the coaching staff wasn’t worried about Jackson sliding into the starting lineup, now you know.

Louis Nix & Stephon Tuitt: Their names might not be prevalent in the box score, but they both made huge impacts on the game. Nix chipped in four tackles and blew up the interior of the Sooners offensive line, while Tuitt constantly demanded double-teams.

Manti Te’o: For all the reasons we’ve discussed for weeks.

THE BAD

The Windows 8 Ads. That’s about all I can find that’s bad about Saturday night’s performance, the stupid yellow box advertisement that ESPN continued to put up in the corner of the screen, making you think there was a penalty on the play when really it was an add for Bill Gates’ newest operating system.

Yes, we noticed it. No, we’re not switching back from a Mac.

The Flu Bug. Kelly mentioned that the flu had hit the team pretty hard this week, with multiple guys battling through it during the week and George Atkinson kept off the team flight because of it. Time for a few doses of Vitamin C to be spread around the Gug.

THE UGLY

Nothing qualifies for ugly here, though it’ll be fun to listen to guys like Rick Reilly and Colin Cowherd today. I don’t imagine either back pedals very well at their age.