SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Three times in the last seven seasons, Notre Dame has come within a play, literally one play, of beating one of the country’s best teams. Two of those would have been fluke plays. Saturday needed nearly any play.
If Brandon Wimbush had gotten off a pass before he was blitzed from behind in 2017, maybe the Irish would have beaten eventual national runner-up Georgia. If Chase Claypool had been able to come down with Ian Book’s heave in 2019, Notre Dame would have been in the red zone with a chance to best the Bulldogs at their home.
And now, if the Irish (4-1) had lined up a fourth defensive lineman late Saturday night, they would have most likely beaten Ohio State instead of suffering the last-second 17-14 loss, beaten a program that has been in three of the last four Playoffs and arguably came a missed field goal away from winning last year’s national championship. Instead, the loss will be remembered more acutely than either of those narrow defeats to what is now the best program in the country.
“Great teams find a way to execute when it matters the most,” Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman said Monday. “That’s what great teams do, we didn’t. We needed to find a way to execute at the end of the game, and we didn’t. Ohio State did.”
That failure to execute goes well beyond playing the last two snaps with only 10 defenders, even if that will be how this Irish loss is most remembered. That braoder failure to execute also shows just how close Notre Dame is to being one of the best programs in the country, an argument not meant to gloss up Saturday into a “moral victory,” but instead intending to frame the rest of the season.
There was no moral victory this weekend. The Irish gave away a top-10 victory. But that, in itself, was a sign of a step forward. In those losses to Georgia, Notre Dame would have needed near-miracles to pull off the victories. Wimbush was still 40 yards from field-goal range with only 90 seconds left when Davin Bellamy knocked the ball loose. Book’s hope for Claypool came on a fourth-and-eight with 48 seconds left, and Claypool would not have come down in the end zone.
But on Saturday, the Irish needed one stop. They needed Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord’s dart for Emeka Egbuka on 3rd-and-19 to have an ounce less oomph, allowing either senior safety Ramon Henderson or fifth-year cornerback Cam Hart to close in before the pass reached Egbuka, a tight window McCord barely threaded. They needed sixth-year safety DJ Brown to make an interception that will haunt him the rest of his life. They needed him to haul in a second-quarter interception in the end zone — a far tougher grab than the one that will be remembered — on a drive that then ended with a Buckeyes field goal on the next play.
Any of those or a good number of others.
“This game didn’t come down to just one play,” Freeman said. “There’s multiple plays all over the game that we have to learn from, we have to be better.”
Freeman mentioned fourth-down conversions, an emphasis for the Irish as Freeman leans into the simple math of 4th-and-1 in plus-territory being nearly-always a GO situation, not a moment to kick a field goal.
“We have to convert, because we’re going to continue to go for those,” Freeman said. “The percentages of success, that is a mindset that I have, we have to be able to execute.”
And on fourth downs longer than a yard, missed field goals prove costly.
"We have to finish those drives with points."
— Douglas Farmer (@D_Farmer) September 25, 2023
Marcus Freeman puts words to the numbers. https://t.co/GE2BgauwVM
While Notre Dame hung with Georgia in both 2017 and 2019, it was never in a position to win. It was, at best, in a position to hope to win. This weekend, the Irish were in a position to win.
They controlled four of the seven total drives in the first half. Outside of Ohio State’s game-winning drive and running back TreVeyon Henderson’s 61-yard touchdown run, the Buckeyes were held to 240 total yards on 49 plays, an average of 4.9 yards per play.
Notre Dame’s defense effectively stopped one of the country’s best offenses in its tracks. A laugh can be had at adding an “11-man” disclaimer to that, but the forward-looking truth revealed does not change: The Irish defense can win any remaining game this season.
That was an unknown entering this weekend. Quarterback Sam Hartman had exuded enough calm through four games to be trusted in any moment this season, and he reinforced that Saturday. Throwing for 175 yards and one touchdown on a 68 percent completion rate may seem meager, but Hartman excelled in taking what Ohio State offered him. He did not put the ball in jeopardy as McCord repeatedly did. Comedy and narrative only lost when the Buckeyes did not make more of tight end Cade Stover’s helmet catch — a pass fluttered by JD Bertrand’s hit of McCord and one that neither Hart nor Irish senior safety Xavier Watts could quite get a clean hand on, allowing for the oblong ball to bounce off Stover’s head and into his hands.
Ohio State punted on that drive; Notre Dame then drove 96 yards for Hartman’s touchdown pass to freshman receiver Rico Flores. No grand “if” qualifier can be attached to the ball bouncing off Stover’s helmet into his own hands without him ever seeing it.
But that was the kind of game the Buckeyes enjoyed. Brown missed two interceptions. A third possible Irish pick caromed off a helmet into its target’s hands. These are the moments that make football great, an oblong ball rendering all the offseason preparation secondary.
But Notre Dame could have elevated the effects of that preparation with one more play, be it a fourth-down conversion, a made field goal, an interception or a goal-line stop.
“We have to learn from the critical mistakes we made in that game as a football program, and use it to help us improve as we move forward,” Freeman said. “We made too many mistakes that ended up costing us a victory versus a great opponent like Ohio State.
“They were a great team. We had chances to win that game.”
The 2017 and 2019 Irish did not have genuine chances to win those games against the country’s best. The 2023 Irish did. That is a reflection of a more talented roster, if nothing else.
More pertinently, it bodes well for the next seven games, beginning with No. 17 Duke on Saturday (7:30 ET on ABC).
“We have to game plan the opponent, but this is about us playing at the potential that we truly have,” Freeman said. “That is my mindset. I was angry [Sunday] because we didn’t do that on Saturday.”
Scenario A: A 10-man defensive play.
— Douglas Farmer (@D_Farmer) September 25, 2023
Scenario B: A ~300-pound DT runs more than 30 yards in three seconds or else it's a 10-man defensive play AND another 11-man play from six inches closer.
Scenario C: The pilot who landed at Teterboro had 17 practice attempts.
