Former college quarterback and current analyst Greg McElroy is back in on the Notre Dame Fighting Irish after the Irish beat Louisville 31-24 on Saturday.
A lot of pundits are still not seeing the Irish as a top-10 or playoff team, but McElroy thinks the Irish could be — if they get back to playing to their potential, and if they can do it for a full game.
“The boobirds were out after Week 2, weren’t they?” McElroy said on his podcast. “You go, and you lose to Northern Illinois. They look great against A&M in the fourth quarter of the football game, and then Northern Illinois comes to town, and you get beat up along both lines of scrimmage.”
“Sometimes, you can point to upsets, and you say, ‘All right, well, little flukey, right. (It’s) unlikely that that happens again,'” McElroy said. “Well, that wasn’t the case against Northern Illinois. Northern Illinois just flat-out beat them along both lines of scrimmage.”
That was the bad. Here’s the good.
“You look at it, Riley Leonard, it’s his fifth game as the starting quarterback of the Irish, and this was his first with multiple touchdown passes,” McElroy said. “All right. He hit (Jaden) Greathouse on the one, and then I love the designed screen throwback to (Jeremiyah) Love, which was a big touchdown down the left side. So, there’s an awful lot to like about what we saw from Mike Denbrock.
“I really liked what we saw from Mike Denrock the offensive coordinator, a highly, highly compensated offensive coordinator,” he added. “Bring him up from LSU, and this is the type of performance that you would anticipate. My goodness, they have improved drastically. That was a good defense that they played against. That was a really good defensive line. I think that’s a group that has talent in the back end, and I thought Notre Dame’s offensive performance was rock solid.”
McElroy praised quarterback Riley Leonard’s growth and development. He then went on to speak highly of the defense, especially with the injuries it has been dealing with.
He ended by pointing out that the Irish have been playing well in 15-minute chunks.
“I’d love to see it for 60 minutes because we haven’t yet seen it for 60 minutes from Notre Dame,” McElroy said. “We’ve seen it in really 15-minute increments, whether it’s the fourth quarter against Texas A&M, whether it’s the one quarter of dominance and brilliance against Louisville in the first quarter. I’d love to see it for 60 because if they can do it for 60, they could play with anybody.”
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