Notre Dame Looks For Better Play On The Road At Stanford

Notre Dame is set to close its regular season this weekend when the Irish travel to Stanford. In a perfect world, the Fighting Irish would play every game at home where they have averaged a shade under 50 points in their five wins and have allowed just under 11 points per in those victories.

The Fighting Irish have not closed out the regular season at home in three decades though. The last time it happened was in 1993 when Boston College toppled the Irish just a week after their short-lived monumental win over No. 1 Florida State.

This year’s version of the Fighting Irish is just 2-2 on the road, while allowing nearly twice as many points and scoring almost half as many points as they have in their home wins.

"Obviously two of our three losses have been on the road,” Irish head coach Marcus Freeman said this week. "You look at the Clemson game (a 31-23 loss), I’ve looked at the Clemson game, looked at the Louisville game and we haven’t performed to our standard on the road. As I told the coaches, I don’t want to make this a road only issue. But we haven’t performed to our standard. As I study those games, we’ve got to start better. I think both of those games we were down, Clemson 7-3 and then Louisville I think 7-0 to start the game.

"We’ve got to, from the first play of the game, have the mentality to .... we’re going to have to go out there and win the interval on this play,” Freeman continued. “We can’t ooze into any game. So, it’s my job to make sure we are mentally and physically prepared and as I told them, it’s their job, too, to make the choice that we’re going to be mentally ready to go. There’s no one answer that can guarantee it’s going to happen, but it won’t be from a lack of effort by myself and our coaching staff to make sure this group is ready.”

Turnovers were a major factor in both of the road losses as well. Notre Dame committed five in the loss to Louisville and three in the loss to Clemson and allowed a total of 20 points off turnovers in the two games combined. They are the only two games in which the Irish have given up any points off turnovers all season.

Freeman has a plan this week for his staff to challenge the team more competitively during the week to try to secure a faster start and different outcome.

"I plan on changing a little bit of the structure (of practice),” Freeman explained. "Not the overall how we’re practicing but maybe the structure and have some more competitive periods early in practice so that it’s just like a game. I don’t want to go through stretch and then individual and then group work and then team and that’s usually how you kind of structure practice. You go individual, you know part to whole, right? Individual, group work, team but I’m probably going to start with some team good on good situations early in practice just to get them in the right mindset of ‘Ok, whenever we say ‘go’ it’s go and I’m going to try to do that in practice.”

Notre Dame has won its last two games at Stanford by a combined total of 83-31.

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