Tag: Trojans

Notre Dame-USC: Burning questions as Irish look to end Trojans CFP dreams

“This is what scares the daylights out of me from a USC perspective…”

Notre Dame-USC might not feature two teams playing for a potential College Football Playoff spot but one is and the other has looked the part of a top-10 team nationally over the last month.  How does Notre Dame go into Los Angeles and play spoiler to the Trojans, who are likely two wins away from their first College Football Playoff appearance?

To find out more about the bigness of this game and where Notre Dame can possibly look to exploit weaknesses in USC, we spoke to Matt Zemek, the managing editor of Trojans Wire.  Here is how Matt answered our questions about Saturday’s showdown.

Marcus Freeman updates Notre Dame injuries ahead of USC showdown

Relatively small list which is good news heading into a huge game

Notre Dame will be in fairly good shape healthwise when they enter the Los Angeles Coliseum in hopes of wrecking USC’s College Football Playoff dreams on Saturday night.  Marcus Freeman held his weekly press conference on Monday and gave the following updates in regard to player health.

“[autotag]Cam Hart[/autotag] will probably be questionable for this one. He had a shoulder injury that he had previously, but he had a shoulder injury. [autotag]Isaiah Foskey[/autotag] is probable. Mitch Evans I would say is probable with the ankle sprain. Probable for [autotag]Jayson Ademilola[/autotag], probable for [autotag]Brandon Joseph[/autotag], still questionable for [autotag]Tobias Merriweather[/autotag]. Still trying to see his recovery of the concussion.” -Marcus Freeman on Nov. 21, 2022

Obviously with USC’s talent at wide receiver the Hart status is a bit concerning.  Getting Joseph back, which it sounds like is going to happen, should go a long way as well after he’s missed the last two contests.

More Notre Dame-USC coverage:

A first glance at USC

ESPN FPI increases Notre Dame’s upset chances

Notre Dame’s statistical leaders for 2022

College Football Playoff ranking projections following Week 12

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Notre Dame football: A first glance at USC

Who is 2022 USC? Some quick notes about what awaits the Irish in Notre Dame’s regular-season finale.

The sleeping giant of the rivalry that is Notre Dame-USC is starting to wake up.  That noise you hear isn’t a loud truck passing by.  It’s actually the giant’s alarm clock going off.  Giant might still be wiping the sleep off its eyes as it gets ready to roll out of bed but the covers are coming off and we’re all about to enter an era that this rivalry hasn’t seen in a sustained matter since the seventies.

Yes, there is a lot of hate and a lot of winning between Michigan and Ohio State as well as Alabama and Auburn.  Army and Navy is a classic you can set your watch to, but all things considered, Notre Dame-USC is the best rivalry in college football when both are ticking.

Related:  Notre Dame-USC: Fast Facts About Epic Rivalry

We’ll get into that more later this week as we have collaborated with Trojans Wire for loads of content that we’ll both be rolling out.  However, with the regular season set to conclude Saturday in southern California, let’s get a very quick first glance at what the Irish have in store for them in the form of USC this weekend.

Notre Dame football: Welcome to Beat SC week

We’ve been asking for Notre Dame-USC to matter more for years. Less than a single season into new coaching regimes, we appear headed there and we couldn’t be more excited. Game on, @trojanswire.

Week 12 of the college football season has come and gone with some close calls and a top-five ranked team getting boat-raced out of the College Football Playoff conversation.

Notre Dame handled its business in a big way Saturday, blowing out Boston College, 44-0.  The 0-2 start to the season feels like a lifetime ago. The Irish have won eight of nine contests since, including a blowout victory over Clemson two weeks ago. It might not have been the route Notre Dame fans would have chosen, but the program has clearly grown in 2022. Now it closes the year with a trip to take on its biggest rival.

USC held on for a victory Saturday night at UCLA and improved to 10-1. Its only loss is by a single point at Utah in October, and it features one of the Heisman Trophy favorites through 12 weeks.

With Tennessee getting destroyed by South Carolina and exiting the playoff conversation, USC was the biggest winner of Week 12. We’ll wait and see what the updated rankings officially say, but if USC wins out it will add wins over both ranked Notre Dame and probably ranked Oregon, which should be enough to get it into the playoff.

Simply put: USC has everything left to play for in 2022.

I’ve spoken to Matt Zemek at Trojans Wire for a number of years about the Notre Dame-USC rivalry. We’ve been in agreement that it’s a sleeping giant that has failed to feature consistent top-15 programs simultaneously for decades.

[autotag]Lincoln Riley[/autotag] has USC still very much alive for the playoffs through 11 regular season games as the Trojans head coach. Meanwhile, [autotag]Marcus Freeman[/autotag]’s squad has put many of the early season struggles behind it and found a way to thrive despite playing with a backup quarterback.

We’ve asked for it for a long time and this really feels like its the start of something special. Two of college football’s proudest programs appear headed for simultaneous sustained success. Playoff appearances and perhaps national championship chances will soon be on the line for both teams when they meet.

This is what we wanted. It’s what we got. And I couldn’t be more excited.  Excited for Saturday but also for this sleeping giant of a rivalry hearing its alarm clock going off.

2022 will not end with a playoff or New Year’s Six bowl game for Notre Dame, but spoiling USC’s dreams would be one hell of an entrance into this new era of one of college football’s best rivalries.

Happy Thanksgiving and happy Beat SC week.

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Oklahoma-Oklahoma State college football’s toughest ticket of Week 12

UCLA has come a long way from those photos we saw of their home games in September.

Rivalry Week ahead of Rivalry Week is probably the best way to describe Week 12 of this college football season.  It doesn’t feature the majority of the biggest rivalry games in college football but there are certainly more than just in-state bragging rights on the line in a few matchups.

Which college games are the hardest to get a ticket to this Saturday?  When we go over this list weekly it usually involves almost entirely blue blood programs.  Whether it’s because the SEC has a couple of their most prideful programs taking on much lesser out-of-conference competition or because of brutal weather across much of the midwest and northeast, the names on this list are quite a bit different this week.

Courtesy of the folks at Vivid Seats, here are the hottest college football tickets for Week 11.

(Notre Dame-Boston College checked in 12th overall)

Notre Dame-USC kickoff time announced

Mark your calendars!

When Notre Dame travels to USC on Thanksgiving weekend all of the lights will be on in the City of Angels.  Game time for the annual rivalry game was announced Monday and the longtime enemies are set to square off in prime time.  Kickoff is set for 7:30 p.m. ET and will air nationally on ABC.

Barring an absolutely insane final two weeks of the college football regular season, USC is the only Pac-12 that remains a possibility for the College Football Playoff.  The Trojans are 9-1 with their only loss coming by one point at Utah in October.

The November 26 contest will be Notre Dame’s first trip to The Coliseum since 2018 as the annual rivalry game was called off in 2020 due to COVID.  What better way to start the [autotag]Marcus Freeman[/autotag]-[autotag]Lincoln Riley[/autotag] rivalry than by having the Irish knock the Trojans out of CFP contention?

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Does Notre Dame have a Tommy Rees problem?

What are your thoughts on Rees?

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

I ask that in regards to Notre Dame’s offense and the disaster it has been two games into the 2022 season.  The news for the squad that is averaging just 15.5 points per game to date didn’t get any better Monday as it was announced starting quarterback [autotag]Tyler Buchner[/autotag] is officially done for the year.

Related: Notre Dame updates depth chart ahead of Cal game

Now comes [autotag]Drew Pyne[/autotag] and the roughly 50% completion rate he’s put up in limited time through his first two years on campus. At least he has [autotag]Tommy Rees[/autotag] to help guide them though, right?

That’s what most Notre Dame fans would have thought this off-season if they were told Pyne would be called upon this early, but what about now?

Our friends at Trojans Wire are experiencing whiplash from how quickly they’ve seen a modern offense come storming into Troy, led by Lincoln Riley and Caleb Williams.  They’ve also now weighed in on a concern for Marcus Freeman’s time at Notre Dame, and related it back to the offensive coordinator and former Washington head coach Jimmy Lake’s demise.

From Trojans Wire (and do yourself a favor and read the entire piece):

Translated: Lake did not seek the best of the best on offense. He is a brilliant defensive tactician, but he dramatically underestimated the value of having a strong, top-tier coordinator on the offensive side of the ball. Head coaches with expertise on one side of the ball have to hire a top-shelf coordinator on the opposite side.

This is the connection between Jimmy Lake and Marcus Freeman.

Look, we know Tommy Rees can recruit, and that Notre Dame’s staff is an excellent recruiting staff. There are lots of things Freeman understands about the business … but at the coordinator level, you can’t do things on the cheap. You need a star play-caller. Tommy Rees could be a quarterback coach, but the keys to the offense needed to be handed to a master chess player.

Next: Back to the chicken-egg question in regards to Rees…

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Where Notre Dame, opponents rank in ESPN’s SP+ Rankings projection for 2022

Who is the most surprising to you?

The ESPN SP+ Rankings have grown in interest over the last few years as advanced analytics become more a part of college football not just for coaching staffs, but for fans as well.

If you’re unaware of what SP+ is, our colleagues at Buckeyes Wire gave this explanation earlier this week.

“A predictive formula Bill Connelly uses and includes returning production, recruiting, recent history and other data that — according to ESPN — are built as a “tempo and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football … These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information that we have been able to gather to date.”

So based off of that information, where does Notre Dame rank nationally and of significant interest, where do Notre Dame’s 2022 opponents rank in the first edition of the SP+ Rankings (subscription required) for this fall?

Notre Dame’s 2022 schedule and game-by-game predictions

It’s early but how do you see Notre Dame’s 2022 season going?

There, I did you a favor by keeping “way too early” out of the headline but the following is certainly a much too early look and prediction at how Notre Dame football will fare in Marcus Freeman’s debut season as head coach.

It’s a tough year for those who say Notre Dame doesn’t play anyone as Ohio State, Clemson, and USC all could very possibly be top 10 teams while a neutral site game against BYU and a trip to North Carolina don’t figure to be gimmes.

So how will Notre Dame fare in 2022?

Here is a much too early look at Notre Dame’s 2022 football season by going game-by-game.

USC lands prized quarterback Caleb Williams

Huge get for a huge rival

Notre Dame plays at USC to close the 2022 regular season and today Lincoln Riley officially found his quarterback at USC both for the future and for the present.

Caleb Williams, a five-star recruit who began starting for Oklahoma midway through the 2021 football season entered the transfer portal shortly after the year.  Early speculation was that he’d wind back up with his former coach at USC and that’s exactly what Williams announced on Tuesday.

Williams completed over 64% of his passes in 2021 while throwing for 1,912 yards, and 21 touchdowns to just four interceptions.  He added an additional 442 rushing yards and six rushing scores on the year.

The writing was on the wall as USC lost a pair of quarterbacks to the transfer portal this off-season so this is hardly a surprise but is certainly newsworthy for being completed.

Buckle up Notre Dame and USC fans, the rivalry between the two is about to get as heated as it was in the seventies.

Related:

Fun facts about epic Notre Dame-USC rivalry

Notre Dame transfer portal tracker (2022)

Notre Dame football coaching staff tracker