Crack Backs Atcha
by Bacchus (2020-09-16 20:25:29)

In reply to: Right Kinda Cracks  posted by Kayo


  • Let’s start with a positive before I start bitching. Michael Mayer.

  • ”Baby Gronk”? Mayer is 6-5, 235. What will they call him when he’s all grown up?

  • More good news! We won’t have to come up with a new name for this exchange for at least another four years.

  • Board Ops extending our contract was met with almost as much derision as Kelly’s extension.

  • ND’s faculty members didn’t buy all of their available tickets. I guess more than a few don’t want tickets that can’t be resold. That’s something to remember when we return to merely abnormal times.

  • ND should eliminate the middle man and sell them directly to Clemson fans.

  • Ian Book finished with a good stats line - 19/31, 263 yards, a TD, and an interception; but I’m dismayed by the number of passes he missed because of poor throwing mechanics. That’s the kind of fundamental activity that coaches are supposed to fix.

  • Don’t be silly. Who is Kelly going to blame for this offense if the quarterback’s fundamentals are sound?

  • Dismayed but not surprised. Rees, Golson, Zaire, Kizer, Wimbush, Book... All of them peaked quickly and failed to improve as upperclassmen. Common theme - erratic accuracy because of poor throwing mechanics.

  • Rees, Long, Sanford, Denbrock, Martin, Molnar…All of them OCs/QB coaches who failed to develop all those quarterbacks. Common theme – mediocrities with MAC backgrounds (and destinies). And the least common denominator of it all…Brian “Quarterback Whisperer” Kelly.

  • "What I had said to Ian on the sideline was he has to make some of the easy plays, the layups, if you will," Brian Kelly said after the game. "He missed a screen and he missed an easy drive route and he did some really good things, too.” Maybe that’s the problem… too much telling guys what to do and not enough time teaching how to do it consistently.

  • Or not enough time spent recruiting better guys. Sure, Book can be better than he is, but he shouldn’t be the best that we have.

  • I wonder if Book has been told that he’s allowed to throw the ball out of bounds instead of taking a three yard loss when he’s flushed out of the pocket. Knowing the rule, he wouldn’t take the loss time after time, would he?

  • At one time, Book had a habit of trying to escape pressure by running straight backward out of the pocket, often leading to a massive loss. So an optimist might conclude that when Book scampers out of bounds for a three yard loss, he’s crushing it.

  • NBC finally put someone in the Booth with Tirico who doesn’t piss me off.

  • At last you can quit pining for the days of the Tom Hammond-Mike Mayock dream team.

  • Braden Lenzy’s number choice was a harbinger.

  • Let’s hope, given the flashes we saw from Chris Tyree, that his number choice was a harbinger as well.

  • Nebraska gets the first Pinkel Award of 2020 for playing nobody in the opener… just like it has since 2015.

  • 23rd-ranked Iowa State wishes it could have won a Pinkel this week.

  • I saw this week’s Hardin Award nominee (citing a nominally true but worthless statistic) as I channel surfed while waiting for the NFL opener to get to the football part of football. Stopping at the WNBA game for a minute to see how the ND women were doing, I heard the game announcers heaping praise on Crystal Dangerfield for having the sixth best rookie scoring average in the last ten seasons. Sixth. Out of ten.

  • That’s cheating. Aren’t all WNBA statistics meaningless? My nomination goes to Florida States’ Senior Associate Director for Football Communications, Derek Satterfield. The Noles lost to Georgia Tech in a punchless 16-13 effort. FSU’s first three postgame notes are devoted to celebrating three blocked kicks---two field goals and a PAT. In other words, “We got nothin’, but hey, it could have been worse!”

  • The stubble beard almost makes Tommy Rees look like a grown-up.

  • It’s less impressive when you consider that he started growing it when he was a senior at ND.

  • Jack Swarbrick has done many puff interviews since he became Notre Dame’s athletics director, but Saturday’s sit-down at halftime is the new puffery gold standard.

  • Good thing for the social distancing protocols, or the puffery might have wound up on a gay porn website.

  • Interesting stat: The crowd was the third-smallest to watch a game in Notre Dame Stadium since it was built in 1930. Only the fourth quarters of the 2003 USC and Florida State had fewer fans in the stadium.

  • It was curious to see the students dispersed around the stadium. One of my old roommates has a freshman at ND this year. He forwarded a picture of the view from his son’s seats. I told him that he can think of it as a preview of the football ticket lottery results when he becomes a young alumnus: endzone seats for the Duke game.

  • Will the fans start chanting, “ACC! ACC! ACC!” if the Irish are leading as the fourth quarter clock winds down next week?

  • Only slightly less humiliating than the “Fire Kelly!” chants that will rain down if the Irish are behind.

  • Kayo

  • Bacchus




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