Injured Irish S Tranquill out for season

Isaac Rochell couldn’t remember when his body ached so much.

Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly is anxious about the number of season-ending injuries hitting the sixth-ranked Fighting Irish. Switzer’s 168 punt-return yards broke a UNC single-game game record that had stood since 1951.

Notre Dame running back C.J. Prosise ran for 203 yards against Georgia Tech, 91 of them on this carry in the fourth quarter. Rushing the ball 47 times, the Yellow Jackets totaled just 216 yards, which was less than half of what they averaged in the first two games of the season.

The goal is to get the safety moving the wrong way to get him out of the play. We needed to mix it up. “I don’t know if we could play any worse”. He also showed a great deal of poise against an aggressive Georgia Tech defense. But the speedster wasn’t done, as with 7 minutes left in the game, he ran it 98 yards for the touchdown to extend the Irish lead to 30-7. He attained a ideal 4.0 grade point average this summer in one of the more challenging areas of study (mechanical engineering) at one of the more challenging universities in the nation, all the while preparing for a strong bounce-back season. A lot can change in three weeks, so Clemson fans ought to keep an eye on this.

Georgia Tech quarterback Justin Thomas led a 79-yard drive in response and made it 30-15 with 48 seconds left to play.

If Alabama coach Nick Saban had his way, the 5-foot-11, 189-pound redshirt junior would be playing defensive back for the Crimson Tide. “We don’t want to lose anybody, but guys got to step up and make plays, next in line”. This pulled one of the Irish linebackers outside, but the other linebackers did not shift to compensate. He attacked it. “He’s a nut”, Kelly said last spring of Tranquill’s effort to get back onto the field.

“They will probably have a better idea how to play us than Notre Dame did”, tackle Bryan Chamberlain said. But what has Whipple done to turn things around, and even at 0-2, does it feel like this program is turning a corner?

From analyst Bob Elliott’s offseason research, to second-year defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder’s implementing that info into a game plan, to his SWAG team, which took pride in simulating Georgia Tech’s offense in practice to prep the No. 1 Irish defense. It will be important that the Yellow Jackets learn from the loss against Notre Dame and apply it towards this week and the rest of the season.

As he jumped up to celebrate, he appeared to seriously injure his right knee.

“A lot of that was predicated on his ability to tackle with his hand”, Kelly said of Redfield. “We’ll get an MRI here”.

That kind of history may be why Kelly said he doesn’t go in to the UMass game thinking about trying different things or focusing on getting freshman quarterback Brandon Wimbush some snaps. The manual exam was not a good one. But we’ll get an MRI [Sunday] morning and then we’ll have definitive results.

Conventional wisdom still has the Irish splintering apart at some point, which means that we may have stumbled on the rarest, most grating college football species: a genuinely underrated Notre Dame team.

“Qua is out for a while”, Johnson said.

It was the first start of the season for Tranquill, who started three games last season before injuring a knee.

UMass is still looking for their first win of the season.

Safety Jamal Golden, who lined up on the hashmark at the Tech 35 on Fuller and Smith’s east (and wide) side of the field, was about 11 yards from the line of scrimmage. His pass protection remains a work-in-progress, but he had a very nice blitz pickup on Chris Brown’s second quarter 3rd-and-9 conversion.

Prosise finished with 198 yards and three touchdowns and Will Fuller caught a 46-yard pass from DeShone Kizer for a TD.

Asked how he’ll go about getting his players ready for the experience of playing under the watchful gaze of Touchdown Jesus, Whipple said “I tell them we’re not going to a fair”. I’m not entirely sure what the offensive guard is doing.

“About anything you could do, we tried”, Johnson said. “He can’t win the game by himself”. That was the good part of the play. “I think that’s what is for me most revealing”.