Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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The late Hall of Fame baseball legend Ernie Banks was fond of saying, "Let's play two!" Kelly might say the same about both his quarterbacks. "It's fair to say that both of them to- gether can give us some really good bal- ance," Kelly said of Golson as a passer and Zaire as a runner. The issue is whether a two-quarter- back system is practical, or even work- able, when both players admittedly want to be The Man? Urban Meyer made it work at Florida during the run to the 2006 national title. Senior Chris Leak was the passer with 2,942 yards, while freshman Tim Tebow was the change-up in red-zone/short- yardage situations and finished as the team's second-leading rusher with 469 yards and eight touchdowns (he also passed for 358 yards and five scores). However, the dynamics were a little different. Tebow was a freshman that was appreciative of an opportunity to have a role. Zaire will be in his third sea- son at Notre Dame, and it wasn't until his 25th game that he received his first non-mop-up action. As the MVP in the Music City Bowl against a top SEC defense, Zaire flour- ished, although Kelly limited the praise to doing "what we asked him to do." Golson (6-of-11 passing for 90 yards) filled his role well, too, completing three clutch third-and-long situations on three of the five Irish scoring drives — includ- ing 12 yards to tight end Ben Koyack on third-and-10 during the game-winning march. He calmly went through pro- gressions and twice found his check- down options on the final series. This past season, Golson produced the second-highest total offense output in school history with 3,728 yards (3,445 passing and 283 rushing), behind only Brady Quinn's 4,009 in 2005 (3,919 pass- ing and 90 rushing). A quarterback's natural ego will make it extremely diffi- cult to share a position once those types of numbers have been produced. Unfortunately, another one of Gol- son's huge numbers was 22 turnovers — 14 interceptions and eight lost fum- bles — with half of them in November to facilitate a four-game losing streak that resulted in the final 8-5 ledger (al- though not all the turnovers were Gol- son's fault). Kelly finally had to put his foot down with Golson, and the LSU game was the "test run" to see if a two- quarterback system could be functional and productive while putting together separate game plans for them. "We kind of saw a glimpse of what that's going to look like," Kelly said after the LSU game. "I couldn't have done that without starting [Zaire], playing him and getting a feel for the game. I think we can move forward and look at that and how we can construct that." ZAIRE EMERGES There has been a huge learning curve for Zaire, who still has three years of eli- gibility remaining from 2015-17. Among the lessons was the fickle nature of his trade. "It's definitely a tough position be- cause they'll love you one day and want to replace you the next," Zaire said when asked what he has learned the most this past season while apprenticing behind Golson. Zaire acknowledged that by taking only a few reps with the starting unit during the regular season he would "float here and there," but he became invigorated in December once he be-