In a movement that paralleled players sending Charlie Strong soaring toward the Austin sky after the Longhorns toppled Notre Dame, the AP poll announced the Longhorns are now the 11th-ranked team in the nation this week.
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To be fair though, those 50 points do come with an asterisk. “You’re going to have to play some games where you outscore people”, he said. Both of them came in virtual back-to-back fashion, with a 68-yard grab by Jerrod Heard and the 72-yard touchdown reception to John Burt on the third quarter’s second play sandwiched around a half-ending kneel down.
Kelly pointed to the youth injected into this year’s defense, with four new starters in the back seven, to explain the poor performance in Austin, Texas.
“What really happened was you had the offense that had a chance to win the game”.
Kelly knows his team can’t play high-scoring games all season and hope to have a successful season.
In Sunday’s loss to the Texas Longhorns, Notre Dame quarterback DeShone Kizer had a huge game as he threw for 215 yards and five touchdowns while rushing for 77 yards and another score.
Void of experience in the wake of losing veteran safety Max Redfield, the Longhorns exposed Notre Dame’s porous secondary as a crucial weakness future opponents are sure to exploit. In 2015, Notre Dame’s defense allowed a red zone touchdown rate of 65.85 (95th), which actually was an improvement off 2014’s rate of 70 percent (116th).
Taking away those two plays, the other 14 Longhorn receptions averaged 10 yards apiece.
Notre Dame entered this season with some high expectations, and the stumble in week one will have the faithful out in droves for the home opener. “My job for them is to go and play the best I can for them as well as for my teammates and give them a good anniversary gift”. Freshman Devin Studstill looked solid after he subbed in for junior Drue Tranquill.
Nevada, for all they did well in week 1, is really no Texas in terms of a team with a system and a certainlevel of expectations, and they will be heading into South Bend to face a team that is down from week one. Notre Dame’s defense forced a turnover and then three consecutive punts after the Crawford-Love-Coleman substitutions were made.
Going into the contest with the Wolfpack (1-0), the Irish (0-1) have numerous questions that need sorting out – most notably, the quarterback depth chart and a rough defensive showing.
“That’s one thing Coach Polian has repeated to us”, said tight end Jarred Gipson, who has played at Texas A&M, UCLA and Florida State in his career.
And it’s not like this defense was bereft of positive individual impacts. Crawford and Cole Luke looked strong at cornerback, too. “We have to do those better”. If we’re not playing cover three well, we’re not coaching well enough, so we’ve got to do those things better.
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“Once we do that and get a chance to sit as a staff and talk about it we’ll have a better sense”, he said. It will take us a couple of months to see if this was an anomaly or a foreshadowing of how the rest of the season will play out. To do enough to impress the selection committee, the Irish not only have to win their next 11 games, but do so in impressive fashion. If they don’t, it’ll be another year of leaning on the offense – and most likely missing the College Football Playoff. It’s a position that I think more than anything else requires somebody to really build a relationship and a rapport with the quarterback, and if you start to move him around now, it begins to erode some of the things that we have built on over the last few weeks.
