It’s been a couple of years since Notre Dame has had a halftime deficit like the one against Clemson on Saturday. The exact score is 24-9, and there are few signs that the Irish are primed for a comeback.
The recently dominant defense suddenly looks very mortal, and the offense has not done much to inspire other than a few nice runs by Audric Estime that ultimately led to nothing more than field goals. The Irish are lucky that Spencer Shrader has made all three of his field-goal attempts, or [autotag]Sam Hartman[/autotag]’s pick-6 would look a lot worse.
To make matters worse, Chris Tyree muffed a punt, leading to a Tigers field goal. The Irish’s own punt team hasn’t been much better at stopping returns either.
On top of that, the Irish didn’t call a timeout when they had two left, so the Tigers were able to run the clock out on the half despite facing fourth down. [autotag]Marcus Freeman[/autotag] flat-out admitted on ABC that with less than a minute left, they weren’t going to do that. Huh?
Basically, everything that could go wrong in that first half for the Irish did, and their fans are none too pleased as you can see from these tweets: