Three days until Notre Dame football: Three keys to a successful Irish season
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 three days until the Fighting Irish and Midshipmen kick off at Aviva Stadium.
With three days to go until Notre Dame heads to Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, here are three keys to a successful Notre Dame season.
1. Find a go-to receiver
Undeniably, Notre Dame is deeper at receiver than it was in 2022. The Irish are seven deep in the receiver room, and crucially, they feature more versatility than in years’ past. For example, senior Chris Tyree and freshman Jaden Greathouse will be Notre Dame’s primary slot receivers, but junior Jayden Thomas and graduate student Matt Salerno have played the position in the past. Plus, Greathouse can move outside if necessary.
However, none of those seven have proven themselves as a bona fide No. 1 target for graduate quarterback Sam Hartman. And in fall camp, no one truly stood out and convinced reporters, “He’s going to be the guy.” Thomas is the most likely candidate, coming off a sophomore season with 25 receptions for 362 yards, but Notre Dame doesn’t know for sure if he can be that go-to receiver or if he’s better off as a complementary piece.
Sophomore Tobias Merriweather has the size and athletic traits of a WR1, but can he make that leap after catching just one pass in 2022? Greathouse and fellow freshman Rico Flores Jr. look like they could both be that guy in the not-too-distant future — potentially as early as 2024 — but asking either to be a team’s leading receiver right now might be stretching it.
Hartman’s Wake Forest teams featured a 1,000-yard receiver, or at least a pro-rated one (we’ll assume Jaquarii Roberson would have picked up the requisite 74 yards if COVID-19 didn’t shorten the Demon Deacons’ 2020 season by three games) in every year of his Wake Forest career. Notre Dame’s last 1,000-yard receiver was Chase Claypool in 2019.
Setting 1,000 yards as the “have to have it” number isn’t exactly fair, but the Irish need someone to emerge as Hartman’s go-to guy.
2. Take the ball away
Notre Dame is well aware of its issue creating turnovers in 2022. Expecting sophomore cornerback Benjamin Morrison to fix it by himself is unrealistic, because if nothing else, quarterbacks will just throw at him less.
“We’ve got to play with consistency and attack the football,” graduate linebacker Jack Kiser said after the second Notre Dame practice fall camp. “And I think that’s defense-wide. At the start of last year, we took forever to get our first turnover. And I think you could really feel that on the field. Like we were playing decent ball, but there were times where we needed to step up, and we couldn’t just get that big game-changing play.”
The Irish cornerbacks should be among the best in college football this season. Because they’ll be able to prevent big plays en masse, the safeties should have free rein to take more shots at the ball. Forcing fumbles, as practice drills at the Irish Athletic Center have shown, will be a priority for Notre Dame at all three levels of defense.
Finishing 103rd in the country in takeaways per game again will not cut it in 2023.
3. Embrace change
For the first time in a while, Notre Dame can win games this season because of its quarterback, not just with its quarterback. While its run game and defense should be assets, just like they are in any other year, Notre Dame has to embrace what it can do with a prolific signal-caller.
In other words, trying to be a run-first team because “We’re Notre Dame, it’s what we do” would be a mistake.
Take Nick Saban‘s Alabama dynasty, for example. From 2015 to 2018, the Crimson Tide finished no higher than No. 90 in pass play percentage. Since 2019 — Tua Tagovailoa‘s third year as the starter — Saban changed his tune, and the Tide finished as high as No. 30 in 2021. To put that into perspective, Alabama very rarely trails in games. Teams who are winning will run the ball more. So an Alabama team that finished 13-2 ranking as the 30th-most pass-happy team in the nation is quite eye-opening, and they did that because they had a Heisman Trophy winning quarterback in Bryce Young.
Is Sam Hartman Bryce Young? Of course not. But he’s a top-10 quarterback in the nation right now. The Irish have that advantage now, so they have to use it.
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