Analysis: Notre Dame at a crossroads in Music City Bowl
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The stage was decidedly grander the last time Notre Dame clashed with LSU eight seasons ago and got shoved off it and into the football equivalent of the orchestra pit.
The stakes haven’t shrunk, though, this time for the Irish, especially when it comes to national perception, to program building, to the prospect of making 2015 a redemptive season.
The records for both teams, a combined 15-9, and the Music City Bowl venue scream relative insignificance in college football’s big picture. Tuesday’s matchup at LP Field will likely prove otherwise, over time.
Notre Dame football stands at a crossroads.
Again.
The Irish (7-5) arrive Friday in Nashville and resume practicing after a three-day holiday break. If Tammy Wynette were still alive and belting out tales of heartache, she’d probably put this injury/suspension-diluted, turnover-tainted Notre Dame football season to music and bring it to the Opry.
Tuesday isn’t about proving a 1-4 November was an aberration, because it wasn’t entirely.
For Notre Dame it’s about building toward a 2015 season, when the Irish theoretically will be less fragile, losing very little to expired eligibility and adding in missing pieces Jarron Jones, Ishaq Williams, team MVP Joe Schmidt, KeiVarae Russell and perhaps even Jarrett Grace, all on defense.
LSU (8-4), young almost everywhere and heretofore underdeveloped at quarterback, will not only grate against ND’s flaws to see how well Irish coach Brian Kelly’s December duct tape is working, the Tigers will provide a reminder of how the Irish can climb college football’s social ladder again.
And how Notre Dame did it in 2012.
It starts with recruiting and developing defensive front-seven talent in quality and quantity.
Overall, LSU and ND have had comparable recruiting classes over the past five cycles, with Rivals.com rating the Irish classes 14-10-20-3-11 nationally from 2010 to 2014 and LSU’s 6-6-18-6-2.
Each team lured eight five-star prospects during that period, but LSU has been hit much harder by early entries to the NFL Draft, a nation’s high 17 in fact over the past two drafts.
There’s not a lot of overlap in the two program’s recruiting, in large part because LSU has dominated talent-rich Louisiana so thoroughly and ND is just starting to make inroads there again after a long drought.
Each current recruiting class has three prospects offered by the other school, including ND’s jewel of the class — quarterback Brandon Wimbush. And only three Irish starters — defensive tackle Sheldon Day, center Matt Hegarty and tight end Ben Koyack — had LSU offers coming out of high school.
Increasingly, though, if ND is reluctant or unable to get into LSU territory to grab elite front-seven players, then it certainly must penetrate SEC territory somewhere else to supplement its Midwest crop.
“When you look at both teams and evaluate future pro talent, defensive line and linebacker is where you see a difference,” said NFL Draft analyst Scott Wright of draftcountdown.com.
Recruiting analyst Tom Lemming, who looks at talent from the opposite prism — high school to college, echoes Wright’s evaluation.
It’s the same reality then-Irish coach Charlie Weis stared at as his 11th-ranked ND team was serenaded with booming chants of o-ver-rat-ed, o-ver-rat-ed in the Superdome in New Orleans following fourth-ranked LSU’s 41-14 defrocking of the Irish in the January 2007 Sugar Bowl.
Even running unimaginative run-out-the-clock-and-go-home plays in the fourth quarter, the Tigers amassed 577 total yards in the rout, the third-most ever against an ND defense at the time and just 40 off the school-record 617 Ohio State amassed in the previous year's 34-20 Fiesta Bowl loss/comeuppance.
As a team, the Irish were outgained 333-30 in the second half against LSU after going into the halftime break down 21-14.
The ensuing fall, Weis and the Irish bottomed out at 3-9, the losingest season in ND football history, while the Tigers climbed to a national title that same season.
The most twisted image coming out of the game eight seasons ago, in hindsight, wasn’t Irish star safety Tom Zbikowski’s mom, Susan, coaxing husband Eddie to wear an LSU sweatshirt to the game to keep him from getting into a skirmish.
It was the perception of LSU coach Les Miles at the time, 22-4 after the victory and only marginally respected.
A fairly common notion was that Miles was incubating former LSU coach/savior Nick Saban’s players more than he was developing them, and that his coordinators at the time, (offense) Jimbo Fisher and (defensive) Bo Pelini — yes, that Bo Pelini — were making all the meaningful moves and decisions.
Most ironic was the idea that one of the factors supposedly holding Miles back was being too guarded with public and the media. Consider then-LSU athletic director Skip Bertman’s urging for Miles to open up to have gone well beyond his wildest dreams.
Defense certainly didn’t take a back seat in LSU’s fairly constant bully status since 2006. Inclusive of that season and this one, the Tigers have finished below 15th in total defense only twice, cratering at 32nd in 2008.
In those same nine seasons, the Irish have risen above No. 30 in total defense once – finishing seventh in their 12-1 national title run that finished, with a No. 4 ranking in the final AP poll — highest of the post-Holtz Era (1997-present).
Six of the seven front-seven starters on that 2012 team, a mix of Kelly and Weis recruits, were drafted into the NFL over the past two draft cycles. The seventh, linebacker Danny Spond had his college career and any pro aspirations cut short by a medical condition that produced debilitating migraines.
The Irish enter the Music City Bowl 70th in total defense, their lowest national ranking in that category over the past nine years, save a No. 86 finish in 2009, the year Weis was purged and his seven-figure buyout (with one installment to go) became annual news.
“Notre Dame needs to be more aggressive in their recruiting of pass-rushers and top defensive linemen,” Lemming said. “Injuries and other things happen. You’re recruiting has to give you the depth to overcome those things.”
That’s true at linebacker as well.
Notre Dame recruited 13 players in the 2010-13 recruiting classes whose projected position on signing day was inside linebacker, outside linebacker or both.
Those players are Kendall Moore, Prince Shembo, Spond, Justin Utupo, Ishaq Williams, Ben Councell, Jarrett Grace, Troy Niklas, Anthony Rabasa, Romeo Okwara, Jaylon Smith, Michael Deeb and Doug Randolph.
Utupo and Okwara have morphed into defensive linemen. And handful of others are no longer on the roster. Still, when you add it all up, 105 of the 107 tackles ND got this season from that group at the linebacker position came from one player — Smith.
Conversely, the Irish got 124 tackles in 2014 from a former walk-on (Schmidt) and freshmen Nyles Morgan and Greer Martini.
“Injuries aren’t the whole story,” Lemming said.
It’s enough of one now that in an ESPN bowl team rating system, concocted in large part by consulting Vegas insiders, LSU shows up as the 14th-best among the 76 bowl teams. ND is 43rd.
A Stanford team the Irish beat 2½ months ago is 17th. A .500 Arkansas squad is 16th.
The Irish would be underdogs, albeit slight, to Boise State, Minnesota, Florida, Marshall, Texas, Miami (Fla.), Cincinnati, Tennessee, Iowa, Memphis, and UCF, among others. The lower-rated Power 5 team, Rutgers at 68, is the team the Irish beat in the Pinstripe Bowl last December.
The Irish are miles from New York now and a 2013 bowl opponent that basically told them very little about their future.
What the Music City Bowl might tell Kelly and the Irish is really about opportunity — if they listen to the message: An opportunity to face the music and get better.
ehansen@ndinsider.com
574-235-6112
