Where For Art Thou Defense?

Okay, we got terribly spoiled last year with our championship caliber defense. But man, 41 points and 460 yards for Michigan? Ouch. Kelly seemed to be down on the offense after the game but not on the defense. Then on Sunday he was a little more balanced. We can score points, but if we have to score in the 40s to win we will be in big trouble.

Michigan played very well and once again we thrust a Wolverine QB into the national spotlight by letting him run and pass all over the yard. Gardner was 21-33 and averaged 9 yards per pass. Cannot win against a good team like that. We will not really know how good Michigan is until November when they play some good teams, but they sure played good against us.

Let's start with the negatives and end on a high note:

Defense simply could not stop Michigan all night. We seemed to lose every 50/50 play on passes and could not corral Gardner despite throwing every blitz in the book at him. I kept yelling out "can someong make a play on D!" to no avail. The interception in the end zone was one of the most amazing and exciting moments I ever remember BUT it was Gardner's stupidity that caused that one. Tackling was absolutely horrible; let's wrap up boys. The Colonel pointed out to me during the game that Michigan was a lot faster than ND. We saw this in how many times they got to the edge before we did and it hurt on many plays.

Tommy did okay but once again tossed 2 interceptions which both hurt A LOT. One could argue that was 14 points right there. The big difference between him and Gardner was that Gardner was very accurate when hurried, Tommy was not (29-51). We had only 96 yards rushing.

A few things to like:

Kicking game made a big turnaround. Brindza was very solid and we actually had some decent return yardage. The team seemed poised and calm throughout the game despite the atmosphere as I expected. We responded well to adversity and changed momentum a couple times in the game never giving up.

It was a heck of college football game to watch and there will be much lamentation on the "end" of the series in the coming days. We will play them again in the next decade so cool your jets folks. By the way, is Brent Musberger actually getting worse? When he commented on the Michigan band on the sideline while the camera showed our ND logo on the bass drums I almost lost it. The interview with Eminem was one of the weirdest moments ever. Put the guy out to pasture already!

This team can still be very good, let's see how they bounce back against Purdue. Lots of time to get our act together for the season and we all knew this Michigan game was going to be tough one. We got beat, now let's learn and get better.

GO IRISH! BEAT BOILERS!

Godfather