Notre Dame Fighting Irish VS Stanford Cardinal: Depth Chart and Brian Kelly Press Conference

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish head out to Palo Alto to face the Stanford Cardinal in their final game of the regular season — WOW — we’re finally here. On Monday, the depth charts were released and there were no changes made. Jack Kiser should be healthy enough to go, and despite the flu bug rolling through the program, we shouldn’t expect anyone out for Saturday.

With Stanford being just a bad football team this year, there is a tendancy for all of us to look at the bigger picture rather than the game itself. This lends to questions directing to the postseason, and Kelly was hit with a few.

BK rightly pointed out the differences in the AP and Coaches poll and the college football playoff committee and the whole “style points” thing.

“I don’t think it really matters. I think they have their opinions. The AP has us ahead of Michigan, right? The coaches have us ahead of Michigan. The group in that room doesn’t. So, adding a few more points against Georgia Tech is not simply changing their their point of view. It’s really, for us, to continue to play solid, to me, on both sides of the ball and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

“I think just the way to play the game for me has always been about we’re going to play it the right way. From our standpoint, we wanted our quarterback Tyler Buchner to be in the game, regardless of what the score was, to run the offense. If that meant throwing the ball and we were up 35 points, it was important that we played the game the right way for us, but we’re never going to do it just to give people the impression that we’re better than we should be. We’re going to play the game the right way. I think that’s just probably it more than anything else. Look, everybody talks about Georgia’s defense and Georgia’s got a great defense. But we’ve outscored our last three opponents on defense, and no one talks much about that either. I just think that when you talk about game control, you got to bring in your defense and your offense and a balanced football team is just as good.”

Kelly went against the norm last year when talking about the Clemson game a few weeks early — which is absolutely fine. The real norm is that Kelly has always been about the challenge directly ahead, and focusing the team’s energy towards that goal. Still... the goal (especially this week) is the same.

“I just think that it’s always part of the bigger picture. You’re always thinking in terms of one game at a time, but you’re always trying to build your football team to be there at the end. I don’t know that we spend any time talking about it at one time, but you’re always trying to build your football team so when you get to November, you become a playoff for the football team. That’s really it. We don’t talk about it, but we’re always going to work every day thinking about building our football team to be that kind of team in November.”

As far as the case for Notre Dame to be in the top 4, Kelly didn’t make much of one. He stayed within general terms and made sure to focus on the game at hand against Stanford. He’s mostly right to do so as none of his politiking would affect the committee’s decision tonight, and we still need to let some chips fall into place.

“Consistency and growth as a football team. Playing well at the end of the season. The balance of both offense and defense. Shutouts at the end of the season, playing well, that should mean a lot in terms of the overall record. Winning 11 games against power five football teams across the board. Look, at the end of the day, we’re going to be right here at the end and you know how this is going to play out. We have to beat Stanford. Regardless of what that looks like, it’s not going to be played as, ‘oh, that was a signature win.’ We think a lot of Stanford. We know their personnel. But it’s not going to be perceived that way. So, we’re gonna have to go beat Stanford, play well, and then rely on what happens in front of us. We lost that control when we lost to Cincinnati. But we’ve done everything else and we’ll have to do that when we play a really good Stanford team. We’re going to have to beat them.”

Now... keep the Legends Trophy at home.