Notre Dame hasn't had many Golden Moments in the past few years, and this year has definitely been up and down. Utah came in as the 14th ranked team, after getting punched in the face by TCU, and Notre Dame just lost to an FCS school with a last drive interception. Utah was at least a two touchdown favorite with its average scoring offense of 44 points and ND's defense is porous at best. Notre Dame needed two wins to get to a bowl game, though it looked like more that 6-6 would be the best they could muster. They had tons of injuries, almost all of their star players, which totaled about 400 yards of offense a game. The death of the young student due to unsafe wind conditions has only added another heavy cloud on Kelly. And of course, it was a raining and dark day over the stadium.
I considered this the game of their season, and they rose to the challenge. ND put on a dominating performance with a 28-3 win over the Utes. They played like the old school Irish, the physical line play, strong running game, and great special teams play. They played like Kelly had been pushing for them to play, and it finally paid off. They looked impressive, they looked like they were finally realizing expectations.
Now I'm not stupid, this was probably more a colossal failure on the part of Utah. They were flat and lifeless, they had no energy. The blowout loss at home to TCU still broke the spirit of the team. You basically had one team playing for its season and one team still holding on to the loss of its biggest game.
I am trying not to read too much into what the win might mean for the rest of the year. They need one more win for bowl eligibility, which seems possible against Army. It would be a nice change of pace over the past couple of seasons if they can finish strong, and not finish falling apart. If they can keep up their new identity, then they could win out the rest of the year and give USC all it can handle.
Fight Irish Fight
No comments:
Post a Comment