When two teams play each other in back-to-back seasons, it’s standard practice for coaching staffs to watch film from their previous meeting. Both Notre Dame and NC State have decided not to do that before they play on Saturday (3:30 p.m. ET, NBC).
Notre Dame and NC State are intentionally forgetting 2016’s hurricane game, but we can still remember it for ourselves
Let’s look back on the wettest, wildest game of the year.
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The game the teams played last year in Raleigh was out of a movie scene. North Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency as Hurricane Matthew honed in on the state’s coastline. There were 6.5 inches of rain in Raleigh that day, according to Weather Underground, but the Irish and Wolfpack played anyway.
How that went:
This was a full-on HURRICANE GAME, with two teams going at each other in the slop while much of the American Southeast braced for a horrific storm. The Wolfpack won, 10-3, on a blocked punt.
Coaches Brian Kelly and Dave Doeren have cast the 2016 game aside.
The two teams were unranked last year. Now Notre Dame’s No. 9 and NC State’s No. 14, and this is one of the better games of the season so far. But the coaches’ desire not to think about the 2016 game has more to do with the climate than anything.
Here’s Kelly, via the Indianapolis Star:
“You know, we didn’t even look at the film,” Kelly said Tuesday. “It wasn’t even part of our breakdown because it really didn’t give us anything. It was a poorly designed game plan by me. There was nothing there that we really wanted to go back and look at.
“We’ve changed our punt protection since that time, which obviously the punt was a huge play in the game. There’s really nothing that we could garner from that game. It really didn’t show truly who they were or who we were in that game because you just didn’t have the ability to exert force against the ground and be explosive and powerful.”
And Doeren:
“None,” he said regarding the value in watching that film. “It’s like it didn’t happen.”
The teams have put this thing firmly to bed.
I will, too, after this.
Let’s just remember a few other things from that day, first.
- The two teams combined for 95 passing yards. Notre Dame was 9-of-26 through the air, while NC State was a much more efficient 7-of-14.
- Wait, Notre Dame passed 26 times? What was that about?
- Kelly blamed his center, Sam Mustipher, for not being able to snap the ball cleanly during the hurricane. Kelly called Mustipher’s snapping “atrocious” but didn’t say anything about his own decision to call dozens of pass plays in a damn hurricane.
- The offenses combined to average 2.4 yards per play.
- Here’s how the official game book describes the weather:
Points for succinctness.
- This is a new type of slide tackle:
- This is a complete train wreck of a play:
- This is a method of staying warm while, uh, “watching” the game:
- And this is method of celebrating a victory:
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