If you have ever officiated football or basketball, you have been taught this basic principle: Look away from the ball — you have to see the action transpiring elsewhere on the playing surface.
This need to look away from the ball also applies to team-sport analysis, and in football, that means looking beyond the quarterback position, essential though it is.
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Assessing Notre Dame football in 2014 can so easily be reduced to an assessment of Everett Golson, the quarterback who missed the 2013 season due to internal discipline (rightly) handed down by the program, and who was physically fresh last autumn. The lack of (on-field) punishment Golson received from opposing defensive linemen, combined with the ability to study the game for a year and see the gridiron chessboard for what it was, suggested that the quarterback was going to turn in a huge season and make the Fighting Irish a national title contender.
On the morning of November 8, 2014, Notre Dame found itself right in the heart of the title hunt. Moreover, the Irish would have been in an even more commanding position had a pick play not been called at the end of a brilliant performance from Golson at Florida State, the school for which he’ll now play quarterback in 2015.
Yet, when a season-defining clash at Arizona State unfolded on a warm November afternoon, Golson wobbled and wavered. He wasn’t responsible for the final turnover of the game, but he was certainly guilty of neglecting ball security on several prior occasions against the Sun Devils:
When Golson struggled again a few weeks later in a blowout loss to USC in Los Angeles, completing just 7 of 18 passes for 75 yards and an interception, it became extremely difficult to view Golson’s 12-game season as anything other than a disappointment. Again, it remains easy to assess Notre Dame’s 2014 season solely through the prism of Golson.
Yet, this is where things get a little complicated.
In the first five games of the 2014 season, Notre Dame’s defense was rock-solid. The Irish never gave up more than 17 points in a single contest. The defense stood on its head to keep the team close against Stanford, setting up the Irish’s second straight last-moment victory in South Bend against the Cardinal. (We all remember the 2012 denouement in Notre Dame Stadium, of course.)
Golson was hardly a transformed uber-quarterback in those games, but with the defense doing its job, Golson was doing what needed to be done, which is an apt summation of his 2012 season. Golson was not an imposing or overwhelmingly efficient quarterback for the national runner-up that season, but he made plays whenever the moment demanded them, never more so than in the impressive fourth-quarter curb-stomping of Oklahoma in Norman.
Golson was unlucky in the Florida State game, simply because one of his receivers made contact when he didn’t absolutely have to. (You can debate the call, but you can’t debate that without contact, the chance for the official to make a call would have evaporated.) Then, however, Golson watched something else happen: Linebacker Joe Schmidt — an anchor-level player on a defense that was already beginning to be thinned out by injuries — was lost for the season with an ankle injury.
The back end of Notre Dame’s season turned into a series of video-game scores. The Irish allowed 39 points to Navy, 55 to Arizona State (though some were defensive scores by the Sun Devils), 43 to Northwestern at home (in overtime, sure, but still… Northwestern!), 31 to Louisville’s backup quarterbacks at home, and then 49 to USC. Even if Golson had been much better in some of those games, the outcomes might not have changed.
What might have seemed, on the surface, to be a season sabotaged by bad quarterbacking would have felt very different if Notre Dame’s defense had remained whole. More to the point, if Golson had been able to take the field in the back end of the 2014 season (November, basically) with an intact, airtight defense such as the one he enjoyed in the first five games of the campaign, would we have seen him press and commit the turnovers he ultimately coughed up?
Was Golson trying too hard to compensate for the shorthanded defense he knew he had to live with?
If you looked away from the ball, and all those late-season turnovers, you saw a Notre Dame season that deteriorated largely because of injuries on defense, and that most brutal of realities for any football team: attrition.
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As your focus turns to 2015, then, simply consider that while Malik Zaire is obviously a centerpiece player, someone who must give coach Brian Kelly a solid foundation of performance and quality over the course of 12 games, the Irish need their defense to take pressure off Zaire’s shoulders. This effort has already taken an attritional hit: Jarron Jones, a big, run-stuffing defensive lineman in the middle of the Irish’s front, is out for the season with an injury suffered late last week. Already, a seed has been planted in Zaire’s mind: “I might have to do a little more this season.”
The 2015 season already feels a little more like the 2014 season, even before it has begun.
Looking away from the ball in college football would tell you this.
