Notre Dame Football Year in Review: Loren Landow’s First Season

A look back at Loren Landow's first season as Notre Dame's Director of Football Performance and its impact on the 2024 campaign.

Notre Dame director of football performance Loren Landow at Notre Dame spring football practice Thursday, March 7, 2024, at the Irish Athletics Center in South Bend. | GREG SWIERCZ / USA TODAY NETWORK

Catastrophic injuries ravaged the Notre Dame roster this season

Notre Dame's roster was brutalized by severe injuries to many key players this season. Particularly painful were the hits to the offensive and defensive lines which both lost more than a few key contributors for most of the season.

How bad was this rash of injuries? Bad enough that multiple coaches within the program have alluded to the fact that they've never been part of a team hit harder by devastating injury news to this many players. That's rough.

Many if not all of these injuries could be chalked up to bad luck.

Football is a physical sport and injuries have always been just a natural part of the game. But when the devastation is so severe that multiple starters ended up out for the season along both lines, it's fair to ask a basic question.

Is there anything the Notre Dame strength and conditioning group could do, or should not be doing moving forward to reduce the odds of this level of injury issues occurring again?

Maybe the answer is no. Nobody is blaming Landow and his crew for what has happened, but when the injury list is this extensive, it's fair and sensible to evaluate if any changes could be made moving forward to help minimize future risk.

Notre Dame has had the toughest injury luck of any team in college football this year. It's insane.

— Ari Wasserman (@AriWasserman) January 10, 2025

Notre Dame made it to the final game of the year with depth and prep

When the 12-team playoff format was announced, I spoke about how challenging it would be for programs to make a deep playoff run.

Only teams with high-quality depth and superb strength and conditioning would be able to make deep playoff runs due to the physicality and intensity the playoff would bring while adding up to four games to the schedule.

Notre Dame survived this gauntlet. Despite injuries to 16 key contributors over the course of the season, the Irish never ran out of gas and were among the last two teams standing in the sport.

Landow and his staff deserve a ton of credit for showing that Notre Dame has what it takes to survive what ended up looking like a full NFL season meat grinder. This truly was a miraculous effort by all involved given the severity of the injury issues at hand.

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