“I thought we showed good patience tonight in terms of keeping the ball and moving them around, creating better chances for ourselves to attack than we had been”, Notre Dame coach Theresa Romagnolo said.
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Notre Dame fell to 1-2 on the season with a 36-28 loss at home to Michigan State. Saturday’s home contest with Duke marks the start of a three-game stretch against ACC foes perceived as a soft patch on the schedule, the ideal time to get this roller coaster under control before it slides off the rails. It’s that sense of urgency that, yeah, we’re still playing football. So finding that sense of urgency, that attention to detail that’s absolutely crucial to being a really good football team, and we can’t be the kind of football team that we want to be unless we play with a sense of urgency for four quarters. We have to eliminate it in the way we go to work every single day.
The Irish offense, led by dynamic redshirt sophomore quarterback DeShone Kizer, has been razor-sharp at times, but remains susceptible to mid-game slumps. Defensively, the Blue Devils’ limited offense won’t be able to challenge the Notre Dame defense. Although the Wolfpack outshot the Irish 5-4, senior goalie Kaela Little made two saves while the back line stood firm, and Notre Dame’s defense preserved the clean sheet.
“They’re a good team, very athletic, so we were trying to make sure that we’re stopping them because they were scoring a lot of goals”.
NOTRE DAME 49, DUKE 20: Notre Dame is struggling, yes. Unless the Irish come out flat following the Michigan State game, it should be an easy double-digit victory for Brian Kelly and company. Kelly said. “A consistency of offensive performance”. “There’s D-Linemen running down the field, you see that play, Jarron Jones running down the field for a tackle, that’s unheard of”.
“Take all that other minutiae out … if you just whittle it down to its simplest forms, if we tackle better and don’t give up explosive plays on defense, we’re going to be fine”.
But what’s clear – and has been clear since, probably, sometime last season – is that Notre Dame will need its offense to carry it to wins until its defensive issues get fixed. And Kelly mentioned his quarterback as one of the players who needs to rev up their sense of urgency, one of the coach’s common themes this week. The college football odds for the game have the Fighting Irish favored by almost three touchdowns to pick up the win. There’s still something left to play for, as linebacker James Onwualu said after Saturday’s loss to Michigan State. At the end of the game, they were sending a lot of numbers forward and we had to deal with that again and be more defensive, but overall I thought we did a great job.
This is not one of those games.
At 1-2 with losses to bottom-feeders Wake Forest and Northwestern, Duke doesn’t look as unsafe as it once did.
After personally visiting Notre Dame’s campus past year as a representative for her school, the college then invited the teacher and her students to fly out to visit the school, check out a football game, and have the whole flight paid for by their official partner Delta Airlines.
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Unless Notre Dame still isn’t in a good place mentally as it adjusts to life with newly lowered expectations. “There’s a lot of things that we need to work on and it’s that sense of urgency that you need to bring individually to work on them”. “But at the same time it’s not something that I’m trying to dwell on”. There’s still nine games left to be played and we have to get better.
