Digging Deep: Cross Road Blues

Digging Deep: Cross Road Blues

“I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
Down to the crossroads fell down on my knees.
Asked the lord above for mercy, "take me, if you please".
I went down to the crossroads tried to flag a ride.
Down to the crossroads tried to flag a ride.
Nobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by...”

This old blues classic, written by Robert Johnson in the 1930s and then repurposed and popularized by Eric Clapton and his band Cream in the 1960s, has been bouncing around my head since last Saturday night.

Why, you ask? Because, as is wont to happen when a team fails to show up (or put up anything resembling a fight) in a nationally televised showdown of ranked rivals, and proceeds to get pummeled mercilessly, the crossroads are exactly where Brian Kelly and this Notre Dame team/program find themselves.

While this column usually entails the analysis of stats, numbers are really beside the point right now; “Digging Deep” is what every individual in the Notre Dame football program must do in order to get the Irish free from the smoldering crater left in the aftermath of the debacle in Ann Arbor.

It’s one thing to get beaten by a team that is vastly more talented, or to make too many sloppy mistakes, and end up in the loss column. Those things can and do happen. And they most certainly are a miserable experience. But what made last week’s fiasco such a worst case scenario, which brought back - with startling speed and intensity - the howls from Irish fans and select national “pundits” calling for the termination Brian Kelly, goes beyond the final score. It goes beyond losing by 31 points and giving up over 300 yards rushing. At the very heart of the matter is the fact this team allowed themselves to be physically dominated; it goes to the fact that they played with a no intensity, no energy, no urgency, and no resolve.

Everything - and that’s not an exaggeration - everything positive that we believed had been baked into the very DNA of the program over these last two and a half years was missing.

Gone.

How on earth does that happen? How does a program - that despite the margin on the scoreboards at the very least earned the respect of players and coaches from Clemson due to their physicality and toughness - listlessly absorb a manhandling that was so shocking in its completeness?

Why have the team’s veteran players, the ones who we thought would elevate their games in 2019, struggled so consistently? It goes beyond just Ian Book and it goes beyond just the Michigan game. Are the problems that have bedeviled this year’s team capable of being fixed? Did last Saturday demarcate an Icarus like crashing back down to earth?

My apologies for the fact that this weeks edition of my column is so long on questions and bereft of answers. Because, quite simply, I don’t know. I don’t know what lies ahead. I don’t know if Notre Dame is capable of bouncing back from such a thorough beating. Not just a loss but a genuine, top to bottom, honest to goodness ass kicking.

No analysis of numbers is going to provide the answers that we are looking for. A week ago at this time I would’ve told you there wasn’t any data to support what actually ended up happening in the Big House. And yet it happened.

So here we are. Which direction will the Irish take as they face the crossroads? The path back to mediocrity? The path back to another playoff berth in the near future?

So, what will it be, Irish? Who will you be from here on out? We shall see. What happens over the course of the coming days are the only things that will give us the answers.

The crossroads await.