90 days until Notre Dame football: An Irish miscue vs. Stanford in 2022
BlueandGold.com will release a countdown article highlighting a significant Fighting Irish football statistic every day until the 2023 Notre Dame season opener against Navy in Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 26. Today, there are 91 days until the Fighting Irish and Midshipmen kick off at Aviva Stadium.
Stanford had one of the worst rushing defenses in the country in 2022. Notre Dame still couldn’t crack it.
The Cardinal allowed 90 plays of 10-plus rushing yards. That’s an average of 7.5 per game. Notre Dame only had four in a 16-14 loss in South Bend last October.
Only one FBS team, Georgia Southern, allowed more rushing plays of 10 or more yards last season. The Eagles gave up 100. Stanford allowed 224.4 rushing yards per game last season. Georgia Southern was one of just four teams to have a worse mark than that. The others were South Florida, Louisiana Tech and Colorado.
Still, Notre Dame only rushed for 150 yards vs. the Cardinal. Those yards came on a somewhat respectable 4.4 yards per carry. It was the lack of big plays in the running game and a 10-0 halftime deficit that didn’t allow the Irish to stick to the run. That was an insurmountable margin, so offensive coordinator Tommy Rees could have tried to keep the ball on the ground to impose the superior team’s will, but it didn’t happen.
There wasn’t a single player on the Notre Dame roster that carried the ball at least 10 times. It doesn’t matter what the score is; over the course of a 60-minute game, somebody like Audric Estimé or Logan Diggs should break into double-digits in rushing attempts. Estimé had eight. Diggs had nine. Chris Tyree also had eight. He only ran for 25 yards, an average of 3.1 yards per carry.
Estimé had a 22-yard run. Diggs went for 26 on one play. Tyree’s longest carry was an 11-yarder. Quarterback Drew Pyne even had a 16-yard run.
The Irish lost the time of possession game by a landslide, 36:07 to 23:53. Only getting 16 first downs will do that. First downs were to be had via lengthy plays in the running game, but for whatever reason(s) the Irish just couldn’t get them.
And it resulted in the most head-scratching loss of the season — even more so than the Marshall gaffe.
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