(The Rock Report | Notre Dame Football) – Notre Dame Football enters the 2011 season with one its most talented (from a recruited standpoint) and mature teams since the Lou Holtz era. The projected starters, on average, have had 3.5 years to grow physically and mentally, are now in their second year of a new system without a staff change-over and have an average star ranking of 3.97 (more fuel to the star theory.)

Maturity

Teams that surprise onlookers, like Stanford’s team last year or Boston College’s season a few years back, are usually laden with upperclassmen that needed time to grow physically and mentally.  Kids have so much maturing to do when they get to college that they usually don’t hit their full potential until their Junior years (ball park analysis from a few years back shows that most potential was realized during their junior years, when 4-stars started playing like 4-stars.) Listening to players like Cierre Wood and their coaches, you can hear both sides talking about how they are now focused on the small things that lead to big dividends (like the right read of a hole.)  All things equal, I’ll take teams full of seasoned players like Stanford last year, over talented, but young teams like Florida and Texas last year.  If you look up and down ND’s roster this year, it’s very hard to find the term, “sophomore”.  A good example of physical maturity is  Ethan Johnson who finished the 2009 season at 265 pounds, but finished the 2010 season 30 pounds heavier (also due to good weight training and the training table.)  Notre Dame’s offensive and defensive lines will both average well over 300 pounds (and are in shape).  I don’t remember that ever being the case at “Notra” Dame.

*Thanks to JR for the data.

Depth

Three things stood out to me in terms of depth and reading about the accounts of the fall practice:

1. We have a third string OL full of scholarship players who were recruited for that position.
2. We have a third string DL full of scholarship players who were recruited for that position.
3. Running back is the biggest depth concern on the team.

Our defensive and offensive lines were “woefully” under-recruited over the Weis and Willingham eras. So to read that a line three deep is full of scholarship players who were actually recruited to play the position  (and not moved out of necessity) while a seemingly small point, warms the cockles of my line control heart.  As Lou said (bad paraphrase) “you can tell how good the team is going to be by how good the offensive line looks.”  This also points out a Holtz weakness; very uneven defensive performance.  On the third point, if your biggest concern is a position where the top two starters were both top 100 recruits, top 10 running back recruits and have both had three years to mature.  Gray was Rivals #4 back who ran a laser timed 4.44 at the Nike Camp and a laser timed 4.37 at the Michigan camp.  Wood was an all-everything back. Both were behind Armando Allen and received relatively few reps compared to Allen.   While not perfect or enviable, if that’s your worst position on the field, and it has two  upper-class highly recruited players on the two-deep, life isn’t that bad.  Now add George Atkinson to the mix who was a highly productive, highly recruited running back recruit with 10.59 speed and has been impressive in practice and Cam McDaniel who strikes me as a very sound player and the biggest concern on the field needs to evaluated within context.  Most teams would love to have this problem and this is Notre Dame’s biggest worry?

Talent

Not much to say here, except that the “recruited talent” is abundant.  Across the starting lines, Notre Dame’s starters average a star rating of 3.975.   Now you can argue over whether it’s been over-rated or under-utilized, but for the most part I’ve felt that analysts have under-rated Notre Dame after 15 years of losing.  3-star players like Zach Martin and Tyler Eifert are among the best players on the team.

Tenure

Notre Dame actually made it through an entire season without changing the staff over. As I wrote in “On the Job Training” in 2008, Weis lacked steadiness, was constantly changing direction and was in danger of losing to Syracuse and Navy, which unfortunately turned out to be true.  Kelly has stuck to his plan in the face of withering criticism, kept on his message and kept his staff focused.  As noted early on, it’s not by happen stance.  Kelly selected his staff to be able to stay on point and on message.  Where a top “name” defensive coordinator might have made fans feel better, Kelly’s philosophy is more about consistency ( see Kelly Coaching the Coaches ).  I clearly wasn’t a fan of two inexperienced coordinators, but Kelly made a trade-off that could pay dividends in 2011 or could highlight a philosophical problem.   That the entire staff returns to teach the same message a second year in a row, is a seldom thought about advantage. As noted in “Fixing Notre Dame Football” Kelly and Swarbrick have moved aggressively to fix long-standing issues with the program. Part II will focus on position analysis.