Have you become as annoyed as I have with Notre Dame
Football? I am a huge fan of Notre Dame and will always love the Irish,
but I am very frustrated with the loss to North carolina. They lost for
the same reason they tried to blow the game against Stanford. Here is
my evaluation of the games.
The first thing that went wrong
started against Stanford when Notre Dame had a 3 touchdown lead. This
was in the third quarter and instead of putting up a couple more
touchdowns and closing the game out they decided to become a shell of
an offense and be conservative. They also became conservative on
Defense allowing Stanford to come back and only lose by a touchdown.
Instead
they should have kept being aggressive and scoring points. One more
touchdown would have closed it out for good. Also, it did not help that
a highly talented high school kicker recruited by Notre Dame missed two
field goals in the game and was 1 for 7 at the end of the game.
Now
against North Carolina it was a lot of the same, but still a bit
different. Clausen made a huge mistake, but the coach should have seen
that this would happen and called a different play. Notre Dame was up
17 to 9 at the beginning of the second half and got the ball back. This
is when Clausen threw an interception that was ran back for a touchdown.
This
happened on a little out route that had almost been jumped a couple
times in the first half. It was time to use the old pump fake and send
the guy deep for the dagger in the throat. If they would have done this
even if it ended up as a deep interception the score would have been
the same. If they complete it, then it is probably a touchdown and
Notre Dame can start to pull away.
On top of that they defense
got conservative with the lead again and gave up points. They stopped
blitzing and started giving shorter pass plays so the North Carolina
offense could walk right down the field. Weis needs to start putting up
points like crazy and getting his team to play a complete game. If they
can do this, then the Notre Dame football team will beat teams like
North Carolina by four touchdowns.