The last word: Final thoughts before Notre Dame football vs Syracuse
The 2022 Notre Dame football season doesn’t make much sense. A win over No. 16 Syracuse (6-1) on the road would continue the theme.
How the heck did the Fighting Irish hold Ohio State to 395 yards and 21 points in the season opener, for instance? The Buckeyes averaged 522.6 yards and 54.4 points per game in the five weeks following the Notre Dame game.
Huh?
Obviously, teams change throughout the course of the season. Ohio State has improved in the way you think a serious College Football Playoff contender would. Notre Dame? Not so much. The Irish have had more ups and downs than a rollercoaster at Six Flags. They’re riding a low point at the moment, even after a 44-21 win over UNLV last week. It wasn’t as dominant a victory as the final score suggests.
Questions remain about who the Irish really are. More people probably deem them to be bad no matter how much Marcus Freeman keeps saying they’re good but just don’t always play like it.
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But that’s why Notre Dame going into the JMA Dome and beating a top-20 team in a hostile environment would actually make a ton of sense. It’s an expect the unexpected type of season. Just when you think the Irish are down and out, they’ll come out of nowhere and surprise a quality opponent in a tough atmosphere with the odds stacked against them.
It already happened once this fall in Chapel Hill. Notre Dame was 1-2 with a shaky, at best, victory over California under its belt the previous week. The week before that? A home loss to 20-point underdog Marshall, a team that had no business beating the Irish in South Bend. But it occurred. And so did the 45-32 triumph over the Tar Heels, a team that hasn’t lost since and has crept into the polls. That Notre Dame victory was actually more impressive than the final score suggests, an inverse of the UNLV result.
Yeah. That’s just the type of year it’s been for the blue and gold.
Syracuse is highly beatable. The Orange do a lot of things really well, but they are not elite in any one particular area. It’s likely going to be a low-scoring slog. That might benefit a Notre Dame offense struggling to be the unit it was against UNC a month ago. Then again, junior quarterback Drew Pyne might go out and provide the upstate New York crowd some rare, dangerous indoor fireworks after not completing more than 50% of his passes in each of his prior two starts.
Expect the unexpected. Don’t be fooled. Anything can happen with this 2022 Notre Dame team.
