ND needed a lot of breaks to go its way.

It was a bad call and bad calls are part of the game, but it was only one of several things that did not go the Irish's way in the first half. The key things in my mind were (in no particular order):

That overturned replay

Tillery's roughing the passer mistake, which gave them the opportunity to make that circus catch in the endzone just before halftime. Had Tillery laid off the QB, the 1st half probably would have ended with either a hail mary or an unlikely field goal attempt.

Claypool's dropped pass on the opening drive.

We fumbled on each of the first 2 drives (and lost one of them).

Failed to pick up 3 yards on 2 plays when we had 3rd & 3 at the Clemson 34.

Love's injury, and the inability to compensate for it.

Make no mistake, Clemson was the more talented team with a superior coaching staff. ND needed to play mistake free and get some breaks in order for this to be a tight game into the 2nd half, but neither of those things happened. Given the hindsight of the subsequent Clemson-Bama game, if they played the ND-Clemson game 10 times, my hunch is that most of the games would have had Clemson pulling away in the 3rd quarter. In this case Clemson got some breaks and were able to pull away in the 2nd quarter. Whatever.