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    • Notre Dame football team suffers hangover after Elko death
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    Notre Dame football team suffers hangover after Elko death

    Vaseline Posted on

    SOUTH BEND — The Notre Dame football team has now beaten a Mike Elko-led team in a top 20 road game for two straight years, but things went south the following week.

    Call it the Elko Hangover Effect. A similar dynamic was used to haunt opponents of the NFL Raiders in their “Just Win, Baby” days.

    Last fall, it took the Irish until the final 30 seconds to beat Duke 21-14 on an emotional night at Wallace Wade Stadium that included a dozen penalties called against the visitors.

    Notre Dame then went straight to Louisville and was defeated by a touchdown as a solid favorite.

    Jawhar Jordan had 143 of the Cardinals’ 185 rushing yards, Sam Hartman threw three interceptions and the Irish gave up a season-high 33 points. Notre Dame’s ground game was stifled on a 44-yard night.

    This season, a No. 7 Notre Dame team spoiled Elko’s rollout as head coach of Texas A&M with a statement 23-13 victory in a slugfest before 107,000 at Kyle Field. This time, Marcus Freeman’s team, again refusing to back down from Elko’s bullies, deflected 11 penalties for 99 yards.

    Everyone was telling the Irish they were coming; national pundits had already earmarked Notre Dame’s spot in the first 12-team College Football Playoff.

    And then came the next blow on Saturday afternoon, a 16-14 home loss to Northern Illinois.

    Yes, the same Huskies program that lost 13 of 16 games in 2022-23 before finding a new rig about 10 games ago. They’ve lost just twice since then under coach Thomas Hammock, a former NIU running back who played his high school ball in Fort Wayne at Bishop Luers.

    Loss number 3 would come in the first-ever meeting between the DeKalb, Illinois, school and its glamorous neighbors 150 miles to the east.

    What happened instead felt like Marshall Redux, a regression to the 26-21 home sensation of 2022. Freeman had not won a game in three tries as head coach after that game, which Notre Dame entered as a 20.5-point favorite.

    Judging the Irish: Notre Dame football deserves a low score after this game

    Formula for a surprise

    Notre Dame entered the field on Saturday as a 28-point favorite over Vegas, and the Irish certainly made a good impression on their opening series of the game: 13 plays, 75 yards, needing just one third-down conversion.

    The highlight was Riley Leonard’s first touchdown since transferring from Duke: a designed 11-yard run around the right sideline, using his entire body (6-foot-3) to get the point of the football across the goal line.

    Easy afternoon, huh?

    Wrong.

    When the Huskies defeated Boston College in 2023 and Georgia Tech in 2021, they jumped to 14-0 leads on both occasions. Northern Illinois left Chesnut Hill with a 27-24 overtime win and the Huskies left Atlanta with a 22-21 victory over Tech.

    In both cases, the favored Atlantic Coast Conference program made the mistake of trying to provide oxygen to a team from the Mid-American Conference.

    That’s exactly what happened when All-America Ben Morrison and freshman Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa collided in coverage, allowing 219-pound running back Antario Brown to take a short pass over the middle and travel 83 yards for the tying score.

    While Notre Dame led the nation in defensive pass efficiency last season, it allowed just eight touchdowns through the air. The longest was a 33-yarder in the Sun Bowl victory over Oregon State; only two others this year have carried longer than 9 yards.

    The Irish defence was hit by lightning early in the game and were unable to get off the field at the very last moment.

    “If you go into this game and say, ‘Don’t worry about the run,’ they’ll run the ball 300 yards,” Notre Dame defensive coordinator Al Golden said earlier this week. “It’s like playing Navy. They have a lot of great running schemes. … Their running backs can make you lose.”

    Sure enough, the Huskies piled up 190 rushing yards, 99 of them (on 20 carries) by Brown. Notre Dame rushed for just 123 yards, 34 of them on Jeremiyah Love’s go-ahead scoring run on the first series of the second half.

    “They’ve got a good front,” said preseason All-America nose tackle Howard Cross III. “They’ve got a really good running back. He’ll definitely play on Sundays — I’m just going to say that now.”

    Even after the Irish sent Brown into the medical tent with a lower leg problem, Northern Illinois kept coming. Gavin Williams, a 209-pound Iowa grad transfer, carried six times on the 11-play march that lasted 5 ½ minutes and ended with a 35-yard, game-winning field goal.

    “Stretching, trick plays,” Cross said. “We knew it. We’re more physical, like physical strength. (With) their speed, they had to use something to throw us off.”

    That was just enough to leave Notre Dame in a daze at 1-1, the program’s first loss in 11 games against MAC opponents.

    Did we mention Miami, Ohio, is coming to town in two weeks, led by former Irish assistant Chuck Martin?

    “NIU is a good team,” Cross said. “NIU is a very good team. And with any good team, we have to make sure we’re ready.”

    Nothing in Saturday’s performance suggested the Irish were.

    Mike Berardino covers Notre Dame football for NDInsider.com and the South Bend Tribune. Follow him on social media @MikeBerardino.

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