1-3 Louisville is not where they were predicted to be. Brian Kelly said today that they are still a dangerous team, that if they took care of the football they would be 3-1 easily. Paul Moala is gone for the season, he tore his achilles tendon, surgery today. Isiah Pryor will move into his slot as the backup Rover. I see that we are 16 point favorites. That's a lot even though Louisville has been struggling. I hope we can cover. They have another QB who is just like the FSU QB, big strong runner and strong arm. They have some excellent WR's and their RB is a really good player. Kiser and MTA should be back for this game. Kelly has a press conference going on right now. I'll post it later. I mainly hope that we can continue to improve on the passing game, Kevin Austin is a full go this week and continue the progress we saw with Javon McKinley, without getting away from what we've been doing with the running game.
Jordan Genmark-Heath announced he's going to be transferring to UCLA. He'll graduate in Nov. If you remember when he didn't make the 2 deep at any LB slot this fall he decided it was time to go somewhere else to finish his career. He, lack of a better word, quit the team and focused on his academics. Good luck to him, he's from San Diego so UCLA is going home for him.
The Lou scares me in that they are well coached and they have some big play maker athletes. Still, ND should be able to run them to death.
Here we go, I just have a feeling that this game will be closer than expected. As far as I know the Irish are healthy.
Irish dominate the 1st half but can't push it into the end zone. and the fake fg fails. 6-0 at half. I didn't like that fake, bad decision.
Book is struggling. His receivers aren't helping much either. If nothing is open he's got to get rid of it OB instead of eating it every time.
Doing the worst thing you can do, keep an underdog in the game... or even worse give them the lead! 7-6 Louisville
We take the gift and a nice drive that ends with nifty run by Book, we go for 2 and don't make it. Hind sight is 20 - 20... But I sure would like to have the FG instead of the fake at the end of the half and a conventional xpt there. 16 - 7 is better than 12 - 7
Irish get the ball back up 12-7 and about 8 min left, clock eating drive to the Louisville 10 where they take 3 consecutive knees and run out the clock. No doubt the smart thing to do, but I would have liked to see them try to score! Sure they could fumble, throw a pick or a pick six... But damn it I wanted to score.
We had a chance to score just before the half. Kelly pissed it away. We have a real problem with our passing attack, it's doesn't exist.
Right now I don't see how we have a prayer against Clemson, Bill. We just don't have the QB / WR game right now. We are a good team but just not in the class of Clemson. But who knows, maybe our passing game will develop in October and upsets do happen, best team doesn't always win, etc. But it's fun to watch our OL/RB!
Terry, not much of anyone has a prayer against Clemson right now. Getting ready to watch Georgia and Alabama right now. In my opinion the winner of this game, Clemson and Ohio State are the best bets to win it all. And we haven't seen Ohio State play yet.
A few highlights via Eric Hansen from an otherwise disappointing offensive performance: -Notre Dame wakes up today No. 4 nationally in scoring defense (11.5 ppg). In the past 50 seasons only 3 Irish teams have finished the season in the top 4: 1973 (3), 1988 (3) and 2012 (2). Those 3 teams COMBINED for one loss. -Soph RB Kyren Williams moves up a spot to No. 6 nationally in rushing yards per game at 121.5. He's 12th in yards per carry at 6.7. -Lost in #NotreDame's 12-7 escape from Louisville (and understandably so), the Irish defense held the Cardinals to 219 total yards. -With his 13-yard TD run, Ian Book moved past Brandon Wimbush into the No. 2 spot on ND's QB career rushing list (1,159 yards). Tony Rice is No. 1 with 1,921 yards.
To me it looked like the Cards we're playing to stop the run and played tight man to man on our receivers. Book was somewhat bothered by the wind and showed a reluctance to pull the trigger. Our receivers didn't get separation and dropped a couple of catchable balls. D was solid. Win and advance.
Gipper, your defense may very well carry you through this season. Book is hot and cold. Any backup you can count on at QB?
Backup has very little game experience Don, so we don't know how he will react if he has to play. He reportedly has a stronger arm than Ian Book though. Ian Book is what he is, he's a good not great college Qb. I guess the question is how much is he limited by his receivers this year? Watching that Alabama game, you see talented receivers who get open and also make great catches, we don't have any receivers that are in the same zip code as those kids at Alabama. But Book hasn't lost many games in his career as a starting QB, and that touchdown run he made for the winning score was classic Book, and the drive to finish off the game was very well done by him. He made some critical 3rd down throws. I hope that, like last year, he'll get hot down the stretch of the season and make plays in the passing game. I still don't think it will be enough to beat Clemson, once much less twice if we make it to the ACC Champ game. Defense did play well on paper yesterday, as Sid pointed out. Hard to argue that, but I was disappointed that we didn't put more pressure on the Louisville QB. Other teams that had played Louisville were able to do so, but we didn't. It's a concern. Bottom line is our OL and RB's are really good, are they Alabama good...NO. Watching Najee Harris last night made me realize that while our RB, Kyren Williams, is having an excellent season...he's a smaller slower version of Najee Harris. I think we are a top 10 team, and that we are over rated right now being a top 5 team.
Don we had a pretty talented backup but he's now starting for BC. I haven't seen enough of our backups to get an idea of how good they are.