Panic!

Well, that was deflating, and it was sad to see that my worst case scenario played out.  The o-line was terrible: they made many mistakes and simply could not handle the athleticism of Notre Dame's defensive line.  The weakness of the o-line clearly hurt the running game (29 yards, ouch!) and may have also hurt Cousins' performance.  I'm not sure if Cousins played poorly because he feared getting hit, but he simply looked inaccurate and made some really bad decisions.  I have to confess that from the outset Cousins looked nervous and seemed to be headed towards repeating the performance of 2 years ago, against Notre Dame.

The defense actually performed pretty well, as I suspected.  They slowed Notre Dame's offense down most of the day.  But as I predicted, the Spartans were not going to stop them completely and their offense needed to produce points.   

I was also not impressed with the Spartan coaches.  The play calling was predictable all day and they went for too many trick plays.  The worst call was the fake field goal to end the half.  Everyone could see it coming, but worst of all, the Spartans could have brought the score to 21-13 at halftime, and they were getting the ball back to start the second half.  That was not a place for a trick play, especially because I saw this game as one that was going to be a relatively even hard-fought battle.  Every point was going to count. 

So overall, this was a disastrous game that could have been more competitive than it was.  Now, I won't completely panic, yet, particularly because the defense played so well against a very good offense.  The Spartans will not face another offense this explosive and talented again--until the bowl game, perhaps.  On the other hand, the offense is not nearly as explosive as I thought, largely because the o-line is worse than I expected and Cousins is not as cool under pressure as I hoped. Against inferior defenses, the Spartans will still score lots of points, but against Ohio State and Nebraska, they may be in for defensive battles.