Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1547169
BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM OCT. 31, 2026 25 CJ CARR'S DEFINING MOMENT ISN'T THE LOSS, BUT WHAT COMES NEXT The body language said way more than the actual 61-second verbal back- and-forth Notre Dame junior quarter- back CJ Carr had with the media before he was whisked away. Neither will define him. Nor will the least Heisman-like set of statistics in Carr's 19 college starts to date — his unwanted souvenir from a trip to Provo, Utah, and No. 8 BYU's 28-24 upset of the No. 2 Irish. What will actually shape his legacy is what comes next. How he picks up the pieces and tries to reassemble a dream that was never about the Heisman Trophy, but about where he could lead the Irish. At least he knows what that should look like. Carr remembers when former Irish quarterback Riley Leonard was booed back in 2024, a full two weeks after the Irish were upended by massive under- dog Northern Illinois. The jeers actually came during a 25-point home win over Miami (Ohio) in Game 4 of a season that culminated with the Irish playing for a national title in January 2025. Notre Dame head coach Marcus Free- man remembers, too. "If you don't do your job, people are going to boo you," Freeman said at the time. "If you let that affect the way you go out and execute the next play, then you're not the right person for this job or to be our quarterback at Notre Dame. "I hope he handled it the exact way that I would expect him to. 'You hear it? Great. Got that. What do you need to do to refocus to go out the next play and get your job done?'" Leonard did. And Carr, a freshman and Notre Dame's fourth-stringer in 2024, needs to do that now, with the Irish heading into a bye week before returning to action against Navy on Halloween. And then comes Miami Nov. 7, a po- tential showdown with the nation's new No. 1 team and an opportunity for Carr to rewrite the narrative. "Put the work in," Carr said about what his next step is. "Do what we do." Against BYU, though, the results were Carr's worst yet in an Irish uniform, including a career-low 99.8 pass ef- ficiency rating. He threw for 261 yards, completing 27 of 49 passes without a touchdown or interception. Carr came into the game ranked fifth nationally in pass efficiency. The career-low rating didn't capture all the missed opportunities, including Carr's botched attempt to spike the ball just before halftime. It resulted in a fum- ble rather than a chance to salvage at least three points with the Irish trailing by 11. "I don't know," Freeman said when asked about Carr's uncharacteristic mistakes. "It wasn't his preparation. Some of those big plays that we usually hit, we weren't executing on them. We weren't hitting them. "I don't know if it's CJ's fault. I don't know if it's the wide receivers' fault or an accumulation of them both. We weren't hitting on those types of plays with as much success as we've been do- ing. I've got to look at it and see what happened." What's inside Carr matters more. Carr's obsessive attention to detail suggests he'll respond with the same unrelenting resilience that has marked his journey to this point. And his per- spective on life's challenges was shaped long before he arrived at Notre Dame, including the death of his 5-year-old brother Chad from a brain tumor. It's time for Carr to turn an inflection point into an exclamation point. — Eric Hansen NOTRE DAME LEAVES PRECIOUS POINTS OFF THE BOARD That Notre Dame's 28-24 loss to No. 8 BYU ended with the Irish offense failing to reach the end zone provided a fitting ending for a unit that wasted too many BYU GAME NOTES BY ERIC HANSEN AND TYLER JAMES Carr produced a career-low pass efficiency rating of 99.8 against BYU, completing 27 of 49 passes for 261 yards with 0 touchdowns in the 28-24 setback. PHOTO BY CHAD WEAVER