Quotes and notes: Key takeaways from Notre Dame vs. North Carolina

Notre Dame heads into its bye week with a 2-2 record after a 45-32 victory over North Carolina. Here is what Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman, Irish quarterback Drew Pyne and North Carolina head coach Mack Brown said about the game with clarification notes from BlueandGold.com.

Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman

Freeman quote: “It was a challenge to our offense to be able to run the ball. It was a challenge for our defense to stop the run. The lowest amount they had offensively through the first three games was 183 rushing yards. To hold that offense to 66 rushing yards was a great accomplishment by our defense. Coach [Al] Golden and coach [Tommy] Rees did an unbelievable job in preparing this group. I’m really happy with where this team is progressing. That’s what I just told them in the locker room.”

BlueandGold.com note: He’s right. The game was won in the trenches. The Notre Dame offensive line got supreme push just about every time the Irish ran. North Carolina had no room to run, meanwhile. It was exactly how the Irish drew it up.

Freeman quote: “We understood the quarterback could run. We had to keep the contain. The other part of that is you can’t ply spy. That’s not going to be what affects a quarterback like that. You have to be aggressive but understand you have to stay in your rush lanes. It was good to see the adjustment from our defensive line. Like I said on the sidelines to them, I don’t want you to play cautious. But I want you to be aware that we can’t just rush past the quarterback because he’ll step up and run. It was good to see that.”

BlueandGold.com note: After running for 33 yards on North Carolina’s first drive, Tar Heels QB Drake Maye finished with 36 rushing yards on 13 carries. The Irish stiffened up in an area that nearly cost them a week prior against Cal.

Freeman quote: “It’s targeting. You can argue all you want but as I told JD [Bertrand] on the field, it’s our job to learn from that situation. It’s an entire game he’s missed now. He missed the first half of this game, and he’s going to miss the first half of the next game. We have to learn. We have to change. Or you’re going to continue to get a targeting penalty no matter if we agree or disagree. We have to understand that’s the way the refs call it, so we have to practice different ways to tackle and make sure we’re not leading with our head. One is safety, but two is you need to be on the field.”

BlueandGold.com note: Bertrand might have hit the player in the shoulder, but Freeman is right in saying he incorrectly led with his head. You simply cannot do that in this era of football. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. That’s where the coaching comes in. The Irish have to make sure they’re playing clean football.

Notre Dame quarterback Drew Pyne

Pyne quote: “Winning is always great. We focused all week on execution. Coach Freeman and coach Rees both focused on that, and our offense went out there and executed. We scored on a lot of drives. And that all starts with our O-Linemen.”

BlueandGold.com note: It does all start with the offensive line, indeed. The Irish are getting better and better with that group as the season moves along. Notre Dame goes as its offensive line goes. It’s going right now.

Pyne quote: “Coach Rees called an unbelievable game. He puts me in a position to go out there and do my job and execute. I can’t tell you how many times I ran over to the phone and said, ‘Coach Rees, that was all you.’”

BlueandGold.com note: This one is for all the Tommy Rees skeptics. Pyne is right. He called a heck of a game. Like the Irish offensive line, Rees is coming into his own as the weeks go by.

Pyne quote: “Like I said, Coach Rees puts us in a position to succeed each and every play. I was able to find (Michael Mayer) a couple more times this week and execute and do my job in getting the ball to him. I’m very happy because he’s such a great player and getting the ball in his hands is something that our offense can really benefit from. Mike is just an unbelievable player.”

BlueandGold.com note: Feed 87. North Carolina simply could not cover him. That could be the case against a few more of Notre Dame’s opponents. Good things happen when Mayer gets the ball.

North Carolina head coach Mack Brown

Brown quote: “To be fair, they have won 25 straight ACC games. So all of us are trying to catch them. And that’s regular season games, I thought it was 19, now it’s 25. So they’ve got a great program, they do it right, they do it within the rules, and they’re really good. I think you just give credit to them. We’ve got a lot of things that we do well, we’ve got obvious things that we need to continue to do better. Weirdly enough, we’re continuing to improve on defense. Tonight, we just could not stop the run. And they just lined up and hit us right in the face and just kept running it and kept running it and we couldn’t get them off the field.”

BlueandGold.com quote: The streak of 25 ACC regular season victories in a row for the Irish is actually quite astounding. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that when the Irish played in the league for the first time ever in 2020, they won the dang thing. And Brown is right: North Carolina could not stop the run. And the Heels paid dearly.

Brown (on his unsportsmanlike conduct penalty): “We really want to win, and we want to have a fair chance to win, and we want to compete as hard as we can, and we want to make each other accountable. If I feel like something has been taken away from the kids on a play, it’s my responsibility to stand up for them and that’s simply what I’m doing. Somebody throws a flag at me because I’m questioning a call, good for them. But the kids were fighting their guts out and we’ve asked them to be a player-led team. We’ve asked them to push each other, we’ve asked them to call on each other.”

BlueandGold.com note: Rarely do you see Brown so fired up. He said it was the first time in his 34 years of coaching he had ever been flagged. He likely had a case. The call he was arguing was a flukey pass interference infraction at best. But he still lost all control, and his team started to lose control when the game is out of hand at the end. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Brown quote: “They’ve got great players up front, I said that they’re two-deep, and they’re very aggressive. And again, they’re the best players in the country. That’s who they are. They’re one of those eight teams that recruits the best players in the country every year. And what it seemed to me is that they said, ‘We are not going to let you run the ball.’ They were blitzing a lot with their linebackers, and they were going to make us throw it.”

BlueandGold.com note: Notre Dame is only getting better in the recruiting department, too, Mr. Brown. So remember when you said you’d like to play Notre Dame every year? The prospects of beating the Irish is only going to get tougher in theory as the program keeps collecting better players. Buckle up.