Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM OCT. 14, 2023 31 N otre Dame is synonymous with gold. Golden Dome. Golden helmets. No athletics program in the country is more associ- ated with the grand color more than Notre Dame. I mean, have you seen what Louisiana State University qualifies as "gold" in its official team color scheme? It's laughable. That's yellow, Bayou Brian and anyone else who needs to hear it. That ain't gold. Also laughable: Notre Dame's offense in the last two weeks, three if you include spurts against Ohio State that were tough on the eyes. At least the Fighting Irish are consistent even when it comes to their shaky, struggling, stumbling offense. It's still been gold. Fool's gold. We've seen enough to know Notre Dame is not the team that scored 40- plus points in each of its first four games. We rightfully take much more away from who a team is when it's up against quality opponents, and in the last three games — all against unde- feated, ranked foes — Notre Dame has averaged 18.3 points per matchup. That sounds about right. This is a team that'd be lucky to score three touchdowns in a game — any game, from here on out. The Irish haven't done that since Sept. 16 versus Central Michigan. Maybe it's bound to happen against a USC defense that is as porous as any in the Power Five, but good luck getting in a shootout with the Trojans. Notre Dame doesn't want to get into a high-scoring affair with anybody right now, let alone the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. Is it that graduate student Sam Hartman is not the quarterback we all seemed to anoint him as for beating up on Navy, Tennessee State and the aforementioned Chippewas? Or is it that these past three opponents Notre Dame has faced — all under the lights with national audiences by the millions watching from home — were just that much better than those other three? This is what doesn't help Notre Dame's case; Georgia Tech went for 488 total yards against Louisville. Bos- ton College went for 427. Even Indi- ana gained 357 on the Cardinals. Notre Dame mustered 298, and 75 of those came in the final three minutes of the ballgame when Notre Dame scored a garbage time touchdown that ultimately didn't affect the outcome one bit. Notre Dame head coach Marcus Free- man was right to say it's not all on Hart- man. The offensive line is regressing. Junior running back Audric Estimé went from looking like one of the best tail- backs in the country to completely aver- age at best. Scholarship wide receivers were targeted 19 times against Louis- ville. They caught 9 of those targets for 87 yards. Parker shouldn't be free of any criti- cism either. He has looked very much like someone who is calling all the shots for an offense at this level for the first time. The whole point of getting Hartman out of the transfer portal was to trans- form the Notre Dame offense into one that boasts experience at the most im- portant position and to elevate the ceil- ing for the group to one that wasn't ever going to be reached by 10-game starter Drew Pyne in 2022. Yet here's the thing; did Pyne ever play as poor of a game last year as the one Hartman played versus Louisville? That's a seri- ous question. There were games when he wasn't great, and he was just downright bad versus Stanford. But he never threw 3 interceptions in one game. Heck, he never threw 2 in one game. It's never been about entirely avoiding interceptions with Hartman in his six-year college career. You live with some of them as long as they come with a fair share of downfield heaves. Those aren't hitting for the Irish at the moment. It feels like Hartman has ju- nior tight end Mitchell Evans and nobody else. Sound familiar? Pyne had Michael Mayer and nobody else. Both instances are partly the fault of the quarterback, undoubtedly. But severe deficiencies around the signal-callers play into it, too. Notre Dame has more of them in 2023 than anyone might have realized. For those who are still clinging to what this group looked like in Ireland and then in the first three weekends in September, contextualize this; we're one more bad week from the Notre Dame offense away from going into the bye with as many downright stinkers as there were offensive outbursts. The latter are beginning to feel like a distant memory, too. The Notre Dame offense just isn't good at the moment. There is time to turn it around as quickly as it all went south, but it won't mean as much after the fall cost the Irish two games and subsequently a chance at a championship. Three bad weeks of moving the foot- ball were enough to derail the whole thing. ✦ GOLDEN GAMUT TYLER HORKA Tyler Horka has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since July 2021. He can be reached at thorka@blueandgold.com Sam Hartman and the Irish offense have averaged only 18.3 points per game in their last three outings; the Irish have a 1-2 record in that span. PHOTO BY CHAD WEAVER Notre Dame Looks Lost Offensively