Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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www.BLUEANDGOLD.com SEPT. 25, 2017 9 UNDER THE DOME 1 Rating of Notre Dame's incoming 2017 men's lacrosse class by Inside Lacrosse, a first in the history of a program that has appeared in four Final Fours and two NCAA championship games. Head coach Kevin Corrigan's class features 14 players from 10 different states. 4-4 Junior placekicker JUSTIN YOON converted all four of his field goal attempts in the 20-19 loss to Georgia Sept. 9. It marked the first time a Fighting Irish player kicked four field goals in a game since Nov. 1, 2008, when Brandon Walker did so during a 36-33 four-overtime loss to Pitt. However, Walker had five attempts in the game, with the miss occurring in the fourth overtime. The last time a Notre Dame kicker had gone 4 of 4 on field goals in a game prior to Yoon was on Nov. 15, 2003, when D.J. Fitzpat- rick achieved the feat in a 33-14 victory at home versus BYU. 5 Trophy games for Notre Dame in football, most recently the back-to-back outings against Bos- ton College and Michigan State. The winner of the Notre Dame-Boston College game receives the Frank Leahy Bowl (Leahy coached at both schools), while the Megaphone Trophy versus Michigan State is the oldest trophy game for the Irish, begun in 1949. The other three are the Jeweled Shil- lelagh that started in 1952 against USC, the Shillelagh Trophy versus Purdue that began in 1957 and the Legends Tro- phy against Stanford that com- menced in 1989. 8 Ranking of Notre Dame in a recent survey by the NCAA of the schools with the best football and men's basket- b a l l co m b i n at i o n s over the past de- cade (2007 through now). The five criteria included are combined overall winning percentage, postsea- son winning percentage, national titles, Final Four/BCS/ College Football Playoff appearances and consensus All-Americans. The top 10 were: Ohio State, Florida, Wisconsin, Louisville, Michigan State, Oklahoma, Oregon, Notre Dame, West Virginia and Cincin- nati — which current Irish head coach Brian Kelly led to a 12-0 regular season in 2009, as he did Notre Dame in 2012. 78 Snaps on offense that junior running back Josh Adams was in against Georgia Sept. 9, even though the official number of plays run by the Irish was 77 (not including two penalties that brought back the ball). It's not unusual for offensive linemen or a quarterback to take every snap in a game, but the figure for a running back would seem inordinately high. The most snaps on offense Adams had in a game last year was 57 in the loss to Virginia Tech. 367 The difference in rushing yards for Notre Dame from this year's season- opening 49-16 win versus Temple (422) compared to the next week in the 20-19 loss to Georgia (55). It was the greatest disparity in rushing yards from one week to the next by the Fighting Irish since …. well, our research went back to the Ara Parseghian era that be- gan in 1964, and we could not find one. One of the clos- est was in 1965 when the Fighting Irish rushed for 320 yards Nov. 13 versus North Carolina, and then minus-12 — still the school record low — in a 12-3 loss the next week to No. 1 Michigan State. But that 332-yard disparity from one week to the next was still 35 yards short of what happened in the first two contests this year. Also, in 1996, Lou Holtz's final Notre Dame team rushed for 397 yards in an Oct. 12 trouncing of Washington (54-20), but managed only 67 the next week in a 20-17 overtime loss to Air Force, a difference of 330 yards. BY THE NUMBERS ✦ Sponsored by: NotreDameTickets.com PHOTO BY BILL PANZICA