The short story out of South Bend is that No. 22 Notre Dame outlasted a scrappy Purdue team 20-17, with back-up kicker Kyle Brindza icing the game on a 27-yard field goal with just seven seconds left on the clock. The longer version? Well… it’s not quite that simple.
With six minutes left in tight ball game, sophomore quarterback Everett Golson was cementing his status as Notre Dame’s quarterback of the future. A week after playing the role of game manager in the Irish’s 50-10 dismantling of Navy, the sophomore was heroic for three-and-a-half quarters as he willed the Irish to victory.
With the Irish ground game largely neutralized, head coach Brian Kelly and offensive coordinator Chuck Martin put the game on Golson’s shoulders, and the talented youngster delivered. Completing 21 of 31 throws for 289 yards, Golson accounted for both of Notre Dame’s touchdowns, throwing one to TJ Jones and scoring another on acrobatic run. So with just over six minutes left in the game and the Irish clinging to a seven point lead, Kelly called on Golson to get the Irish out of South Bend alive.
With Tyler Eifert and Davaris Daniels out, the Irish relied on their run game. As the clock rolled, the Irish went to work. Theo Riddick churned out an important first down getting the Irish outside their own 20. But then Kelly put the game in Golson’s hands, and things took a drastic turn for the worse. With nowhere to go with the football, Golson took a back-breaking sack, eschewing an easy throw away for a 10 yard loss. Saddled with a 2nd and 20, Kelly once again kept the ball in Golson’s hands. Until the sophomore was stripped of the ball on the Irish 15, setting Purdue up perfectly for a game tying score.
On 4th and 10, Purdue’s Caleb TerBush hit Antavian Edison for a 15 yard touchdown pass, beating linebacker Carlo Calabrese on a double move. With just over two minutes left and the Irish without any timeouts, the Irish turned improbably to Tommy Rees, and the much maligned junior lead the Irish down the field 55 yards for the game winning field goal.
“Any time you come back and show the resolve that our team did, you can imagine it was a pretty excited locker room,” Brian Kelly said after the game, throwing in his contender for understatement of the year.
Nearly 12 years to the day after Irish kicker Nick Setta sunk Drew Brees‘ Rose Bowl bound Boilermakers, Brian Kelly pulled a rabbit out of his hat in a move that could’ve changed the course of his career.
Let’s find out what else we learned during No. 22 Notre Dame’s heart-stopping 20-17 victory over Purdue.
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With all the chips on the table, Brian Kelly turned to quarterback Tommy Rees for the victory. And the embattled quarterback came through in the clutch.
Notre Dame fans have already made up their minds on Rees. When the junior quarterback took the field with just over two minutes to go, a cascade of boos echoed through Notre Dame Stadium. But with no timeouts left, a field filled with back-up offensive skill players, and an offensive line that was leaking oil, Rees gutted out one of the more improbable drives in recent Irish memory.
Utilizing a mostly vertical passing game, Rees attacked the alleys of the Purdue defense, throwing early and decisively as he calmly marched the Irish down the field. Rees converted two crucial third downs — the first to fifth-year senior John Goodman just as the play clock expired. The second to senior Robby Toma, hitting him perfectly on the break as Toma scampered into field goal range. From there, the Irish worked the ball into the middle of the field, where Kyle Brindza drilled the game winning kick.
When asked if he expected his most experienced quarterback to deliver in the clutch, Kelly talked about what made him confident in the embattled junior.
“It’s what I knew about him, and his make up and moxie and mental toughness,” Kelly said of Rees. “Does he have all of the elite skills? No. But he’s a gamer. And he’ll do anything. Those guys in that locker room will go to the wall for him. They’ll do anything. Because he’s a great teammate.
“He’s the consummate teammate and that’s why those guys in the locker room are pretty happy.”
That Rees was able to march the Irish down the field in crunch time was made even more incredible when you consider he didn’t take a snap with the team until earlier this week, kept out of 11-on-11 drills while the staff got Golson and junior Andrew Hendrix up to speed.
And while Kelly said he wasn’t certain who the No. 2 quarterback would be heading into this game, Rees took every single snap with the team’s second unit this week, making up for lost time just in case the Irish needed to call on their veteran.
After the game, Rees had the opportunity to prove his naysayers wrong, but stayed incredible humble.
“We’ve got to win this game,” Rees told NBC’s Alex Flanagan about his mindset. “I wasn’t too caught up in the moment. Find a way to win this game and not let it get to overtime.
The junior also didn’t bite when asked about a brewing quarterback controversy.
“I try to be as positive of a role model as I can and help Everett out when I can,” Rees said. “Everett played a great game today. He’s a great player and he’ll continue to get better.”
The majority of ND Nation didn’t want to see Tommy Rees on the football field. But when his number was called, he got the job done, solidifying the respect and belief his teammates and coaches had in him.
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Perhaps the superlatives lavished on the Irish offensive line were a bit premature.
It didn’t take long for fifth-year senior Mike Golic Jr. to realize that the Irish weren’t playing Navy anymore. Golic was treated like a rodeo clown early and often by Purdue’s All-American Kawann Short, as the Purdue defense controlled the line of scrimmage against the Irish for much of the game, forcing Notre Dame to rely on the quick passing game to muster any offense.
“I assumed they wouldn’t come out and try and just run the ball at us, because I think we’re too big and strong for someone to just run the ball at us,” Purdue head coach Danny Hope said after the game.
After cruising for almost 300 yards on the ground in week one, and a year after torching the Boilermakers for 287 yards, the Irish couldn’t run the ball at all, held to just 52 yards on 36 carries. After looking like a line filled with All-Americans, the front five all made their share of mistakes, with captain Zack Martin getting flagged three times and every starter showing up on the wrong side of a Purdue highlight, as the Boilermakers racked up five sacks and eight tackles-for-loss.
“Purdue made up their mind that they were going to have a loaded box today,” Kelly said. “That was it. You’re not going to run the football. We’re going to make it so difficult. We had to manage it by throwing the football.”
Purdue defensive coordinator Tim Tibesar put together a perfect game plan against the Irish, bolstered by the fact that his game-calling was a mystery, having spent the past three years in the Canadian Football League. He also gave teams like Michigan State a blueprint, stacking the line of scrimmage and relying on his talented front to control the line of scrimmage.
It’ll be back to the drawing board for Harry Hiestand‘s troops, who took a large step back in their second game of the season.
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With their backs against the wall, Notre Dame showed a resolve that was absent in 2011.
It was all hands on deck for the Irish as six starters and seven major contributors were lost during the game with injuries. Defensive captain Kapron Lewis-Moore was lost early with a calf injury. Safety Jamoris Slaughter left the game early after a bone-crushing hit injured his shoulder. All-American Tyler Eifert suffered a mild concussion, watching crunch time from the sideline. Davaris Daniels, on his way to an impressive afternoon, rolled an ankle in the end zone. Ishaq Williams was lost for a large chunk of the game with an elbow injury. Sheldon Day went down with dehydration. And 48 hours before kickoff, Nick Tausch aggravated his groin.
“The story for me as the head coach is our mantra: Next Man In,” Kelly said. “We had seven guys go down today. We had two captains go down. A leader in our secondary. And our guys kept fighting, the next guy came in and battled.”
It’s hard to pinpoint areas that could’ve hurt the Irish worse. Lewis-Moore’s injury turned the defensive end position into another youthful experiment, with Tony Springmann logging heavy minutes after both Lewis-Moore and Day went down.
In the secondary, the Irish depth at safety was already precariously thin, yet the secondary put together a nice game as it mixed and matched youth around Zeke Motta while holding the Boilermakers two quarterbacks to just 19 of 37 for 198 yards. (Navy threw for 197 yards the week before.) Offensively, losing your two top receiving threats is never enviable, but it was veterans Goodman and Toma coming up big down the stretch to help the Irish.
Kelly doesn’t expect any of the injuries to be major, with no surgeries expected and a week in the training room to cure most ills. Yet the injuries weren’t as painful as the self-inflicted mistakes that came with the Irish home opener. After a remarkably clean debut, Notre Dame committed eight penalties, including personal fouls on both Martin and All-American linebacker Manti Te’o. Yet the Irish still overcame all of that, picking themselves off the mat and winning a game that might have gone the other way a year ago.
“A few years before this, the game wouldn’t have gone down like this. We wouldn’t have won,” Martin said after the game. “The resilience of those guys when their number was called, it was a full team effort.”
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Even with Tommy Rees coming in as the closer, Everett Golson is still the Irish’s starting quarterback.
Rightfully so, Brian Kelly killed any quarterback controversy early, telling NBC’s Alex Flanagan that Golson would be starting against Michigan State and echoing those sentiments to the assembled media.
“There is no quarterback controversy. Everett Golson is our starter. He will start against Michigan State,” Kelly said.
With Golson at quarterback, the Irish have an athletic runner who can make defenders miss and also make big plays with his arm. That confidence was obvious when the staff’s offensive game plan put the ball in Golson’s hands for much of the first quarter. But they’ve also got a young quarterback that is learning the game of football as he goes. Notre Dame burned their final timeout with 11:21 left in the fourth quarter.
And while Kelly said the decision to pull Golson was influenced by an injury to the quarterback’s hand, a source tells me that Golson suffered no ill effects from the tackle that caused his fumble.
While a large portion of the fans in the stands didn’t agree with the decision to go with Rees in crunch time, Purdue coach Danny Hope applauded the decision.
“It was a really good decision by their head coach. It was a pressure situation and it would’ve been a tough assignment for a rookie quarterback,” Hope said. “I was kind of excited about the idea of having a rookie quarterback in there on the last drive. I thought that may have given us an opportunity to get after him some. I thought it was a good coaching decision. Tommy Rees is a good player, he’s a heckuva quarterback, too.”
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With a job-defining decision on the line, Brian Kelly doubles down on his gut instinct and is rewarded appropriately.
Last week, it seemed like Brian Kelly was miles away from the guy who told Irish fans to “get used to it,” after his decision to eschew a winning field goal and throw for the end zone resulted in an interception and a back-breaking loss to Tulsa. But here Brian Kelly was, rolling the dice once again on Tommy Rees, a quarterback that just about everyone within a hemisphere of South Bend had given up on except for the head coach.
After a second consecutive 8-5 season forced many Irish fans to reconsider if Kelly was the right man for the head coaching job, the Irish coach said and did all the right things. He reshuffled his coaching staff, putting the offense in the hands of his most trusted assistant. He looked inward, evaluating his priorities and putting a focus back on football after spending too much time playing ambassador to the Notre Dame brand. He even holstered his attack on changes to the establishment, leaving decisions on field turf, a Jumbotron, and crowd noise to others while he focused on the football.
For a week, it looked like Kelly had learned his lesson. Against Navy, he played to win — bludgeoning the Midshipmen with a running attack that was impossible to defend. But this afternoon, Kelly reminded everyone that he was still the impulsive coach that marched to his own drummer, throwing himself in the crosshairs of Irish contrarians everywhere when he turning his back on the future and put Rees into the game as he lay all his chips on the table.
That Kelly believed in a quarterback that hadn’t taken a true practice snap until this week says quite a bit about the head coach, and perhaps just as much about this team. While outsiders worry that Kelly’s decision could fracture the locker room, there was nobody that believed in Rees more than the guys wearing the blue and gold. That Kelly was able to double-down and win after exposing himself to as much backlash as possibly imaginable shows that the Notre Dame coaching job — and the pressure cooker that comes along with it — hasn’t broken him.
In a season where victories will be hard fought and tough to come by, the head coach played every card in his hand to gut out a win and keep the Irish undefeated.
“It’s a great feeling,” Martin said after the game. “A tough win today, but we’ll take it. We’re on to Michigan State now.”
The Irish may be on to Michigan State, heading to East Lansing for a primetime showdown of ranked teams. But they can thank a head coach that didn’t flinch for the undefeated journey continuing.
