Opportunity Seized

Of course it isn't a gimme, but to write off the season after this game is bleach drinking stupid.

You speak for the mgoblog community

I remember Manningham crashing into the ND band in the 2006 game.  Those kinds of things seem to happen a lot at ND.  I'm not sure what the deal is about that.  We have visiting bands stay on the corner of the field at Michigan Stadium, but there never seem to be any collisions.

The sidelines in South Bend are really, really, really tight.  It's very similar to what our stadium was like before the field was lowered in '91, when the seats were relatively close to field level, and not incredibly far from the sidelines.  At our stadium today, the visiting band is no longer allowed to wrap around past the end line of the end zone, so you don't get corner routes running directly into the heart of the band anymore.  That changed ~2005 when Lloyd was concerned about the possibilities of players getting hurt plowing into the band in the corners of the end zones.

At ND, the gap between the field and the wall before the seating begins is significantly narrower.  Heck, in the end zone opposite the tunnel, the seating begins less than ten feet behind the goal post, and it's literally seats sitting on the field level.  And the bands are wrapped from the sidelines all the way around the corners into the end zones, and are just about within five feet of the boundaries of the field.  There really isn't another way of doing it with the incredibly small amount of real estate they have.  It's an extremely compact stadium, and looks a lot smaller in person than it does on TV.

So when Gardner went careening into the bleachers, it wasn't as much surprising for it happening as surprising it doesn't happen more often.  It's downright scary how close those things are to the field, and that guys don't get hurt more often.  In a stadium that size, putting both bands in the seats means eating up about 1000 seats of a mid-size stadium (their band is freaking massive), which is a goldmine of lost revenue.

So all in all, it's a shame a player had to get hurt for this.  And especially awful it's Gardner.

No, it's 30% of the season or four games (whichever is more).  This was the last game he could have played in to receive one.

If it worked on a crappy Minnesota team last year, it would surely work on a 3-0 (oops, make that 4-0) Notre Dame team this year. And, really, the point is that, based on how the team was moving down the field, there was no need for Borges to pull a trick play out of his hat.

Yeah, when Chris Petersen did stuff like that to be Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl everyone pretty much dumped on him, too.

But how the hell do you blame Denard's 4  interceptions on 4 consecutive pass attempts on Borges?  You have to let the quarterback throw at some point.

Exactly which is why RR benched any kind of pitch option with Denard and Borges benched it early last year as well.

Denard for whatever reason has never really put a pitch where it needs to be. Probably a solid reason for no speed option.

He throws one behind Fitz and then somehow chucks one LOW to 5'6 VS. It is what it is, but you have to know your QB hasn't really been good enough to pitch the ball consistently.