A season in review.When Notre Dame hired Brian Kelly last December to wake up the echoes, it was going in a specific kind of echo: Kelly's offense at Cincinnati in 2009 was the best in the Big East in passing, total and scoring offense, and ran the table despite rolling the league's worst total defense; the Bearcats also won 10 games with a top-20 offense and mediocre D in 2007, Kelly's first season in Cincy after a three-year stint at Central Michigan, which had led the MAC in total and scoring offense en route to the conference championship under Kelly in 2006. You can trace the thread to his Division II days at Grand Valley State: Where Kelly goes, fireworks follow.
But maybe it was no surprise that his first offense at Notre Dame looked less like the efficient, up-tempo assault Irish fans imagined before the season than it looked like what it really was: A unit in transition under a new coach and a new quarterback after losing the most prolific pass-catch combo in school history to the first two rounds of the draft. ND came in four points and 72 yards per game below its 2009 averages and ranked in the bottom half of the country on both counts. Instead, the Irish lived and died by coordinator Bob Diaco's defense, which held opponents below 21 points in all seven wins and yielded a mere 39 over the four-game November/December winning streak that saved the season from total collapse.
That streak – including validating wins over Utah, USC and Miami – was the first time all season either side of the ball particularly stood out against anyone worth standing out against. Prior to November, the defense had held Purdue to 12 points in the opener and Boston College to 13 on Oct. 2, but the Boilermakers and Eagles both went on to finish as the worst offenses in the Big Ten and ACC, respectively. The Irish offense rang up 535 yards in the last-second loss to Michigan in September and 44 points against Western Michigan a month later, but the Wolverine defense wound up being abused on a weekly basis, and Western Michigan is, well, Western Michigan.
Aside from a total offensive flop against Stanford on Sept. 25, the Irish were consistently mediocre in all respects, and only the defense raised its game down the stretch against respectable opposition: With true freshman Tommy Rees playing in place of Crist, the offense averaged 27 points on 330 total yards over the last four, barely above the season average in the former case and significantly below it in the latter.
On the heels of the eye-opening, 33-17 Sun Bowl rout over Miami, though, the good vibes carrying the Irish into Kelly's second season are clearly being emitted by the offense. Almost half of the defensive starters in El Paso were playing their last college game, but the offense gets back nine Sun Bowl starters in the fall, including Rees, three offensive linemen and receiver Michael Floyd, source of the most stunning draft snub this side of Andrew Luck, who'll push for his place among a crowded field of preseason All-Americans – and not including Crist, who's likely to regain his starting job as a senior, or running back Cierre Wood, who wound up leading the team in rushing despite spending the first half of the season as a virtual nonentity. This from an outfit that was justifiably left for dead at the end of October.
Instead, it rallied from back-to-back humiliations at the hands of Navy and Tulsa and Crist's injury to earn ND's first win over a ranked team since 2006 against Utah, then to snap an eight-game skid against USC with a rain-soaked, fourth quarter comeback in the L.A. Coliseum, and then to trounce a fellow traveler in underachievement in the bowl game. Given the circumstances and the alternatives – and the Irish are more than accustomed to the alternative, having stumbled through eight losses in nine games in back-to-back November collapses under Charlie Weis in 2008-09 – that's about as good an end to a roller coaster debut as Kelly could ask for. With Crist and Floyd back for one more go-round in the fall, it's also just a start.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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