72.2% First Down rate (38th nationally)
We earned at least one first down on 72.2% of our non-garbage drives. This was a slight improvement from 2011 (71.5%), though our rank in the category dropped from 33rd to 38th. North Carolina ranked 25th this year at 74.0%.
- Notre Dame's best rank (and only top-30 finish) in last six years was No.4 in 2009 (80.0%).
- Need to avoid three-and-out twice more per 100 drives to move into top-25.
- Need to avoid three-and-out six more times per 100 drives to move into top-10.

52.9% Available Yards rate (35th nationally)
We earned 52.9% of available yards on non-garbage drives. This was a slight improvement from 2011 (51.4%), though our rank in the category dropped from 29th to 35th. North Carolina ranked 25th this year at 54.1%.
- Notre Dame's best rank (and only top-25 finish) in the last six years was No. 8 in 2009 (56.2%).
- Need to earn 1-2 percent more of available yards to move into top-25.
- Need to earn 3-4 percent more of available yards to move into top-10.

11.1% Explosive Drive rate (80th nationally)
Only 11.1% of ND's drives averaged at least 10 yards per play. This was the worst rate for ND in the last five years. 2007 was worse (7.6%), 2008 was only slightly better (11.6%). North Carolina (again) ranked 25th this year at 17.6%.
- Notre Dame's best rank in the last six years was No. 17 in 2009 (17.7%).
- Need to feature explosive drives on 6-7 percent more drives to move into top-25.
- Need to feature explosive drives on 9-10 percent more drives to move into top-10.

like El Dumpo pass option for Golson. Watching the Pats this weekend reminded me again of how effective it is to have one.

although I realize the prime goal this year was to do what Golson is capable of doing. Hopefully we see more up-tempo next season. I did expect to see a bit more of it than we did during the game. I kept an eye on the play clock and we rarely were snapping the ball before 15 seconds left, even when it did look like there was some effort to hurry up.

Other things I noticed from major to minor...

* Still a reluctance to play the backups

Once the undefeated regular season became more and more a possibility, I understand the "play for the now" mentality. But does that really mean putting Davonte Neal out there on offense had to disappear completely? How about popular Te'o heir apparent Jarrett Grace only playing 28 snaps all regular season long? That's only 7 more snaps than Okwara and Rabasa, who were essentially 3rd stringers.

* Red zone offense

It goes against all of our predictions that ND got blown out by Alabama while at the same time converting all (both) red zone trips for TDs. ND had a pretty rough TD conversion percentage all season long. The option attack was a nice wrinkle for the championship game. I wonder if it is something that we will see more of next year. Either way, ND needs to score a lot more points when they have the chance, since the defense will likely be giving up more points on their end.

* Keep improving the play-calling timing

It was better than in 2011, but there were still some burned timeouts. Some of it is on Golson to get ND into another play quicker, but Kelly needs to keep improving how quickly the play calls get to the QB.

* Punt returns por favor

I understood the conservative approach with John Goodman back there. But Neal is a pretty athletic guy. He almost got loose a few times against Alabama. Imagine what he could have done against a BC or Pitt or BYU.

Over the middle passing game

Again, another facet of the passing game likely cut out due to Golson's inexperience and general turnover aversion by the staff. Hopefully it will start to creep back into the playbook and Golson's height isn't a main reason the staff kept most passing plays to the outside.

What are some of the mistakes that were made this year that you noticed? Before we jump to solutions, I'm first curious what went wrong.

Obviously the regular season went a whole lot better this year, but I'm sure there are still plenty of things we can point to where improvement is possible. Feel free to go program-wide big picture or as nit-picky as you want.

We hid the deficiencies in our back four pretty well, but Alabama picked them apart. Clearly, we can zone cover well against mediocre passing teams and/or mediocre running teams. But when we get a team that can pass and run equally well, the zone coverage breaks down and the holes on the back end are evident. We either need faster play by our corners such that they are covering man-to-man back there or else we need to switch up the scheme enough that the holes in the zone are not as repetitively evident.

The right side of the offensive line was problematic/inconsistent. They had good games against some opponents and horrible games against others.

In our run game, it appeared that the "slow to and fast through" philosophy didn't always stick with the runners. Witness Alabama using a similar philosophy with deep handoffs where the runners can see/look for the best holes and then burst through. Our guys had games where that worked for them and games where they seemed to consistently miss.

In our passing game, we relied too heavily on throwing fades/sideline routes of all kinds to the one-on-one coverage. Sure, it worked a lot. But it allows the sideline to be the extra defender and allows a great corner to essentially wreck our scheme. I'd like to see us doing more slant routes and crossing routes, but I think that our failures came in some respect from trying to protect EG from making a bad read/bad throw and forcing an INT. So maybe that fixes itself as he ages in the program.

On the DL, we sometimes seemed -- and against Bama always seemed -- to lose edge contain and allow runners to bounce outside. I don't know that it's a purely DL problem, but it's there.

Obviously, blocking/scheme/whatever on KR and PR.

Not just against the small and timid. Our rushing performances were all over the map this year.

game log:
http://www.cfbstats.com/2012/team/513/rushing/offense/gamelog.html

1.44 ypc versus Purdue, 7.37 against Miami, 1.68 versus Alabama. Rushing the ball more efficiently would help a lot of other offensive woes already mentioned in this thread, such as red zone offense and Golson's effectiveness.

I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when Farley didn't barf all over himself in his first year of playing, but he was hardly a difference-maker and as the year went on appeared pretty shaky at times. Some of that was injury, I'm sure.

Motta finished with zero interceptions and got badly exposed by Alabama, both in the run game and in coverage.

The liabilities there were largely covered up throughout the year by our terrific front, but when it comes time to play a balanced juggernaut like Alabama again, safeties are going to have to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Mind you, there were very few times it was exploited but whatever minor glimpses were evident were blown up in the NCG. For the most part, I think our DL was stout all year.

Even in the NCG, I thought we did a good job of closing holes while forcing Lacy to find cutback lanes outside of the A and B gaps. Where we struggled, was with the second level of pursuit, and this burden was borne on all of the LBs (not just Manti).

I only bring this up as because when Nix was out for large portions of the Pitt game, Ray Graham had similar success against our run defense. In my amateur opinion, it seems like our LBs struggle when the can't shed OL blocking.

Shembo was great all year, but the reason I think Ishaq is still being given opportunities is that he has the ideal size to better take on OL blockers.

This kind of seems like I am picking a nit but I think other teams are going to look hard at the Pitt and Alabama tapes next year. It's also part of the reason why I think our goal line rush defense was so great, there's generally too many DL on the field thereby limiting cutback lanes.

Not sure it's a mistake, but I found it disappointing that our offense lacked these.

ND's talent level and coaching continuity this year should have lead to larger MOV in a few games.

Pitt, SoCal, and Purdue were all too close. BYU was probably too close as well, though there were mitigating circumstances there. If they were more comfortable MOVs, who knows what that means in terms of depth development.

--
Sometimes I rhyme slow sometimes I rhyme quick.

And it was against Navy.

Near as I can remember, very few if any other turnovers caused by the Irish gave the O obvious TD opportunities either. A few lead to a scoring drive afterward, but I believe they all required some actual semblance of a drive. I don't recall any within 15 yards of the opposing EZ.

--
Sometimes I rhyme slow sometimes I rhyme quick.

Regular zone blocking was an adventure particularly in terms of the blocking on the right side.

In terms of pass blocking there were some problems with picking up stunts. It seemed that we tended to pick up straight on blitzes well enough, but really struggled once they moved to a stunt. I think that was more of a recognition/communication issue rather than purely a technique issue.

I thought overall the staff did a fairly good job of masking some of the issues by calling to the strengths of the line (most notably all the pulling), but this is something I'd like to see worked on.

We were terrible at scoring touchdowns from the red zone this year. We absolutely MUST improve in that area if we want to do good things next year. Sub-50% touchdown rate on red zone trips is not winning football.

Seems like our lateral speed can still be a problem on the lines. Stanford had a lot of success going at Niklas when he was in for protection and Alabama's RBs were able to bounce outside too much.

It wasn't an every down problem and improved dramatically over 2011. For example, everything USC ran last year against us seemed to be designed to get Shembo and co. in space.

But to win a NC we're gonna have to get better in immediate movement to the outside.

With an experienced QB returning next year, it should be a very solvable problem, but we definitely had too many wasted timeous or delay of game penalties, especially early in the season.

Everyone knows how bad our punt return team was.

Usually teams with underwhelming offenses win with defense and special teams. We tried many times to do it with only defense.

Coverage units were fine, and Brindza and Turk were pretty good. Damned if I can think of more than 2 short(ish) fields provided by the return units though.