For the Fighting Irish, the 2014 campaign ended, perhaps ironically, exactly opposite how 1914 ended for the British Expeditionary Force and the French on the Western Front, one hundred years ago. Faced with the highly-professional and dedicated Kaiser’s host, the French and British retreated throughout August, falling ever back, until they pressed against the very gates of Paris. There, at the Marne, they stood and counter-punched. The masses of French on the left smashed into the Germans and rolled them back, ever back, until they, too, stood firm. And thus, the two great enormities of men rushed to the sea, and dug in along the way, literally, in tens of thousands of cases, digging their own graves.
Brian Kelly’s team started 2014 strong, but came apart down the stretch, as completely and fantastically as an errant space shuttle upon reentry. Having looked at injuries as one explanation, and Everett Golson as another, let us consider the performance of the offensive line in the campaign of 2014. Having lost considerable talent and experience to graduation, the 2014 O-line was going to challenge position coach Harry Heistand. Just how big a challenge, I don’t think, was predicted by anyone back in August.
Having given up just eight sacks in 2013, the 2014 Irish conceded four against Purdue, alone, to go with two, total, in the previous two games. This, and a feeble running attack, prompted a massive shuffle during the bye-week leading up to Syracuse. The table, below, shows the two-deep and how, surprisingly, it was pretty much locked in from the Stanford game on, but how major the changes made for Syracuse were.
[table “” not found /]With the shuffling over, after Stanford, the Irish saw their rushing yards per game remain essentially unchanged, falling from 152.8 yards per game (Rice through Stanford) to 149.43 yards per game (North Carolina through USC). Remarkably, the Irish averaged almost the same number of carries per game, despite only running the ball 29 and 25 times against Louisville and Southern California, respectively. The O-line’s worst performance in the last seven games came against ASU, in which the Irish ran the ball 38 times for 41 yards.
If the running game was a wash, sacks were definitely not, for the Irish wound up the regular season conceding another twenty-two sacks. Certainly, Everett Golson accounted for some of the year-to-year increase. As a more running-able quarterback, he was going to put himself in position to be sacked more than Tommy Rees, who was dialed in to his progressions and his internal “throw-it-away” clock far more keenly. And, to be fair, Golson just bumbled into a few this year, ignoring open receivers or yards of space. The Golson effect is present, too, during the 2012 undefeated season, in which a far more solid line than 2014’s iteration conceded eighteen sacks.
So, perhaps the O-line is due for its fair share of criticism. Christian Lombard, for example, came into the season as the line’s most-experienced player, with twenty-two starts under his belt, but was yanked from the USC game in favor of Notre Dame’s version of Finn McCool, Mike McGlinchey. And what about that snap earlier in the game? Was there a play more representative of this season than that, as the ball rolled, tra-la-la, along the turf?
With a possible fifteen extra practices to be gained, you can bet that Harry Hiestand will be craving the opportunity to figure out what ails the Irish O-line before we head into the Spring. A perchance sign that all, if not all right, is not all bad, Jerry Tillery, a senior from Evangel High in Shreveport, Louisiana, today signed his grant-in-aid agreement with ND and is due to fax it in tomorrow. He will enroll in January. While the lure of possibly playing D-line cannot be discounted, if the Irish O-line were a tire fire, surely LSU, Tillery’s erstwhile suitor, would have made more noise about it.
So it becomes a question, now, of whether 2014, and the Syracuse shuffle, goes down as the start of something great, or whether it was the first of more shuffles to come.
- Finding Flaws in a Diamond: Clemson’s Rushing Offense - December 17, 2018
- Why Nobody Will Cotton to Notre Dame - December 3, 2018
- Irish Finish Regular Season Perfect 12-0 - November 26, 2018
William Adams
I complained about the OL all year, especially Hegarty. He needs to get stronger. You will also notice that the turnovers increased dramatically after the by week leading into Syracuse. That is when it all began. The OL needs to find a way to get nasty. If they don’t, all that offensive talent is going to go to waste.
Bayou Irish
Hi William. Thanks for reading and for commenting. Like Golson, they, the line, sort of seemed to be in a fog most of the year. The O-line is the only position group that functions as a unit, meaning a poor performer at the LG position negates the worth of your stud RT five plays out of seven, whereas a five star MLB will make the entire D better. Nastiness is a funny word with linemen, for I think there’s a lot of finesse, technique, and skill to it. There’s synchronicity required, again, something I think that is more diminished, but not absent, on the defensive side of the ball. So, to wrestle this reply back towards relevance, I think we saw a lot of individual poor performances, none perhaps as noteworthy as Lombard’s against USC, that just happened to couple with some awful decision-making by Number Five. A great QB will make his line better more than a great line will make their QB better — a mediocre QB won’t use the pocket right or will hold onto the ball too long. We saw all those things this year. My hope is that time will cure whatever ails them.
William Adams
There is a lot of nice, fancy words in there Bayou, but, I am an old school lineman that happened to coach the game for ten years and officiated it for the last 13. I agree, Kelly’s system seems to employ a lot of finesse, much like Charlie’s zone blocking scheme, but you have to have the ability to man handle your opponent and until we do that, we will see the same thing year in and year out. ND has not been dominant up front for a long time. EG was blamed for a lot of the TO’s especially against ASU and in my eyes, the OL forced a lot of that to happen. EG isn’t without blame though, he needs to improve. Yes, a good QB will make the line look better, but, a bad OL will make a decent QB look bad too. Love the articles. Keep up the good work.
Bayou Irish
You remind me of ever crusty chief or warrant I had the occasion to work with in the Coast Guard. Thank you for commenting and for the compliment. I appreciate it.
tiki
The space shuttle simile is really in poor taste and serves only to marginalize the importance of your solid analysis. I mean woudl you ever have compared the season going to shite to beloved Nawlins descending into chaos during Katrina? No – becuase you lived that and it’s so obviously beyond compare. Lives were lost in those “errant ” re-entries – heroes never came hom- families parishes and communities grieved and mourn still.
Bayou Irish
Hi tiki and thanks for reading and commenting. Sure. I could have used the mechanical and process failures that inundated New Orleans during and after Katrina, but I think the shuttle was a much more simple, and more easily YouTube-able, subject. Lives were lost in that shuttle disaster and ever will lives be lost in space and at sea and in the air. At times, those moments become fodder for writers or coaches — remember Bill Parcells? Sometimes, the use is in poor taste — certainly and clearly not my intent.
Letsgetserious
WW I, An errant space shuttle? You compare a football team to soldiers and astronauts who perished in the line of duty? Take a moment and think about that. It’s a game and of course a business, but certainly not a matter of life and death! After your service in the Coast Guard one would think you’d have a better perspective.
Bayou Irish
Thanks for reading and for commenting. I think if you’ve been following my posts over time you will know that, at most, I compare athletes to soldiers, I never equate them. Read my piece on Eddie Vanderdoes nnd his decommitment, for a start. Football, to be fair, is at certain times, a matter of life and death. One need only think of the Rutgers and Tulane players who, of late, were paralyzed by the game and who, in years before, would certainly have died on the field or in hospital from infectious process. The metaphor of the trench is one that is used all the time to describe the O- versus D-line battle, no offense, and I make no apologies for using it, especially in this centenary year. Regarding the shuttle, I only compared the season’s de-lamination (sp?) to the shuttle’s reentry. That was a mechanical process — you will note I even hyperlinked to mission control. We use the Titanic as a literary device in so many instances — Pearl Harbor, too — such that I’m okay with what I did, from my perspective. Yours is different, and if I offended you, I am, for that, sorry.
Brian McKeown
In years past, I visited HLS for the misspelled players’ names and outrageous adult-film references. Now I come for benign metaphors that outrage the oversensitive, PC crowd. Keep up the good work, guys!
Ryan Ritter
In our defense, I still misspell things regularly.
Irish Elvis
I must register my complaint with the operators of this site…how long will we permit offensive linemen to be shuffled about like so many playing cards? These are young men (and smart ones, at that! Our Lady’s University does not recruit numbskulls) and should not be tossed around like so many 3-of-diamonds.
Perhaps if the head Joker (you know who I mean) would exhort these linemen to have more Heart and to Club their opponents on a regular basis, we’d see wins come in Spades.
Bayou Irish
Hi Irish Elvis and thanks for reading and for commenting. I gather you yourself did not graduate from Our Lady’s University, since you did not mention your class year. Regardless, I agree with your point, except that I find your references to playing cards offensive. Cards, as you may well know, can be used in either gambling or time-wasting, neither of which we really need to be promoting.