Spreading The Ball Around Should Boost The 2020 Pass Game

A more explosive an efficient pass game is a must for Notre Dame in 2020 if it wants to build a championship caliber offense. I’ve explained the need for a more explosive pass offense in past articles, which you can find HERE and HERE.

How that looks can vary and must be determined by the personnel each offense possesses, but spreading the ball around more than what we saw at Notre Dame the last two years would be a benefit based on what returns in 2020.

Beyond the trends, there are specific reasons why it would benefit the 2020 offense.

1. Makes Preparation For The Defense More Challenging — Notre Dame has been dominant against most defenses in recent seasons, but it has struggled against top defenses. Notre Dame’s passer rating against Top 25 Power 5 teams the last two years is just 122.07, which isn’t going to get it done for a team trying to win a championship.

Notre Dame has the tools to make a big jump in this area in 2020, but part of that success is making life more difficult on opposing defenses, and developing a pass game that spreads the ball around and has multiple weapons forces the defense to be more varied in how it prepares to play Notre Dame.

Coaches must spend more time during the week figuring out which matchups it wants to focus on, and what players it must attack, or on their own end, to protect.

2. Harder For Defense To Limit The Pass Game — Part of making preparation more challenging is that it limits the defense’s ability to focus on taking one or two players out of the game. The top teams and defenses will usually be good enough to take a top player or two out of the game. We saw that with Georgia this season, as the Bulldogs adjusted at halftime and were able to limit the effectiveness of tight end Cole Kmet, who dominated the defense in the first half. It was also able to limit how much Chase Claypool was able to do, and the pass game didn’t respond well.

If you have a top player or two then defenses will work hard to limit their effectiveness. When an offense can then utilize weapons three, four and five it can expose a defense that is geared towards taking out one or two players. This forces the defense to make a tough decision.

Option one is to go in with a game plan that continues to focus on slowing down the top weapon or two, but a pass offense that has more options can still thrive against this kind of game plan.

Option two is to go with a more balanced defensive game plan, one that tries to defend more weapons, relying on the defense’s own individual players to limit the effectiveness of the top players. This is the game plan Clemson tried to utilize against LSU in the national title game, and while it worked for awhile, eventually the depth of the LSU pass attack proved to be too great. Four different LSU pass catchers caught at least five passes in the game, and leaving the star outside receivers in one-on-ones eventually led to the Clemson defense breaking.

3. Gives OC/Staff More Options — When you look at Notre Dame’s personnel in 2020 there is a lot more diversity from a skillset standpoint. In 2018, the pass offense had a lot of talent, but the talent was mostly players with very similar skillsets. Miles Boykin, Chase Claypool and Alizé Mack were all big, long wideouts that did their most damage before and up to the point of the catch. Even Chris Finke, who had a very different skillset, was a player who did his best work before the catch.

There wasn’t a burner, or an after-the-catch weapon that presented a different look for the defense. That somewhat limited what then offensive coordinator Chip Long could do against top defenses. That hurt Notre Dame against a Clemson defense that had very long, athletic cornerbacks that could better matchup against Notre Dame’s big outside receivers.

When you have a more versatile group of receivers, especially when that group has a lot of speed, it gives the OC a lot more to work with from a game plan standpoint. For Notre Dame OC Tommy Rees, the personnel is such that he could choose to go into a series with a bigger lineup that has Kevin Austin and Javon McKinley on the field together with a pair of tight ends. On the next series he could easily have Austin and tight end Tommy Tremble on the field with Braden Lenzy and Lawrence Keys III, which would give Notre Dame a bit of a smaller lineup that has a whole lot of speed.

The pass offense finally got on track in the final five games of the regular season, which coincides with the emergence Lenzy into the lineup. The more Lenzy played and was involved in the offense, the better the pass game became. It wasn’t just because Lenzy is talented, but also because he has a very different skill set. As a defense, you had to worry about the size and playmaking skills of Claypool and Kmet, but you also had to worry about the speed of Lenzy and Keys.

You can see the impact it can have here.

The safeties had to treat Keys on the jet sweep as a legitimate weapon based on the success he and Lenzy had on that type of action down the stretch of the regular season. The focus on the jet action allows Claypool to get behind the defense for a big play.

It was the diversity of the skillset that was so effective, and the 2020 pass offense should have a very diverse group of players. You have bigger receivers (Austin, McKinley, Tremble, Brock Wright), and now there are more speedy, after-the-catch players (Keys, Lenzy). A return to help of running back Jafar Armstrong, a legit weapon in the pass game, would only add to this diversity.

What this does for Rees is it gives him far more weapons to work with when it comes to putting a game plan together. It also gives him a greater diversity of skillsets, which allows him to attack different strengths and weaknesses of the defense. In 2018, if a defense could handle Notre Dame’s size there wasn’t a lot Long could do to counter that. In 2020, if a defense can handle size then Rees will have a lot of options. If a defense can handle speed but not size, he will have a lot of options.

This takes pressure off the OC and adds it to the opposing team’s defensive coordinator.

4. Book Will Be At His Best — If quarterback Ian Book would have played as well in 2019 as he did during the regular season of 2018, at least as a passer, the Irish offense would have been very, very hard to defend. I would be willing to bet Notre Dame would have been better than 11-2 as well.

There were several reasons for Book’s regression in year two as a starter, but one of the primary factors was Book went away from just running the offense and taking what the defense gave him. Book was far too focused on locking into specific players at the snap, and he wasn’t nearly as fluid, precise or poised going through his progressions.

During the 2018 regular season, Book was far more willing to read out the defense and spread the ball around. That wasn’t the case in 2019, and it hurt his game, which hurt the offense. A more balanced offense that is more about attacking the defense and less about feeling the need to force the ball to a player or two would do wonders for Book.

Just look at the numbers. In his eight regular season starts of 2018, the Notre Dame offense averaged 7.6 players per game to catch a pass. That dipped to 6.7 in 2019. In half of his 2018 regular seasons starts Book competed balls to at least eight players, something that only happened once in 2019 (Virginia Tech), and that was a game where he attempted 53 passes.

In Book’s eight regular season starts in 2018 the Irish offense had 30 players catch at least three passes in a game (3.8 per game). He completed 70% of his passes and averaged 306.9 passing yards per game in those contests with a 161.6 passer rating.

In Book’s 13 regular season starts in 2019 the offense had only 34 players catch at least three passes in a game (2.6 per game). He completed just 60.8% of his passes, averaged 233.4 passing yards per game and had a 149.13 passer rating.

It’s imperative that Rees get Book back to spreading the ball around and focusing on reading out the defense and not locking into a smaller number of players. That also includes getting Book to be far more poised in the pocket in 2020, and getting him away from rushing his reads and mechanics, something he did far too often in 2019.

If Book can get back to spreading the ball around he’ll finish his career on a very high note. If he can also do that against the top teams (Clemson, USC, Wisconsin, Louisville) then the Irish will have a strong chance to get back to the College Football Playoff, and this time with a chance to win it all.

5. Eases Pressure On Young Pass Catchers — Notre Dame has several players with the raw talent to become alphas at some point in their careers, and that could possibly happen as early as 2020. Kevin Austin certainly has that kind of talent, Lenzy and Keys are dynamic weapons, freshmen Jordan Johnson and Xavier Watts have star potential. McKinley could also be in line for a breakout season in 2020, and Tremble has special tight end skills, as does freshman Michael Mayer.

But in each case I could make a strong case that putting that kind of pressure on them in 2020, as individuals, could be damaging to them, and the offense as a whole. Austin has five career catches and didn’t play in 2019. Lenzy has struggled to stay healthy, as has McKinley, and the freshmen, well they are freshmen.

The more the offense is designed to use all their skills and relies less on just one or two players to carry the pass offense, the less pressure there is on the up-and-coming players. It allows them to grow and take on more prominent roles more naturally, without having to feel the pressure of being the next great Notre Dame wideout, or next great Notre Dame tight end.

Remember, Will Fuller certainly was more productive early in his first season as a starter (2014), but he didn’t really have that breakout game until week five when the Irish played at Syracuse. Fuller had Ben Koyack, Chris Brown, CJ Promise and Amir Carlisle to take the pressure off, and eventually he emerged as the alpha of that group, but it wasn’t thrust upon him.

We saw the same thing in 2018 when Boykin caught just one pass in three of his first four games of the season, and his only big game came against lowly Ball State. It wasn’t until game five against Stanford that he truly broke out and took his game to another level, but the presence of Claypool, Finke and Mack meant Boykin didn’t need to be “the man” right away, he could grow into that role.

A scenario in which different receivers step up in different weeks, and the ball is spread around more, takes a great deal of pressure off the young wideouts. It also gives more players an opportunity to step into prominent roles, which could create a situation where eventually Notre Dame doesn’t have one alpha, it has several.