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Opening segment transcription (thanks to
@Mason Plummer)
Instant Takeaways
“My first thought is just that it is kind of unfortunate that the guys can’t be out there with their family before the game on Senior Day and soak in that moment. On the flip side of that, your seniors showed up today. The studs, the captains of the team, played really well today. Book was tremendous, Javon McKinley, Daelin Hayes, Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah, all played well. It was a fitting end for these guys. Outside of that, it was a slow start and sometimes that happens on senior days. I was guilty of that on my senior day inside of Notre Dame Stadium. You get into your feelings, and I think you can get too overwhelmed with thinking about what you have been through and maybe forget about the task at hand. It was a convincing enough win for me though. I know a lot of people made money from the fact that Syracuse covered, but it was a solid game all around, good to see the seniors get a nice win on senior day in their last time playing in Notre Dame Stadium.”
Who flashed
“Owusu-Koramoah is number one for me; McKinley is number two. That is two 100-yard receiving performances for McKinley in back-to-back games now. Tyree flashed on that 94-yard run but we finally got to see him open up and flash that speed we have been waiting for. I don’t know if that was necessarily a breakout performance from Tyree but it was good to see him get his chance and take it. Daelin Hayes had a great game. There have been multiple times where Foskey was the drop end where Hayes was on that play and Notre Dame has had a lot of success with that play. It was really nice to see that pay off there for Hayes with that interception. I can’t forget Kyren Williams either. The top four for me are Book, Owusu-Koramoah, McKinley and Tyree. That Owusu-Koramoah fumble he caused was awesome. He hit a big 260-pound tight end and caused him to fumble when he hit him; he didn’t even try to wrap up he just came in and whacked him. It was really fun to get the chance to see an explosive playmaker make plays like that and he will be making plays like that here on Sundays very soon.”
Areas of Improvement
“I am not concerned about the run defense Notre Dame showed today. Syracuse rushed for 229, but 120 of it was on two plays. Two long touchdown runs of 40 and 80 yards, it was the same play with the same defense that exposed a flaw in the defense. They exposed that same flaw in the Notre Dame defense twice and scored on both. Essentially in football terms, Syracuse had more blockers than Notre Dame had linebackers and the ‘spill’ linebacker was cleared out, leaving a big hole. From what it looked like, Hamilton took a bad angle on the first 40-yard run in support and the same thing happened again on the 80-yard run. It is very correctable schematically in the next couple of weeks in practice and on film. It is alarming to see when you watch live but when you peel back the onion it is very fixable and it looked like Notre Dame just got caught there. I don’t think the team is reading the press clippings about how great they are and they are slacking off now, it was just a bad run defense there and a great play call.
“Other areas of improvement, which you didn’t see last week, was the Notre Dame secondary. Nick McCloud has done a great job stepping up, he has been strong and serviceable on one side. On the other side, Shaun Crawford’s side, they are just kind of out there. They are just oozing around. It will be interesting to see what they do from there now, I am not seeing a lot from that position. Clarence Lewis is out there and is probably a little trigger-shy because of his youth but he needs to be less trigger-shy and be willing to make a play, especially on down and distance where it seems like he is nervous. Lewis is often a full step late on these plays and obviously he is worried about getting beat over the top but hopefully they can continue to groom him over the next couple of weeks and encourage him to play more aggressively because I really think they are going to need him to. That will be something I am sure that they look into over the next couple weeks and maybe have some help from Hamilton over the top as well. I think we look for things to complain about sometimes, looking at Twitter during the game and stuff like that. At the end of the day Notre Dame is the No. 2 team in the country and you are going to have games like this.”
What did we learn?
“As far as what I learned today, as long as Ian Book is back there for Notre Dame, he is going to get the job done. It was a little bit touch and go early in the game, clunky is the word that comes to mind. Eventually, he finds himself and asserts himself in the game and we saw that with the touchdown run. When you saw him run that one in you knew he had control of the game. It is a tremendous luxury to have Ian Book back there for Notre Dame. He threw an uncharacteristic interception today but I will take it. He was pushing the ball down the field and you like to see that. As I was looking for things to talk about for the show today while I was watching the game, I could not help but think back to the beginning of the season and how far the team has come. There was so much nervousness at the beginning of the season and panic and now where we are today, man what a journey. Ian Book has been at the helm of all of this and it has been great to watch. Winning his 30th game today was awesome. Last week, I was not even a little bit worried going into halftime at 17-17 with UNC because Book is back there. Notre Dame did not roll anything special out there today, it was actually a simpler offense than we have seen recently. We saw some different personnel packages and Lenzy out there which was good but we were forcing him the ball on some of these gadget, end-around types of plays. We did not learn a lot about the offense but maybe that is a good thing.”
