Charting the Irish offense from Saturday’s game against Washington leads to some interesting results. Namely, the Irish still frequently give away their run/pass intention prior to snapping the ball.

While offensive coordinator Mike Haywood had arguably his best play calling game of the year, the Irish are extremely predictable based on personnel grouping and formation. In other words, Saturday’s contest against the Huskies was more…

Notre Dame owned an edge in nearly every statistical category in their 33-7 win over the Washington Huskies. The Irish offense didn’t punt once, and the defense limited the Huskies to only a few first downs through every meaningful minute of play.

The Irish had nearly a 15 minute edge in time of possession, was perfect scoring in four red zone attempts, only turned the…

Coming off a bye week Notre Dame travels to Seattle to face the win-less Washington Huskies. With the memory of a mistake-ridden loss to North Carolina fresh in the minds of the Irish players, a strong effort in the early going is a necessity. A convincing road win would go a long way to getting the second half of the 2008 season pointed in the…

You Call That A Tendency?

Charting the Irish offense from Saturday’s game against North Carolina leads to a painful—yet obvious—conclusion: Notre Dame offensive coordinator Mike Haywood telegraphs the pass. It is puzzling how the Irish still managed 383 yards through the air, a testament to the talent Notre Dame has on offense.

Disclaimer: The following analysis excludes the first two drives of the game (11…

The clock clicked to zero and the players on the field began to jog into the locker room. It was halftime and Notre Dame was beating up on North Carolina. The score was 17-9 and by that alone, you couldn’t tell that the Irish were playing some of the best football I’d seen all season. The Notre Dame defense held the North Carolina offense to…

Anyone who has attended multiple games at Notre Dame Stadium keeps a personal record of wins and losses while they were there. My mother, for example, has a horrible record as an attendee—Notre Dame has lost every game that she’s attended. Previous to last season, I had a 4-0 record as an attendee; however, the last game I attended was last year’s game against Navy.…

Whenever the Irish saddle up to play the Boilermakers, I am usually looking forward to a game of little excitement. Even though Purdue is a team that likes to dink and dunk the ball down the field, they usually end up playing a vanilla type of game with the Irish. It’s not like when Notre Dame faces USC or Michigan—where you can expect a certain…

On Saturday, I sat with my brother, cursing at the television. I could not understand, for the life of me, why a team who showed so much promise against San Diego State and Michigan, a team that had some unexpected players starting to make game-changing plays, could lose so poorly to Michigan State. It wasn’t that the Irish lost by a big margin, they didn’t,…

In light of last week’s game against San Diego State, I was pretty wary about watching the Irish this Saturday. It’s not that I didn’t think that the Irish would perform badly, but that there was so many unknown aspects about both Notre Dame and Michigan that could make this game a pleasant surprise for Irish fans, or a hellish nightmare. Luckily for Irish fans,…

On Friday night, I couldn’t sleep. As part of my annual tradition, I watched Rudy. I know—in my previous article, I bashed people who watch Rudy and then make predictions on the new football season. Let’s just say I was trying to gear myself up for a new year of football laced with optimism. Plus, I’ve already made my season predictions.

Finally, Saturday morning rolled…