After two underwhelming weeks of defensive football for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish under new defensive coordinator Chris Ash, a large portion of the fanbase has been voicing their frustrations. The unit has been a borderline elite group in the last two seasons under the departed Al Golden, so this unforeseen regression has not been sitting well with their supporters.

This past offseason, both the media and fanbase were fed the line from Ash that he wasn’t reinventing the wheel. He constantly talked about building off the foundation that was already there. He was, by his own words, coming in and running “the Notre Dame defense.” 

The biggest frustrations with what we have seen on the field so far are that things don’t look the same. In fact, they look different. It wasn’t a shocker that head coach Marcus Freeman was asked a lot about the defense during media availability on Monday afternoon. 

Here is what Coach Freeman had to say about whose defense Ash is really running. 

“It’s the execution of what they are being asked to do,” Freeman told the media. “The overall output is what you see. It’s not the structure of the defense. It is the execution of what we are asking our guys to do… There are some new players where we have to get them to the point that we can get them to execute what we are asking them to do. I don’t think you are seeing a change in terms of the structure or the tactical aspect of how we are playing defense. What we have to do is evaluate what we are asking our guys to do and then say, okay if they can’t do what we are asking them to do, then do we have to change it or address it in practice in a way that they can execute it exactly what we are asking them to do, at the level we are asking them to do it. That’s what we have to do. 

“Whose defense is it? It is our defense. It’s Notre Dame football, the head coach. It is no one person’s fault. It is ours.” 

What Notre Dame fans needed 

At the end of the day, a head coach won’t go into a public forum like a press conference and bash his staff, even if he knows there is a problem. There is also, however, still a way to navigate the questions accordingly so that the fans don’t think they are being lied to, or that their intelligence is being insulted. 

Freeman did a poor job of both things in his response. 

Do the players need to get a better grasp of expectations? Do they need to be more comfortable in the positions they are playing? Absolutely! That should go without saying. 

When you have veterans like Drayk Bowen, Christian Gray, and Adon Shuler all showing regression, however, then the line that nothing is different doesn’t hold any weight. Things are different. The coverage structure is different, with way more zones and fewer man principles. There’s a lack of aggressiveness on the second level, and not as many auto triggers to get downhill. 

This is not the same defense as the last two years. This is not what the Notre Dame defense has been built on during the last couple of years. The fanbase has been lied to.

At this point, there probably won’t be much of a change for the short term. The schedule gets a lot less challenging, so things will get better, even if fundamentally the issues still exist. There’s a good chance Notre Dame gets some momentum back, and the fanbase tries to convince themselves that everyone just overreacted after two games. 

This is a conversation that should get tucked away for when the USC Trojans are in front of them, or if they do manage to qualify for the college football playoffs at the end of the season. When teams that can exploit those issues get in front of the Irish, there isn’t much confidence things will get a ton better, but time will tell. Then maybe we will get the answer about whose defense they’re running.

Notre Dame Fighting Irish News

Notre Dame football has the supports in place to make an aggressive decision that could solve a major issue for the Fighting Irish 

Notre Dame football has an interesting dilemma on their hands. Should they eye a change now or let things play out a bit more?

Ryan Roberts