Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1513077
BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM JANUARY 2024 23 the season with 47 tackles, tied for fifth on the team. While he played well the entire season, his three-game, 5-in- terception stretch in October and early November put him on the national radar and on a flight path toward winning the Nagurski Trophy. After Notre Dame's win over USC, in which Watts picked off 2 passes, forced a fumble and returned another fumble for a touchdown, his dominance almost became a running joke. Every time he got his hands on a football, "There's no way it's Watts!" everyone said. To hear Watts tell it, though, he could have done even more. "I feel like I still didn't capitalize on my plays," Watts said. "I had seven picks this year; I could've had 10 or 11." He did enough to lead the nation in interceptions and be named college football's defensive player of the year, as well as Blue & Gold Illustrated's 2023 Notre Dame most valuable player. MOST VALUABLE PLAYER 1. Xavier Watts — Turnovers are so critical. Notre Dame didn't force enough of them last season. Ball dis- ruption and taking the ball away was a massive point of emphasis for the Irish, and no one did it better than Watts. The ball often finds the best ball hawks. While you might look at some of Watts' interceptions and say, "Well, that deflected right to him," much of that is the senior safety constantly put- ting himself in the right position. It wasn't just the turnovers with Watts, either. His speed and tackling instincts on the back end were critical to an elite Irish defense. Quite a few players shined on that de- fense this season, but Watts stood above the rest. 2. Joe Alt — What would Notre Dame's offensive line look like without Alt? Even replacing him with an aver- age left tackle, it doesn't come close to the Joe Moore Award semifinalist unit that it was. Alt finished the season with a 92.2 Pro Football Focus pass-blocking grade and a 91.0 overall grade. He gave up just 5 QB pressures in a whopping 347 op- portunities. Putting it simply, Notre Dame's of- fensive line was the engine behind its offense. When the Irish scored points, it was because its run game and pass pro- tection played at elite levels. That would never have happened without Alt. 3. Audric Estimé — Running back value prevented Estimé from ranking higher, but he was everything Notre Dame could have asked for in a ball car- rier, and then some. He got the ball 210 times, rushing for 1,341 yards and 18 touchdowns, and his season culminated with a 238-yard, 4-score performance against Stanford. Estimé had one of the best seasons by an Irish running back since the turn of the century, and the offense would not have been nearly as explosive without him. MOST IMPROVED 1. Xavier Watts — Watts was also recognized as Blue & Gold Illustrated's second-most improved player from 2021 to 2022, so it wasn't a total surprise to see him make another huge leap. He had this in him, and we suspected that, but he went out there and made himself as important as anyone on the Notre Dame roster. We're talking about a player who did not have any interceptions in his career as recently as Sept. 22 of this year be- fore finishing the regular season as the nation's leader in that category with 7. That's the epitome of improvement. 2. Mitchell Evans — Evans had a Watts-like spike with his own statistics. The junior tight end went into the year with 5 catches for 60 yards and a touch- down in his career. In eight games be- fore tearing his ACL this season, Evans had 29 catches for 422 yards and 1 score. At the end of 12 regular season games, with Evans not playing in four of them, he still led Notre Dame with his 29 catches. His 422 yards ranked second. Evans was the inverse of the Notre Dame offense as a whole. He showed up in the big games. He had 7 catches for 75 yards against Ohio State. He looked like the second coming of Michael Mayer with 6 receptions for 134 yards against Duke. Had Evans been able to finish out the season, he'd have challenged Watts for the No. 1 spot in this category — and that's saying a lot. After switching positions many times, Watts settled in at safety last year and had a breakout season in 2023, leading the nation with 7 interceptions. PHOTO BY CHAD WEAVER