Rockne's Roundtable

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ncirish2002 said...

Ok gents I am not off the Brian Kelly bandwagon by a long shot. Of course we are all disappointed as heck with the way this season turned out, things were looking great at the end of last season. However we are in better shape now than we were a year ago. Sure we still have a QB question, but this time it is an embarrassment of riches (relatively speaking) rather than what happened when Crist was injured.

In that vein let me throw out what I think about the state of the program at present:

Offense: Kelly is a spread guy, has always been a spread guy, and will most likely always be a spread guy. That means you need spread players – from linemen to receivers, to quarterbacks. When he got to South Bend he inherited a grab-bag of pro-style players, though they were very talented. Many have been forced to play semi-out of position, trying to master skills that they have never had to use before in their football careers. Riddick and Crist/Rees come to mind immediately as does the offensive line. This is why we can look so good on occasion, and absolutely like the Bad News Bears the next. Most of the fundamentals of playing football have improved exponentially under this regime, which is why we are winning games that we didn’t under the previous staffs. The innate talent and athleticism has allowed the offense to function, even if on a limited basis, and put us in position to compete if not win. With Hendrix you saw a spread quarterback operating a spread offense and the difference was startling.

Defense: This one is a bit different. The defense has turned it around much faster than the offense. Many think that ol’ Charlie left the cupboard bare, but he really did Diaco a favor in many ways. The whole 3-4, to 4-3 quandary left a number of relatively versatile players on the roster (EJ, KLM, Harrison Smith, etc). Most of these guys could be placed into a 3-4 hybrid defensive scheme and be successful. Of course we see the holes at some positions and how certain players aren’t ideal, but for the most part we have guys that are more than serviceable. The plan to recruit along the defensive front last year and the secondary this year shows that the staff understands the strengths and weaknesses of this team and is more than capable of addressing them. As we move along and get more athleticism at the LB positions and can land decent DB’s we will continue to be more than solid on defense, much more so than what we had come to expect in the Weis and Willingham eras.

Coaching: Kelly has taken a crap-ton of heat for his explosions on the sideline. Of course we have forgotten Ty and his stoicism, or Charlie and the snot-rocket , or even Davie and that dumbfounded look he had on his face. Some coaches are calm, others are emotional, Kelly is the latter. I think it is a combination of emotion, understanding the fine line between winning and losing with this team, and the way that a group of incredibly smart players are able to screw the pooch on the best laid plans. Sure he is over the top sometimes, but so was Holtz (ask the players about the 1989 Fiesta Bowl against WVU if you want to see over the top theatrics), so is Saban. It is not a condemnation of the coach, but a meme that internet fans seize on to explain failures in the game that they do not understand.

Players: I would LOVE to coach these guys! However I do not think some of them would like me coaching them. They seem like a truly great bunch of kids, the kind you’d want coming to your school to read to elementary students, come to the hospital to have fellowship with the ill, etc. First and foremost that is a great thing. But you have a couple of different groups of recruits that were brought in to do different things by different sets of coaches. The expectations, attitudes, demands, and dynamics are different now than they were two years ago. Undoubtedly some have bought in to Kelly. Some have lay down and given up. Others have proceeded from a façade of buying in, yet harboring resentment. This is all to be expected, especially when there is a great upheaval in terms of system, coaching styles, etc. As we get more buy-in and weed out the malcontents I think we will see effort like the 2nd half against Stanford.

Winning: This is a learned skill. Beating a Maryland or Purdue doesn’t take knowing how to win, it only takes showing up and out-athleting them. Learning how to win is a process (Holtz has told us this on many occasions) and this crowd has been so beaten down that a learned helplessness is having to be forcibly rooted out before they can know how to win. Handling success is just as important as handling adversity and in many ways is much harder. The bitter taste of defeat is one thing, but the bitterness of losing to teams you KNOW you were better than (USF, UM) should help the process.

Historicism: Historians use the past to make sense of their present. This is one of the few truths in my profession and one that I cannot find an exception to. Likewise to us fans the past was that romantic era of ND stomping a mud hole in every team’s collective asses. Just as the good old days of history were not exactly so good when studied under an analytical eye, so the old days of ND football weren’t either. Ara lost to some teams that were head scratchers, Devine seemed to lose at the most inopportune times or had to have miraculous comebacks to win, and Holtz’s teams would crap the bed against teams like Stanford or Tennessee. Had the internet been around back then, the fan base would have been howling like today.

We are moving in the right direction as a team. We may not like how the finished product looks but the foundation is being laid down. Stay the course people, we are on the ascent.

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ncirish2002 said...

Ok gents I am not off the Brian Kelly bandwagon by a long shot. Of course we are all disappointed as heck with the way this season turned out, things were looking great at the end of last season. However we are in better shape now than we were a year ago. Sure we still have a QB question, but this time it is an embarrassment of riches (relatively speaking) rather than what happened when Crist was injured.

In that vein let me throw out what I think about the state of the program at present:

Offense: Kelly is a spread guy, has always been a spread guy, and will most likely always be a spread guy. That means you need spread players – from linemen to receivers, to quarterbacks. When he got to South Bend he inherited a grab-bag of pro-style players, though they were very talented. Many have been forced to play semi-out of position, trying to master skills that they have never had to use before in their football careers. Riddick and Crist/Rees come to mind immediately as does the offensive line. This is why we can look so good on occasion, and absolutely like the Bad News Bears the next. Most of the fundamentals of playing football have improved exponentially under this regime, which is why we are winning games that we didn’t under the previous staffs. The innate talent and athleticism has allowed the offense to function, even if on a limited basis, and put us in position to compete if not win. With Hendrix you saw a spread quarterback operating a spread offense and the difference was startling.

Defense: This one is a bit different. The defense has turned it around much faster than the offense. Many think that ol’ Charlie left the cupboard bare, but he really did Diaco a favor in many ways. The whole 3-4, to 4-3 quandary left a number of relatively versatile players on the roster (EJ, KLM, Harrison Smith, etc). Most of these guys could be placed into a 3-4 hybrid defensive scheme and be successful. Of course we see the holes at some positions and how certain players aren’t ideal, but for the most part we have guys that are more than serviceable. The plan to recruit along the defensive front last year and the secondary this year shows that the staff understands the strengths and weaknesses of this team and is more than capable of addressing them. As we move along and get more athleticism at the LB positions and can land decent DB’s we will continue to be more than solid on defense, much more so than what we had come to expect in the Weis and Willingham eras.

Coaching: Kelly has taken a crap-ton of heat for his explosions on the sideline. Of course we have forgotten Ty and his stoicism, or Charlie and the snot-rocket , or even Davie and that dumbfounded look he had on his face. Some coaches are calm, others are emotional, Kelly is the latter. I think it is a combination of emotion, understanding the fine line between winning and losing with this team, and the way that a group of incredibly smart players are able to screw the pooch on the best laid plans. Sure he is over the top sometimes, but so was Holtz (ask the players about the 1989 Fiesta Bowl against WVU if you want to see over the top theatrics), so is Saban. It is not a condemnation of the coach, but a meme that internet fans seize on to explain failures in the game that they do not understand.

Players: I would LOVE to coach these guys! However I do not think some of them would like me coaching them. They seem like a truly great bunch of kids, the kind you’d want coming to your school to read to elementary students, come to the hospital to have fellowship with the ill, etc. First and foremost that is a great thing. But you have a couple of different groups of recruits that were brought in to do different things by different sets of coaches. The expectations, attitudes, demands, and dynamics are different now than they were two years ago. Undoubtedly some have bought in to Kelly. Some have lay down and given up. Others have proceeded from a façade of buying in, yet harboring resentment. This is all to be expected, especially when there is a great upheaval in terms of system, coaching styles, etc. As we get more buy-in and weed out the malcontents I think we will see effort like the 2nd half against Stanford.

Winning: This is a learned skill. Beating a Maryland or Purdue doesn’t take knowing how to win, it only takes showing up and out-athleting them. Learning how to win is a process (Holtz has told us this on many occasions) and this crowd has been so beaten down that a learned helplessness is having to be forcibly rooted out before they can know how to win. Handling success is just as important as handling adversity and in many ways is much harder. The bitter taste of defeat is one thing, but the bitterness of losing to teams you KNOW you were better than (USF, UM) should help the process.

Historicism: Historians use the past to make sense of their present. This is one of the few truths in my profession and one that I cannot find an exception to. Likewise to us fans the past was that romantic era of ND stomping a mud hole in every team’s collective asses. Just as the good old days of history were not exactly so good when studied under an analytical eye, so the old days of ND football weren’t either. Ara lost to some teams that were head scratchers, Devine seemed to lose at the most inopportune times or had to have miraculous comebacks to win, and Holtz’s teams would crap the bed against teams like Stanford or Tennessee. Had the internet been around back then, the fan base would have been howling like today.

We are moving in the right direction as a team. We may not like how the finished product looks but the foundation is being laid down. Stay the course people, we are on the ascent.

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CMC--Chief Engineer for Carolina Recruiting Pipeline and Director of Zone Blocking. As the offensive line goes, so the team goes!

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CITY OF CHAMPYINZ!!!!!!

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ND vs. UCLA - October 2006

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CMC--Chief Engineer for Carolina Recruiting Pipeline and Director of Zone Blocking. As the offensive line goes, so the team goes!