While I touched on this a bit in my last post, I wanted to go back and rewatch the game to get a more in-depth analysis of our gameplan. I saw a few things in the stands that I wanted to confirm before I posted them. I also wanted to see how Kelly approached these various situations, if our QBs audibled out of the plays too often, and see if it changed the way I see the game overall.
I went back and charted all the plays myself. I made a few changes (for instance, Cierre’s fumble is a pass not a run, same with Dayne’s fumble). I also took a look at how many men USC put into the box against us and if they were showing blitz (I define showing blitz as the defense showing 5 or more pass rushers). I also checked to see if our QBs called an audible and what the resulting play was after. I know this can be a fools errand, but for the sake of this post, if the QB adjusted anything presnap, I marked it an audible even though there is really no way of telling exactly what was adjusted (blocking, routes, or the play outright).
To start off, let’s take a look at our drives by down, down & distance, and for each drive:
I’ll be honest, I was rather shocked with this breakdown. Primarily the fact of just how often we passed on first down. Granted, as I mentioned before, a lot of this was due to the fact that we had a two minute drill that was 100% pass (drive 5) and were trying to play catchup for most of the game, but the result is still staggering.
Second down is an even stranger case. When facing second and short, we mixed it up. Facing second and medium distances (5-9), we were 100% pass. Finally, when facing 2nd and long (10+), we actually threw some runs in the mix. I can understand a mix on 2nd and long plays, and even 2nd and short. On long downs, you are trying to make 3rd manageable and taking a shot on 2nd and short isn’t out of the question. However, not trying to run at all in the medium distances makes no sense, even for someone like me that will defend going pass happy at times. There’s a difference between being aggressive and predictable, and we were far too predictable in those cases.
3rd down was no shock at all to me. You need to get to the sticks, so you’ll pass unless it is 3rd and short. What did surprise me though was that only 9 passes came from 3rd downs of 5 or more yards.
While drive 5 was the two minute drill, only 9 passes came from that as well. The drive responsible for the most passes was the following drive, which was the same one that Crist had a large part of (and the eventual fumble). An incredible 16 passes came from that drive. ND was only trailing by a TD at that point and with it being our longest sustained drive, it should be the best example of a balanced offense, but it wasn’t. Even stranger, when Crist came in, all of his plays were passes, including the fumble as it was supposed to be a play action to a wide open Eiffert.
Personally, I had a theory for this, but couldn’t prove it until I did my rewatch. While I watched in the stands, I swore that I saw USC loading up the box and basically daring ND to beat them with the pass. At my angle with the field though, I wasn’t too sure. However, after re-watching the game, here is what I found:
As I mentioned in my last post, with the spread literally spreading the defense out, it allows the offense to run more effectively, facing far fewer men in the box than normal. For instance, in a normal two-wide I formation, you will likely see 7 men in the box at all times, possibly an 8 if run support was needed. In a spread, if you go three-wide, you should expect 6 and if you are four wide, you should expect 5.
USC came at ND ultra-agressive on defense, often stacking 6 & 7 in the box at all times. Not only that, any time the 7 in the box look was given, they were showing blitz the majority of the time, basically daring Rees to pass to beat them. It seems that ND was all to willing to oblige. As the chart shows, just about every time USC put 7 in the box and showed a blitz, we passed. Of course, not of all these looks were blitzes so we were, in fact, playing right into USC’s hand.
The biggest oddity is that we ran the most against a look of 8 men in the box showing blitz. This would seem to confirm my fear that we were too predictable, but the strange part was the we saw this look on the following downs & distances: 1 & 10 (4), 2 & 10, 2 & 8, 2 & 3, 2 & 1, 3 & 1, which wasn’t in the initial pattern that I saw.
Another interesting oddity was that ND saw the 6 man look most often when Crist came into the game. When they did this, they also rarely showed blitzes as well.
What this all tells me was that USC figured that they could dare Rees to pass on them, but that we would be unable to read the defense properly and force the ball into places that it shouldn’t go. As we have seen throughout the season (one of the best examples was Pitt), Rees does have a tendency to fall into this trap at times. Rees was unable to properly read these looks and take advantage of them and, in the same vein, it appears that Kelly had a little too much faith that he would.
Knowing Kelly’s aggressive nature, I’m sure he thought that Rees would take advantage of USC overloading the box. While I still have a hard time saying he completely abandoned the run (just check out drive 7, he went right back to it before being forced to go nearly all pass after), it definitely seems that Kelly failed to adjust to the issues Rees & the offense were having with what he thought was a clear mismatch.
And as far as audibles go, well, I highly doubt Rees was thinking about changing any plays to runs:
That’s right, only one run called after an audible. This means that either Rees was adjust protection or routes constantly or was, in fact, changing runs to passes. Considering that I didn’t see Kelly dressing Rees down for changing plays, I have to figure that Rees was making minor adjustments for the most part.
So how do I feel after all of this data? Well, I have to say my initial thoughts were wrong. While I know ND fans do have a tendency to lean on the “run more” crutch, I was a bit hasty in my judgement as well. Call it a knee jerk reaction on my part as this offense overall is a lot more balanced than people give it credit for (43% run despite the unbalanced nature of the USF and USC games). For the USC game though, you can only give so much leeway for not running more; however, as I said before, I have a hard time saying Kelly completely abandoned the running game as he reverted right back to it on drive 7 which resulted in Gray’s TD. Unfortunately though, by that time it was a little too late.
Had Rees managed to pick apart the defense a bit better, who knows how big of an issue this would be. In the end, Eiffert slipped on what should’ve been a TD pass, Dayne fumbled away a play call that would’ve seen Eiffert wide open, and to top it all off we shot ourselves in the foot with two additional turnovers. For me though, I’m going to put blame into both sides: the offense for poor execution and Kelly for not trying a few more runs to mix it up a bit more and keep USC a little more honest regardless of what they were daring ND to do or how good the matchup looked.
- Epilogue - January 3, 2022
- HLS Podcast Finale - January 2, 2022
- The Final Fiesta: Notre Dame vs Oklahoma State NCAA ’14 Sim - December 31, 2021
michaelkmcneil
Hopefully that took you rmind off of last night. Good analysis, this is what I suspected. I cannot bring myself to rewatch this game.
George
Is it possible that Kelly’s plan was to use the pass to open up the run? As a Patriots follower, I have seen Belichick/Brady throw successfully forcing the defense back into a pass defense thus opening up running lanes.
SC put a lot of guys in the box but Rees and Co just could not take advantage of open receivers. Had there been some early success with moving the ball, SC would have had to spread their defense out, and given the offense more opportunity to run.
When that pass game never got into sync, SC was never forced to defend the pass and never allowed for the run game to open up.
The Irish fell behind because the pass game didn’t work and then were forced into the never-ending cycle of needing to pass to get back into the game but never finding a passing rhythm.
NDtex
It definitely could have been. And honestly, had a few things gone our way, we might be saying “wow, Kelly had USC so scared about the run we shredded them with the pass!”
However, since it didn’t work, we sadly don’t have that luxury.
George
I agree NDtex. I wonder if the confusion is because Rees is still young and inexperienced or if he has reached his apex and there is nothing more than what he is. It seems that both Pitt and USC confused him and neither have a strong pass defense. It is worrisome that now 10 games and a season and half of preparation and he is still making the same mistakes.
I have favored Rees over Crist because I think he makes decisions and delivers the ball quicker. But he seems to be easily rattled as well.
The next few weeks might provide greater opportunity to get Hendrix larger parts of the game to see how he changes the speed and output of the offense.
Dusty
Thanks for acknowledging that many “audibles” are not play changes, but might be blocking or route adjustments. There is too much railing against Rees for so called audibles when we have no clue what he is changing.
PAK
Can’t look at the graphics here at work (stupid no fun filter blocks flickr) but I still have my 2c anyways (and will probably look at this post later).
I’m not generally a “we must run the ball!” kinda guy but just watching the game as it developed, I thought it felt like we were not running the ball enough early in the game. Sure, once you’re down 14-0 and the defense has yet to show a pulse, your hand is forced, but those first couple of drives really felt pass happy.
I’m sure a lot of that was by design – either, like you said, USC daring us to pass, or Kelly wanting to attack what has been a pretty soft passing defense – but it felt like too much, especially when it lead directly to two quick 3-and-outs that seemed to kill a lot of our momentum right out of the gate.
Erik '04
I’m not sure you can take two drives that were 3-and-outs and say “those first couple of drives really felt pass happy.” Just not a big enough sample of plays. I don’t disagree that we could have run more, necessarily, but the game had such an odd feel to it overall that I have a hard time figuring out what the true game plan was or would have been.
Mr. Wednesday
We had a run in each of the first two drives. We netted -1 yd on the two runs. I do not think that aspect of your criticism is well-founded.
jmichael
On slo-mo review,our oline and dline were stood-up on almost every play
SDI
Great read Tex thanks. I think this is the key sentence:
“Had Rees managed to pick apart the defense a bit better, who knows how big of an issue this would be.”
This I think is the big problem–with both Kelly and Weis. They see what the defense is doing and know how to defeat it and assume the QB will be able to get the ball to the right (open) receiver. But Rees isn’t Pike and may never be. But until he is better, you need to run the ball more to make it easier on him especially given how well Gray and the offensive line have been playing.
Erik '04
I’m not sure you can use the lack of Kelly undressing Rees for audibling as conclusive evidence that Rees wasn’t changing the play. Perhaps Kelly just agreed with Tommy’s assessment of the men in the box and was perfectly fine with him changing to a pass play. Kelly seems to be designing this offense to give the QB a lot of room to make adjustments depending on what he sees. The fact that Tommy gets to say his side of the story when he comes to the sidelines tells me Kelly wants to know what he saw out there.
Whitecoat
This was a coaching failure, and an Athletic Director failure. The team was no more ready to play USC than they were USF and Michigan – coaching. But not calling 3 timeouts is giving up, no matter what is said, because this is Notre DAme. As for Swarbrick, he is accountable for allowing a total distraction at the game to occur, from 50 recruits, to rock music taking over for our great band, to the gaudy gold helmets – our guys thought they could walk on water with those new helmets. Yes, we need a Jumbotron…..but we probably need another new coach, offensively and defensively.
ShamRockNRoll
Congratulations, Whitecoat. You managed to squeeze about every moronic opinion at the NDN retirement home into one single comment.
canuck75
Good point Erik. Given that Coach is not afraid to do a little bashing-both on the sidelines and after the game, it seems clear that not many of the mistakes were made by Tommy.
As an aside, here’s an example of how our bad luck works versus some good luck. I watched the Big 10 replay of Wisc-MSU. On the last series when Cousins must advance the ball to fg range and must avoid a sack at all costs- he gets sacked badly and fumbles. It is a much worse fumble than any of Tommy’s because he actually saw the guy coming and should have dumped the ball off.
However, his lineman recovers and two plays later Hail Mary.
I can never get over the vagaries of such plays. Cousins is a hero and in our case Tommy and dayne goats because of who recovered a fumble.
The Biscuit
SC and Pitt have figured out how to beat our Offense: force a young QB who is prone to turnover the ball to win it with his arm, and mix up the coverages to confuse him. That’s it. Pretty simple if you have the players. Navy won’t. Stanford will.
kyndfan
Tired of beating the dead horse that is last weeks debacle. Players standing around waiting for someone else to make a play is why we lost. Crist having a mental breakdown when it mattered most is why we lost. I’m a Hendrix fan, but he’s not starting for a reason. Have we reached Rees’s ceiling? Maybe. At this point, I don’t feel good about any game left on the schedule. The most likely scenario is we win 4 in a row(again) and get owned by Stanford. Mentaly, I am hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. If I sound demoralized, I am.
SDI
I was somewhat optimistic about the Stanford game until last Saturday night. I do think they are beatable, but not unless you can stop the run and pressure Luck. If ND couldn’t do that @ home against SC with KLM, they definitely won’t be able to do that against Stanford without him on the road.The only other option is to win in a shootout, and I just can’t see any combination of Rees/Crist/Hendrix putting up more points than Luck.
GB
Very informative analysis. The D also did their part to make this a loss. The LBs were getting literally run over.