Game is now less than a week away, Kelly will have his pre-game press conference tomorrow. Irish are double digit favorites. I believe Louisville will be a well coached team, Scott Satterfield I believe was an excellent hire and he brought with him some critical coaches from App State. He didn't inherit very much and went out and got some JUCO talent to fill in the gaps. I do expect a great effort by Louisville, and if the Irish aren't fully engaged could find themselves in a dogfight much like they did with Ball State last year. Hopefully though we will see a lot of players get game action. Esp the RB's and Wr's I am hoping that the game will be in hand by half time and we'll get to see Kyren Williams at RB a lot and the other RB's as well. Hope to see Braden Lenzy, and some of the young speed WR that we have getting balls thrown to them by Phil Jurkovec who will hopefully look like a legit backup QB for Book. Mostly of course 1) the Win 2) no injuries 3) get a lot of backups in the game.
While it's true that any win is better than a loss, but a lot of wins feel more like losses. Here would be an example, if ND beats Louisville with the same type of game that we beat Ball State or Vanderbilt last season it will feel a lot like a loss and fans including myself will be worried about what's ahead.
The level of execution in an ugly win is what always worried me. Some ugly wins you chalk up to just an off day and some you say to yourself sh it we had better play better than that next week or we will lose.
I don't like to predict wins or losses for ND but this team(Louisville) should not be a problem for the Irish.
Strange things happen on opening day. It doesn't even matter who has the most talented players. It's a team game. What matters the most is how well they work together as a team. Football is a complicated game with a lot of moving parts that must all synchronize.
I'll be curious if Kelly is asked and answers questions about Kevin Austin. The reports have been that he's done for the season, suspension. Then there has been chatter that he appealed and it's back to a 4 game suspension. Kelly has been pretty much giving non-answers to questions about Kevin for quite awhile, saying things like he's getting better and stuff like that. The odd thing is that he's reportedly doing well in the classroom and it's not an academic thing, and if it were something involving the law we'd already know about it as those are public record. It could be weed, esp since he's from Florida, and schools can't talk about that sort of thing. He's a talented young man, but he might be a knucklehead when it comes to managing his life.
OK as expected... Status of Kevin Austin playing this year? "He's on our team." Follow up question: Will he be enrolled at school? "Yes, expect him to be on the team and enrolled in school the whole year."
On Austin, from the way Kelly sounded today the reports were not quite accurate. Kelly sounded as if Austin would be playing sometime this year. After what I heard it wouldn’t surprise me to see him on the field after the 4th game.
You could be right Tim, he didn't say he was out for the year....have to read the tea leaves. Question: Is Kevin Austin going to play for you this year? KELLY: Kevin Austin is on our team. I think you guys all know that I don't talk about playing time with our guys. If I have anything to talk about with a player relative to their status, I'm going to talk about it if I can. His situation is such that he is still on this football team and he is still practicing with us. Other than that, I've made my statements regarding him. Question: Do you expect [Austin] to stay enrolled in school, be enrolled in Notre Dame? KELLY: Yes, he will be at Notre Dame. I can tell you in my conversations that he'll be with us, he will be on our football team. I expect him to be with us the entire year. So we don't know what we don't know...he's not likely to be getting 1st or 2nd team reps, most likely will be getting scout team work...if it's 4 games and using Kevin Stepherson as an example, he won't get much action in the first few games he's back and eligible to play. Dexter didn't start his first game (Stanford) but he saw plenty of action and of course his 1st carry was a 50 yd/TD run. I don't expect such a spectacular entrance for Austin. Plus I do think there is some talent that will be getting playing time and by the 4th game Austin might find himself down the depth chart.
Depth Chart is out. No surprises, it's official though that Drew White is the starter at Mike and Shaun Crawford is the starter at Corner opposite Troy Pride. I'm really praying that Shaun stays healthy this year, he's worked so hard to get back from injuries that I hope he's rewarded. Asmar Bilal is the starter at Buck, not really an upset but more than a few people thought that he really hadn't done much to inspire confidence and were hoping that one of the younger guys would beat him out. There is some really good talent on the defense. Gilman, Pride, Okwara, Kareem and Jalen Elliot are all really good players, and don't forget super freshman Kyle Hamilton who had an outstanding fall camp, maybe the best in recent memory for a true freshman. He will play, a lot. No surprises on Offense except where dictated by injury. Lawrence Key's will get his shot with Michael Young out for a month, and while Brock Wright will be the TE, the first guy off the bench will be Tommy Tremble a RS freshman, Cole Kmet will be back by October for sure. We should see some of Braden Lenzy who is a speedster along with Joe Wilkins. We should also see some of Kyren Williams another freshman with a lot of upside and who also had a good fall camp. OL is set and should be good, Josh Lugg and Trevor Rhuland are the backups at the other positions, the rest of the young OL's reportedly aren't ready for the bright lights. Hopefully we won't need them. The worry of course will be at Kicker where Jon Doerer will take over from steady and productive Justin Yoon. Doerer has been scary when he got into games, he's like a golfer who fights a snap hook on the tee box (Tiger Woods) leg strength is not the problem. The punter won't be spectacular with distance but had a steady camp. A lot of teams have added those Australian style kickers and those guys really get the ball down field, I sort of wish we had one of those guys. Other good news is that all the final reports on Phil Jurkovec are really positive. I think most fans hope to see him in live action running the regular offense for a few series against both Louisville and New Mexico.
Hopefully he is doing better than he was is spring game cause if Book goes down it could get ugly fast.
An ISD writer on Kevin Austin... Also, one thing I hadn't noticed about Book that this same writer pointed out. Book is a slow starter, only in the Va.Tech game did he score on the opening drive and he finished 80th in out of all quarterbacks in first half pass efficiency. Hopefully this year that will change and the Irish will be fast starters. Also noted that ND has 46 4 star players and 1 5 star player on the team, Louisville has 10 4 stars. Talent difference is significant, but as always talent has to come ready to play and execute otherwise they get their butts beat.
Always leery about opening on the road, especially at night. Throw in a new coach for the opponent and there is a lot of bad karma. Just win baby, I'm not counting on seeing the second team QB tomorrow.
Gipper, Just when I was starting to feel confident you had to say that!? Actually, we did pretty good on the road last year and we will probably have good crowd representation in Louisville. If we can't win against a team that went 2-10 last year, a new coach and scheme on both sides of the ball, lots of new faces all around, Karma or no Karma we are in real trouble the rest of the season. Karma got USC yesterday and the past couple of seasons. I think we have Irish "Luck" tomorrow. Maybe a rocky start but in the end Luck beats Karma.