Things are looking up.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish scraped, scrapped, flailed, and clawed its way to a win against the gloriously inept Stanford Cardinal, coached by the criminally negligent Jim “If you can’t feel anything, you must be ok” Harbaugh. Despite the fact that this win was about as sloppy as it could possibly be, there are a number of reasons to feel very good about the win and how it bodes for the 2008 season. Primary among those reasons: Notre Dame was blatantly a better football team than Stanford.

Now, immediately the Pollyanna Detectors in some heads just started blaring, but let me explain. To be sure, there are several reasons to be a bit concerned about the 2008 season, but I’ve learned that when things are bad, it’s time to remain positive. When things are good, it’s time to get critical. And we’ve been quite critical of several facets of the 2007 edition of Notre Dame Football already, so I’m going to remain pretty positive in this post. And I’m positive that Notre Dame was just a blatantly better football team than Stanford.

So how can I say that? Didn’t Stanford have a shot to tie the game with just seconds left in regulation? Yes. But the opportunity wasn’t created because Stanford was an equal team to Notre Dame. The situation was created by a number of singular moments in the game combining to the advantage of The Cardinal and the determent of the Irish, and yet the Irish won.

Easy Bullet-Pointing To Help Make My Argument Without the Need of Much Flow!:

• Wretched Officiating: When Robert Hughes fumbled the ball at the Stanford 4, and there was no flag for the obvious helmet-to-helmet/spearing by, I believe, #20 of Stanford, I knew it was going to be a bad day for the refs. I’m not sure the refs were outright “jobbing” the Irish in this game, but they did a crappy job of not looking like they were trying to cheat. The hit on Hughes was practically ripped from a film used to teach officials how do identify spearing. Hughes was stopped dead in his tracks, he was on his way down to the ground, he had zero momentum left, and #20, who by the way is the sort of kid I used to taunt in high school, went with the sort of cheap shot a kid like #20 would go with. But no flag. Nope. Because that would be too obvious. These Refs were going for irony or something. And don’t come to me with the argument that they called the game poorly both ways, so it’s okay. They called a bad game both ways, and when that happens it tends to help the lesser team. Poorly officiated games have a tendency to nullify exceptional play, and if there was one team on the field that was executing anything close to “exceptional play,” it was Notre Dame, not Stanford. And hey, speaking of “exceptional play,” the best touchdown pass/catch Notre Dame has executed this season will never go into the record books because the review official is a blind fool with a poor understanding of physics. And possibly the best return of an interception for a touchdown this decade was nullified by the tickiest of tackiest calls against a defensive end who, when not sacking QBs or stuffing runners, was being tackled by the Stanford offensive guard. Yeah, the refs made some lousy calls against Stanford, but I didn’t see Stanford return any interceptions 98 yards either. Great singular moments in the game being eliminated by singular moments of really pitiful officiating.
• Turnovers: This is one of those funny things where everyone acknowledges that turnovers are as much a part of the game as blocking and tackling, but they’re also considered “game changing moments.” And why? Because the better blocking/tackling team will tend to win over the lesser team, but the turnovers can serve as equalizers. The better team, ND, committed 2 costly turnovers, fumbles, in the redzone. And not just “in the redzone” as in “yeah, but you were still 19 yards away.” They were committed at about the 4 and the 8. Even with the Notre Dame kickers, those 2 drives were all but guaranteed points. Points this Irish squad were poised to score because they were out-classing Stanford. That took, at minimum, 6 points, and probably 10-14 points, off the board for the Irish. Now, the Hughes fumble should have never happened. The whistle should have been blown before the fumble, and even after the fumble, a penalty for spearing, as we discussed earlier, should have been called. And the Schwapp fumble should never have happened because ASAPH SCHWAPP SHOULD NEVER BE HANDED THE BALL EVER, EVER, EVER! Again, singular moments in the game cost the better team the ability to show that it was a far superior team.

And that’s really what the game came down to. Yes, Notre Dame had 7 offensive drives that went for less than 20 yards, but they also had 4 drives that went for 70, 56, 75, and 68 yards respectively. They had 28 points taken away by fumbles within the opponent’s 10 yard line or idiotic officiating. While Stanford laments that they should have won a game in which the Irish and Refs gift-wrapped so many opportunities, the Irish just have to thank God that so many singular moments could have gone against them, and they still pulled off the win. That’s how I know that the Irish were a blatantly better football team than the Cardinal: ND survived all of those mishaps while the Cardinal weren’t able to capitalize on them. And sure, had ND made all of those mistakes against a non-boneheaded coach and a team that could be both “chippy” and competent, ND would have never survived. But that’s not the point. The point is, it took all of those weird calls/no-calls/reversals and turnovers to enable Stanford to even keep it close with ND. Take away either the turnovers or the wretched officiating, and ND would have won the game by 21.

So I’m feeling quite positive about how this game bodes for the 2008 season of Notre Dame football. ND has, arguably, become a “fair” football team in the last 3 weeks. And as disastrously as the 2007 season began, going from, “Oh my god, I can’t look” to “fair” is pretty encouraging. And no. Obviously that’s not “good enough” for Notre Dame football on the whole, but in order to progress to excellent, you have to make strides in the right direction. The last few weeks, even including the 2nd half of the Air Force game, have amounted to a nice first step.

Once the bowl-season is all over, and after I manage to bring HLS Expert Picks back from the dead, I’ll post more on the topic, but here are a few things that need to happen in the off-season for ND to take the next step towards becoming good on the way to becoming great.

• Make sure Clausen and the Receivers See Routes in their Dreams Last off-season, both in the winter and the summer, Clausen was unable to participate in voluntary workouts with the receivers because of his elbow problem. The result has been several talented guys playing football together, but not really having great on-field chemistry. I don’t mean it’s kept the QB and receivers from being friends. I mean they just don’t have that innate sense of what the other will do given certain conditions on a play-by-play basis. It’s something that Quinn had with his receivers and that made Quinn and those receivers so capable on the field. Every available moment should be spent by Clausen and the receivers working on passing and receiving.
• Lift Everything If a girl drops 17 chemistry books on the quad while walking back from the bookstore before 2nd semester classes begin, there had better be a football player volunteering to pick them all up and carry them back to her dorm. Hopefully it’s P.E. or P.W. or another dorm that will provide that player with a suitably long walk carrying 110 lbs. of knowledge. And when he’s done with that, he should just head over to Loftus and dead-lift the equivalent of a cement truck since he’s already warmed up. A lot of the talent on this team is very young, and, thus, physically immature. You can’t catch up completely to a senior when you’re a sophomore, but you sure as heck can minimize that difference.
• Beat the Heck Out of Each Other I know Weis has already said that his Spring and Fall camps will be much more physical now, but that attitude needs to be bought into by the players. The team’s players need to understand that the pain now will pay off later, as cliché as that sounds. We’re (hopefully) going to hear about some dings and injuries from spring practice as a result of the amped up physicality. Hopefully it isn’t catastrophic. If it doesn’t wipe out our 4 best players, it will result in vastly improved performance on the field.
• Road Trip! It’s already been highly-publicized and highly-scrutinized that Weis will be visiting the Patriots in the off-season to get some self-scouting and criticism done. I think it’s a great idea. And since that work will probably only take up a week worth of the off-season at most, I hope Weis takes another trip or two to visit a couple of southern, preferably SEC, schools during their relatively early spring practices. Not to pick the minds of the coaches at those schools, but to observe how their practices are run.

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domer.mq

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