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.

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. 

The post Losing the Trenches: What’s Wrong with the O-line? appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

An academic committee has finally been formed. Should everything proceed according to plan, from what Kelly has been told, all hearings could conclude by next week. Of course, at the glacial pace this thing has progressed, “by next week” could just as easily transform into “by next month”.

You could read the frustration on Brian Kelly’s face every time a question was asked about the investigation. At one point, it forced him to make it quite clear where he stood in the grand scheme of things:

I’m not here to be the sound piece for our administration.

Kelly, however, understands that he’s also the only public figure answering questions about this topic at all. He knows part of the Notre Dame job means having to take these bullets even if it might piss him off deep down.

The frustration probably hit its peak when Pete Sampson of Irish Illustrated (aka the ND Rivals site) asked Kelly for his opinion on the process in general. You could see Kelly gather himself in restraint to let the crowd know he certainly had an opinion on the matter, but he wasn’t going to speak about it. He knows better than the try and kick that hornet’s nest.

Sampson still tried, as any good reporter should, with a followup on whether or not the length of the process, and continued suspension of his players, made him believe they were guilty. As Kelly has stated in the past, he repeated that he did not have nearly enough information to make any kind of judgement on the matter.

The entire exchange with Sampson ended with Kelly quipping with a curt “yeah, my pleasure”, indicating that he might just be more relieved than his players once this is all said and done.

Of course, immediately after those questions, Kelly found himself faced with yet another one on the same subject, this time regarding why the parents of the players were kept in the dark. This lead Kelly to go into a long, sweeping answer of every question he could think regarding the matter in hopes to kill the line of questioning for the day.

Yes, he knows the parents are in the dark. It’s consistent with any other honor code violation at Notre Dame. The privacy laws demand it. Again, he isn’t a spokesperson for the administration. He doesn’t know what’s going on either. No, he isn’t aware of any vacated wins or any kind of NCAA sanctions. Read between the lines and you’ll see that he’s just as frustrated as you are that he doesn’t have the answers, but there isn’t anything he can do about and you are getting every last piece of information possible that he has.

That answer, of course, led to yet another followup question on the investigation and I wanted to hand BK a bottle of whiskey because I felt so bad for him. I know this all comes with the territory, but Kelly certainly took a full load of bullets at this presser, more so than usual on this matter. In a week in which there were major injuries and position changes to discuss, it was incredible so see just how much this topic managed to dominate the consciousness of the entire event.

I can only hope this finally concludes last week as Kelly (now) expects. It will keep us all far saner.

Position Changes/Injuries

As mentioned above, there was quite a bit of shakeup in the depth chart this week. While, Kelly said what was handed out to the press is probably a bit “premature” in its finality, it’s clear that there is a very serious desire to change things up along the offensive line.

As of now, the new starting O-line is as follows:

• LT Ronnie Stanley
• LG Nick Martin
• C Matt Hegarty
• RG Steve Elmer
• RT Christian Lombard

Lombard slides out to tackle and Elmer replaces him on the interior while Martin takes over the other guard position and Hegarty takes over the center job. The interior guard positions in particular appeared to be the major focus for Kelly. He mentioned on multiple occasions that he wanted the interior of the line to be far bigger and more physical, implying that he is quite unsatisfied with what the line has shown up the gut in the past few weeks.

Luckily for the Irish, of all these swaps, only Nick Martin has to learn a new position. According to Kelly, everyone else has the experience needed to take over their new roles.

Personally, I’m happy with this change because something had to be done about the poor performance of the running game. I’m hopeful that we will start seeing a bigger push up front against Syracuse.

In other depth chart news, Amir Carlisle is still out for next week which has bumped Torii Hunter Jr. up the depth chart as the backup slot WR. Hunter, who is recovering from a broken leg, will likely see his first action of his career this weekend.

Fun with 140 Character Limits

I love Twitter. It’s an amazing medium, especially for sports. It is also worse than a soundbyte as far as quotes are concerned.

While the press live-tweeted Kelly’s thoughts on night games and the unique challenges it poses to Notre Dame considering how many they have to play, his thought got broken up into the 140 character or less chunks. That lead to the national media, following only via Twitter to be quite confused and even scoff at the fact Kelly wasn’t fond of playing “nationally televised” games considering ND’s NBC contract.

Because context is important, here’s the quote in full (h/t to @anderwinn for saving me from the transcription process):

The biggest challenges for us are, quite frankly, playing on national television. Our kids get back at 3:30. I’ll just give you Purdue. Our kids get back at 3:30, got to be at study table at, you know, 4 o’clock in the afternoon and it’s, it’s a lot. We’ll have the same thing. We’re on national television. It’s wearing. You know, it gets to the point where you wonder: Maybe we shouldn’t play all these nationally televised games because it really puts a lot on these kids. We ask them to do a lot. It’s a very challenging academic environment. The ACC doesn’t do that to us. Notre Dame, by the virtue of its brand recognition, puts us in that position. The ACC has been great in terms of the scheduling because, you know, we’re not out on the west coast. The travel is pretty good for us. So I don’t think it puts any added stress on us from that perspective.

Now, if Kelly’s talking about getting back at 3:30, especially after Purdue, you know he’s talking about 3:30 AM which means he’s talking about the nationally televised night games. Should he have specified a bit better there? Probably, but anyone actually listening to Kelly’s full train of thought knew he was referencing the fact that ND has been playing an abnormally large amount of night games especially in comparison to other teams in the nation.

We are about to hit game four and three of those games have been in the primetime hour and only one of those games has been a true home game. Notre Dame will once again have another primetime affair with Florida State in a couple of weeks as well unless ESPN decides they hate ratings. That game will be followed by another primetime game against Navy. The game after that is at Arizona State and I’m sure that west coast affair will also fetch a primetime slot as will the Southern Cal game to close the season.

That means ND is looking at a potential 7 out of 12 games played in primetime. When looking at that kind of a schedule, and considering that academic issues are front of mind right now at ND, Kelly’s statement makes nothing but sense.

Context matters.

The post Questions on the Academic Investigation Dominate the Brian Kelly Presser appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

Now, unfortunately, I don’t have anything particularly witty, funny, or really anything intelligent to say to lead off this week’s version. Let’s just say I’m going to set the bar extremely low so I can continuously trip over it all year.

Thankfully though, there was quite a bit of news that broke this week from Notre Dame and around college football to make up for my failures at creativity so let’s get to it!

The Roundup

Charlie Strong is NOT screwing around. Around here, a common narrative is that Texas has had a “country club” culture for years and has created a soft team prone to failure. Well, that is definitely gone now. I can only imagine how nervous this made some regents when he was hired. Perhaps this is why his contract has no buyout.

So college football managed to effect the WWE and it’s a dream true. The only downside, it was Rose Bowl Champion Sparty that caused this, leading Daniel Bryan’s now famous “YES!” chant in a packed arena. Still though, rumor is the WWE caught wind of that and accelerated Daniel Bryan’s storyline in this past week’s episode of RAW.

Big Lou is talking and you should listen. He did an interview with Eric Hansen and filled in the blanks on why he signed with an agent so early among other topics like the NFL draft. Speaking of…

Dear Jerry Jones, please give me something to be happy about again. The team is a disaster, especially on the defensive line. Mel Kiper has three Domers hanging around your draft slot, grab one. Bonus points if it’s Nix because I will buy that jersey immediately.

Austin Collinsworth, Christian Lombard, Kendall Moore and Justin Utupo will be back for fifth years. Irish Illustrated apparently broke this news, but the only thing that I could find to link was an ESPN mention of the report. Lo Wood, another potential fifth year, has decided to go to Miami University along with his former position coach Chuck Martin.

And now your moment of zen…THE SUBWAY DOMER IS BACK, Y’ALL! (Hey does this mean I’m off the hook of IBG leadership duties now?)

Put These Games Shows on Your Radar

There will be two Notre Dame specials of note this weekend. Be sure to tune in or set your DVRs!

The Booze

So, yeah, Subway’s back and that means it’s PBR time y’all (save the Trojan Bloods for later).

The post Friday Roundup: The “Back to Business” Edition appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.