We may never see a worse blowout. We may never see a more uninteresting blowout. If neither of those statements are true at least we may never see a weirder blowout for the Fighting Irish. After an uninspiring start that saw Boston College leading late in the 2nd quarter and Notre Dame clinging to a 1-point lead halfway through the 3rd quarter somehow (an explosive run game being the ‘how’ here) the Irish won by 29 points.

Half way to last year’s win total, baby! Let’s review Notre Dame’s 6th straight win over Boston College.

PASSING OFFENSE

Well, we’re getting the ugly out of the way first. Brandon Wimbush has now thrown 94 passes on the season and completed 48 of them. That’s a 51% clip and he’s rarely throwing the ball deep. This is a bad sign.

Against Boston College his passing was easily the worst performance of his career. Wimbush threw one very nice completion to tight end Durham Smythe in the second half but you’d be strained to find another impressive completion on the afternoon. Outside of that throw, Wimbush was 10 of 23 for 63 yards.

Wimbush 1st Half Struggles

Wimbush 2nd Half Struggles

Making matters worse the pass protection was more than solid. Boston College didn’t record a sack* and had just 3 quarterback hurries. More than ever before we saw a case of Wimbush being off with his decision making and accuracy. After the Temple game, it’s his first start. After the Georgia game, chalk it up to a mean defense. After this BC game we may be looking at some serious concerns.

*The vaunted Harold Landry finished the game as a non-factor with only 1 solo tackle. This Boston College defense is probably going to be a step or two below the recent two editions.

In Wimbush’s defense at least he’s close. His accuracy doesn’t look terrible it just looks “off” at the moment. This is more reason to believe it’s a confidence issue especially because of his accuracy looking better in practice.

As you may be aware by now, the Irish receivers finished the game with 11 yards on 3 catches. There were some people who thought, me among them, that St. Brown could put up a top 5 statistical season for an Irish receiver and after 3 catches for 19 yards over the last 2 games it’s probably not happening this year. Silver lining, maybe he comes back for 2018 and leads a more veteran group?

Perhaps a second silver lining is that Alize Mack has turned a corner with a 5-catch performance for 43 yards. He’s now the leading Notre Dame receiver on the season with 101 total yards.

RUSHING OFFENSE

***Loud fireworks***

Maybe things really are okay with the run game and the offense really needs to work on Wimbush and the passing game. The off-season told us everything!

Once again, Notre Dame’s explosive ability rules the day. How explosive, you ask? How about runs of 10, 11, 11, 11, 12, 14, 14, 15, 32, 36, 46, 64, 65, and 65 yards. That’s right, almost 61% of all successful runs went for at least 10 yards.

The success rate (58.8%) is good but not great, but paired with long runs it’s pretty great. In addition, the ground game was there when it was needed, particularly on 3rd down where the Irish converted 7 times with a pair of failed attempts being 3rd & 17 and 3rd & 14 rushes from Adams and a late garbage time run by McIntosh.

Player 1st/2nd Yes 1st/2nd No 3rd/4th Yes 3rd/4th No Total
Adams 9 5 2 2 61.1%
Wimbush 7 9 3 2 47.6%
Jones 0 1 1 0 50.0%
Dexter 4 1 1 0 83.3%
McIntosh 3 0 0 1 75.0%

 

This was peak Josh Adams rumbling for a career-high 229 yards on just 18 carries. Holy cow 12.7 yards per carry!

Wimbush continues to be kind of poor when it comes to success rate–and ND is definitely running him way too much now up to 44 non-sack carries through 3 games–but when you obliterate the school-record for rushing yards by a quarterback (207 total on the afternoon) things are fine.

Adams’ instincts, feet, and balance are phenomenal. 

Dexter Williams was finally let loose and looked damn fine, as well. It’s still a small sample size but he’s been successful on 11 out of his 12 carries this season for a total of 174 yards.

Tony Jones was clearly not involved as much in the gameplan this week and then suffered the indignity of having his ankle injured on a late carry. X-rays were negative following the game, though.

Notre Dame’s 515 rushing yards shatters the previous Kelly-high (UMass, 2015) by 58 yards and the 10.1 yards per carry sets an all-time record in school history.

PASSING DEFENSE

It was a distant second issue behind Wimbush’s passing but I thought the Irish pass defense was fairly pedestrian against a rather bad Boston College offense. The Eagles quarterback Anthony Brown was forced to throw the ball a lot late but he should not be completing 24 passes against this Irish defense. Yes, he threw 2 picks and only accounted for 215 yards through the air. Still, he never really looked bad which is concerning.

Additionally, against a weaker offensive line Notre Dame only mustered 1 sack and 3 quarterback hurries. This should’ve been a game fit to tee off on the Eagles passing game and it did not happen.

There also wasn’t much face time for anyone outside of Julian Okwara and Shaun Crawford. The former continues to look like the team’s most disruptive pass-rusher and finished with a tackle for loss, forced fumble, and quarterback hurry. The latter recorded a fumble recovery, two interceptions, and one pass break-up.

RUSHING DEFENSE

During the game this felt like there was a lot to work on, especially in combination with Boston College’s passing game. I mean, the Eagles did have 400 total yards with very little of it in garbage time over their last 4 series.

Upon further review things were okay here and I suspect there was a little bit of playing down to the opponent going on for the defense. Boston College only had 15 successful carries from 43 attempts and most of the time a 34.8% success rate is pretty great for a defense.

However, among those 15 successful carries we saw a touch too many longer runs and perhaps the worst part was that 10 of the runs resulted in 1st downs. The high for BC on the day was just 29 yards but they did put together 6 carries total that were 10+ yards. I thought the tackling needed to be a little better and if it was the defense was in place to really stifle the Eagles on the ground. It didn’t happen so a poor grade here is deserved.

SPECIAL TEAMS

The Irish didn’t attempt a field goal against Boston College. Why? Because for the second time in 3 weeks the Notre Dame offense went 6 for 6 on touchdowns in the red zone. Through 3 games the Irish are tied for 12th nationally red zone touchdown percentage.

Newsome’s punting was pretty awesome, except on one rugby attempt that failed pretty spectacularly. Otherwise, the return game on both sides were largely irrelevant.

True freshman Jonathan Doerer got his first career “start” as the kickoff man and it was a rough day. Out of his 3 attempts two were short (one landed almost at the 20-yard line) and the other went out of bounds. I can’t believe I’m about to say this about a kicker but maybe it’s worth it to redshirt him and find someone else on campus who can kick the ball far if they’re adamant about resting Yoon’s leg.

TURNING POINT

The Scene: Notre Dame opens the second half with a pair of 3 & out drives sandwiched in between a punt of their own by Boston College. On Notre Dame’s said second punt (the rugby one from above) BC returns it 13 yards to their own 46-yard line for excellent field position.

The score is a tenuous 14-13 lead for the Irish.

Following a completion from Brown the Eagles were quickly in field goal territory but a few plays later found themselves in a 4th & 1 situation from the 30-yard line. Instead of a long-ish field goal and the possible 2-point lead BC decides to go for it and gets stuffed by Nyles Morgan and Te’von Coney. Both Daelin and Trumbetti aren’t even set but true freshman Myron Tagovailoa-Amosa absolutely blow this play up.

The Irish would go on to out-score BC 35-7 from this point.

3 STARS

  • Josh Adams
  • Shaun Crawford
  • Brandon Wimbush

FINAL NOTES

Here’s what scared me the most about today. I don’t think the result moves the needle much in either direction for 2017 and I’m sure many of you agree. However, there are a couple troubling things with Wimbush worth considering. One, if his accuracy doesn’t improve quickly I’m a big believer that it’s unlikely to get substantially better over the long-term. Two, we may see an offense next year without McGlinchey, Nelson, Adams, St. Brown, and maybe even Mack. That could an insane amount of pressure on Wimbush to both improve and carry an even larger amount of the offense in the future.

Boston College’s football program has absolutely cratered. They found some magic in a bottle during the early to mid-2000’s but this will be 8th straight season where they’re somewhere between mediocre and terrible while it’s been 10 years since they’ve had a legitimately strong football team. They’ve hired 37-year old athletic director Martin Jarmond away from Ohio State and it’ll be interesting to see if he makes a move this off-season. Addazio’s contract runs for 3 more years at around $2.2 million per year which feels like way too much for the program to swallow.

In the yuck category, Boston College had 22 first downs, 3 more than Notre Dame. In the positive category, BC was only 4 for 17 on third down. It’s still early but Notre Dame has only allowed touchdowns on 5 out of 11 red zone trips in 2017.

Through 3 games, Nyles Morgan has 9 solo tackles, 24 total tackles, 3 tackles for loss, 2 quarterback hurries, and 1 forced fumble. Those numbers are okay but not quite up to expectations in the Elko defense. You could say the same thing about Daelin Hayes, too. Just 1.5 tackles for loss, 1 sack, and 10 total tackles so far this year.

We can safely assume that the return of Kevin Stepherson after one more game is going to help the passing game. In the meantime, now that Dexter picked up some carries we can move on to the mystery surrounding C.J. Sanders. The spark plug was taken off punt returns this year which would be fine if it meant he was able to focus more on his receiving abilities. Instead, as far as I’m aware he hasn’t received a single snap on offense this year. Why are we running screens to Chase Claypool instead of Sanders? To be honest, some of the stuff with the running back rotation at least makes sense (Adams is genuinely great) but everything about the receivers stretching back to the spring has been so very strange.