Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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of what it's been. Having said that, you've got a lot of guys to develop and bring along. They've got to take advantage of it. This is their oppor- tunity." In its final week of spring ball, Van- Gorder was encouraged with the prog- ress. "We've got a lot of ascending play- ers. Having said that, we've got a lot of work ahead of us," he noted. "They're ascending, but it's got to be a lot better to compete how we have to compete against the teams we play and such — we've got a long road ahead. We've got to keep grinding. Every day is an opportunity to get better. Every day we have to go out with a purpose as a player to work on this to get better at this and have that type of focus." One of the questions consistently asked following November 's de- fensive struggles was whether Van- Gorder's scheme was too complicated for young but talented players such as Morgan, safety Max Redfield and oth- ers to learn. (In fairness, one of the first critiques directed toward a defensive coordinator when his unit is strug- gling is typically that his defense is too complicated.) This spring, head coach Brian Kelly said the players adapted and Notre Dame simplified the scheme a bit. "A little bit of both," the coach noted. "The thing we struggled with was tempo and we worked really hard on that. We've reduced calls and made the communication system easier to get out to our players. We've learned a lot in terms of moving personnel in and out of the game. We got hurt a lot of times on having nickel personnel in the game on third down, and when there were conversions on third down, we had nickel in the game and we're running