Notre Dame Football: Lessons Learned from Boston College

It seems like only yesterday Notre Dame came out on top in a defensive struggle, holding Boston College to 80 yards rushing, 250 total yards and two scores, while the Irish piled up 161 yards rushing on the way to 417 total yards, just one turnover and a win.

I guess that was yesterday.

So why do I feel like I was just tied to a chair for two days and forced to watch Snookie audition for a big part in Striptease II?

Seriously, I just got done watching some hairy drunken pig in lipstick that Notre Dame is calling a win, and in the process saw something so ugly there is no size beer goggles that could make me want to snuggle with it.

I’m sorry, but sometimes you just have to come to grips with the fact that the cute girl you’re dating has a big butt and an annoying giggle that is not going away—and anyone that watched the Irish dance with the Eagles on Saturday is damn happy to be back home in bed with the lights off.

Yes, time heals all wounds, even gaping tortured blast wounds like the 16-14 garbage scow shipwreck we just saw.

In a week the stench will fade and in two weeks it will be just the musty odor of an off game that we managed to win in a “solid defensive effort.” In three weeks it will be smelling the clean air of a true testimony to ND’s grit in the face of adversity. By next year it will be nothing more than the sweet smell of roses for the “W” on the way to an eight or nine win regular season.

While no one that loves the Golden Dome should bitch about a win, those of us that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I don’t honestly think I can watch much more of this tripe without getting another graduate degree somewhere in the SEC so I have a backup alma mater to flip to next time a defense decides to make Tommy Rees beat them with his arm.

Yes, Senior Day was that ugly, but we did learn some things.

Boston College Needs a Football Team

To win the Ugliest Couple trophy, you need someone to dance with that is truly hideous, say like Boston College.

The Eagles are 3-8 and have the 112^th best scoring offense in the country, and looked every bit as bad as their ranking. The fact that there are actually eight offenses in the entire country worse than this one is a truly sobering thought.

To their credit, the Eagles’ offense is a balanced mix of bad and terrible. Chase Rettig has a big arm capable of missing the entire stadium on any given throw. To make up for any throws that actually stay in the stadium, he has an athletically challenged group of receivers that collectively are not a deep threat but make up for it by dropping easy throws underneath on a regular basis.

Their leading rusher had 42 yards and at times looked like he had a legitimate chance of beating out my 90-year-old mom for a spot in the two deep until she laid off the whiskey for a week and impressed in the one on one drills.

Lest anyone thinks ND beat anybody on Saturday, BC got pantsed by Central Florida 30-3 and was hammered by Florida State 38-7 on the way to earning every loss in its 3-8 year. This team lost to 3-8 Duke for chrissakes. Duke!!! They lost to a team with a blue mascot and a 3.7 team GPA—I don't think the school even owns a football!

Yes there have been some big time victories—hard to say which was the bigger signature win for the 2011 Eagles, a 45-17 dismantling of 5-6 FCS power Massachusetts, the  28-17 squeaker over 2-9 Maryland or that convincing 14-10 home win over 6-5 football powerhouse North Carolina State.

Just sayin’, at least on the toilet paper it is written on, with the possible exception of the inexperienced injury-ridden Navy squad, BC is the worst team we’ve seen all year, and it is legitimately vying for worst team in the country.

Suffice it to also say that eeking out a win at home against this talent-challenged BC squad will not fill up the first few pages of the Sporting News this week.

Tommy Rees Has Issues

I have to be fair here, Boston College’s 48^th ranked scoring defense isn’t all that bad, and BC linebacker Luke Kuechly plays football like he’s taking revenge on a biker gang.

I have also been told that wind was a big problem in the passing game, a factor that is going to play havoc with any QB.

That being said, Notre Dame Nation needs to accept Tommy Rees for what he is, because he isn’t getting any better.

As we all know, the book on Tommy is get in his face and he’ll wilt, we've all seen it.

Without the physical tools for their D-line to dominate ND’s O-line and press the pocket like USC, MSU or Pitt, the Eagles did the next best thing—drop eight or nine into coverage and shade to the single running back to stop the run as needed.

By flooding the passing lanes and ignoring Rees as a runner, Boston College simply dared Rees to make strong throws into tight windows all day long.

The result was 24-39 for 256 yards and one interception to the defensive end on one of the worst QB decisions in college football history. BC blew two or three other golden chances to get a pick, and generally had little problem making Rees look as pedestrian as he really is when a defense doesn’t just flat out suck.

As usual, when in perpetual doubt, Tommy just kept throwing short to Floyd (10 catches) and let him work the sidelines running over corners and safeties for modest yardage.

In the process, Tommy was generally unable to take advantage of the non-existant pressure to find other receivers or to rush for yardage underneath with the entire BC roster, fanbase and part-time ushers dedicated to deep and middle coverage.

Instead, Rees typically stood in a relatively confused pose until a day or two later when the two man rush finally forced his immobile butt to take two steps left, chuck it out of bounds and trot over to Kelly so they could shake their heads and exchange “WTF” looks at each other before the punt.

Frankly, even though he was right, if announcer Mike Mayock said that Rees needed to run to keep BC honest one more time I was going to fly to South Bend, breach booth security and rip his tongue out with my crude set of pliers fashioned from a crushed beer can.

That having been said, the point is well taken…if you’re as slow and immobile as Rees, you better get damn good at throwing fastballs at the outside shoulder, or you better get somebody else to start for ND.

For those of you that keep saying Rees’ record as a starter (now 12-2), please save your breath, I know Kelly has picked him, trained him and there is no other choice right now.

My point is only that this is what you’re going to get from Rees against average to good defenses, and sooner or later this team will pay for Kelly not making a hard choice and developing a better arm and athlete at QB. With Jonas Gray going down (what a travesty for a great kid) and Mike Golic filling in for Braxton Cave, hiding Rees in this offense just got a whole lot tougher.

The poor performances against USC were not aberrations for Tommy, and neither was MSU, Pitt and now BC. Until Kelly admits that and does something about it, we are never going to beat a quality defense unless the rest of the team can carry him.

Diaco Needs A Better Plan To Beat Real Offenses

When you only give up 14 points and 250 yards to a college football team, with the opposing QB going 18 for 38 in the process, it might seem like I’m being overly critical to call Diaco out.

But be honest with me—did Matt Barkley miss anybody in the wide open under routes while USC picked us apart all day long? Do you think there is any chance Andrew Luck is going to miss open receivers two out of three times, or that Stanford’s receivers are going to drop eight to ten passes that would move the chains?

Against BC, for every decent pass play defended by the ND linebackers there were two where the linebacker barely managed to get onto the same TV screen with the underneath route, and I have one big-ass TV.

The deep secondary was consistently saved by Rettig missing an open receiver, although Zeke Motta managed to turn his two second coverage responsibility at the goal line into a half second of coverage and almost two seconds to get back in time to not turn his head and run over a receiver trying for an uncatchable ball.

I only mention that because it seems that ND’s secondary must endlessly practice losing the ball in the air because they consistently don’t know where it is in the likely event the pass actually leaves the QB's hand.

Boston College runs a high school offense with bad personnel and vanilla play-calling and had short routes open all day long. Yes, they were kind enough to miss them all day long, but if you notice in the two instances where they didn’t they scored.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the definite feeling that Diaco is under direct orders to keep everything in front of him while Kelly’s offense takes care of business.

Either that or Diaco has no idea how to get a defense to defend a short passing game.

All is not Lost

No, my new tag line is not Danny Downer.

Admittedly, I am still angry at Coach Kelly for stinking up three-and-a-half hours of a perfectly good Saturday making me watch this team struggle against yet another lousy football team.

That being said, in the big picture we’re seeing some very good things.

Louis Nix III is becoming a real force: there are few things more enjoyable than watching a two-story house tackle people. It is also good to see talent like Lynch and Niklas continuing to develop. The play of the injury depleted D-Line is getting better every week, and it should be a real treat watching them lunch on O-Lines again next year.

In a somewhat unexpected plus, Robby Toma and the non-Floyd receivers are becoming a more capable crew—in the few instances Rees sees fit to throw it to someone other than Floyd, they have shown an improved ability to make the catch and slip for extra yards, even without No. 2 receiver Theo Riddick on the field.

This is especially good news for me as I was highly unlikely to lose that pesky 50 pounds and get my 40 time under the pace most recently set by an eroding cliff on the front face of Mt. McKinley.

Overall, offensively and defensively, Kelly’s “next-man-in” theory is working. This year’s Irish have been ravaged by injuries on both sides of the ball. In prior years this team would have fallen apart, this year the level of play has been relatively consistent despite a hospital wing full of ND players watching games every Saturday.

Yes, Kelly better get Tommy (or someone else) and his fast strike offense on the same page if he expects to beat anybody with a real pulse, and Diaco has yet to show his Xs and Os can stop a quality offense.

But in all fairness, despite some consistently undisciplined play and a boatload of mistakes, this is Kelly’s second year with an injury-riddled team, and we can legitimately say that we are arguably two fumbles away from 10-1 (three less fumbles and 11-0 for those of you that watched USC drinking a barrel of Irish Mist while bathing in Kool-Aid).

No, we’re not ready to beat the Crimson Tide yet, but at least we quit losing on Senior Day, and next year we have the right tools to stomp Michigan and possibly even edge USC.

We'll talk about taking ‘Bama in 2013.