Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Murphy’s Law Detailed From Head To Toe By Dan Murphy This spring, in the weight room, the Notre Dame players ran into a potentially locker-room-shattering conundrum. They didn’t like their socks. Some of the Irish players wanted to wear black socks instead of their team issued white ones during workouts. To do so they had to get approval through a player liaison, who got a stamp of approval and saw to it that each locker had a fresh pair of matching black mid-length socks for the first summer weight room session. Irish head coach Brian Kelly has been strict about dress code this year. The entire team wears identical clothes to every workout, practice and team meeting inside the Guglielmino training complex. Yes, apparently, that includes their socks as well. This type of attention to detail is time consuming. It’s a little bit ridiculous. And it might be one of the biggest reasons why Kelly has the Irish headed in the right direction to start 2012. Success in sports is a mosaic. It takes hundreds of seemingly meaningless bits and pieces to fit together in perfect order to make the big picture work. John Wooden knew this. The legendary UCLA basketball coach was a dictator of detail. Former Bruins star Bill Walton loves to tell the story about his first college practice in 1970, 22 years after Wooden got there. The coach sat down with each freshman one by one and taught them how to tie their shoes. He instructed Walton to pull his laces tight at each row of eyelets and to double knot his laces at the top. He started the lecture, of course, with the socks — showing each player how to pull them tight from the ankle and rub wrinkles out of the toe to avoid blisters. “The wrinkle will be sure you get blisters, and those blisters are going to make you lose playing time, and if you’re good enough, your loss of playing time might get the coach fired,” he would say. In games decided by the tips of toes, no wrinkle is too small to be left un-ironed for the consummate head coach. In recent years, college coaches have taken valuable time away from playbooks to teach their players how to shake a hand, or (my personal favorite) how to properly apply soap in the shower. Kelly saw that attitude slipping away from him after back-to-back 8-5 seasons at Notre Dame. He shoved aside some of the big picture speaking engagements and CEO responsibilities of his Notre Dame job to get back to the nittiest and grittiest of details this offseason. A couple of weeks is not a large enough sample size yet to comment on the entire mosaic, but the detail-oriented Irish made a strong statement starting their season the way they did in Dublin. Mistakes were virtually non-existent, especially when compared to the sloppy mess of a game Notre Dame played to start the 2011 season. “Last year, we weren’t focused on the attention to detail,” senior captain Zack Martin said. “We weren’t ready. This year we prepared the right way.” Notre Dame’s players are on board. They understand why they need to all wear the same pair of socks. They can see the long, serpentine dotted line that leads from a trash can tipped over in the locker room to an interception in the red zone or an illegal procedure penalty on a crucial third down. That’s not an easy jump, and it’s one that takes time to navigate. It didn’t exist under Charlie Weis, who wasn’t used to the college game, and it didn’t get enough attention during Kelly’s first two seasons in South Bend. That it is now clicking is almost more valuable than a win-loss record after two weeks of the season. “I think it’s a cumulative effect of everybody pulling together and making sure we do all the little things right,” Kelly said following the season opener. “Our guys have been tremendous. Everything we’ve asked them to do, they’ve done it. It’s getting close to that time when they’re going to start getting paid back.” There is an understated confidence to Kelly’s words. A confidence far less brash than the coach who was not shy about claiming BCS expectations a year ago. They are the words of a prepared man, and victory loves preparation. Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com