On building program toughness

by Bill, Murrieta, CA, Saturday, February 04, 2012, 12:13 (5240 days ago)

As I've said a number of times, I think the biggest challenge that Kelly's faced since he arrived is rebuilding the program from a strength & conditioning, physicality and mental perspective. I believe that the program that Weis left for Kelly was one of the softest in all of Notre Dame history and that the biggest factor in the performance of Kelly's teams since he arrived is the rebuilding that needed to occur in this area.

I think a good measure of a program's physicality and toughness is the ability to run the ball on offense and to stop the run on defense. The table below shows our performance during the Weis and Kelly eras on a yards per carry basis, both for ND and our opponents and on a 'net' basis.

             2005   2006   2007   2008   2009   2010   2011

YPC For      3.59   3.86   2.06   3.27   3.84   3.98   4.82

YPC Against  3.94   3.80   4.28   4.06   4.75   3.97   3.78

Net YPC     -0.35   0.06  -2.21  -0.79  -0.91   0.01   1.04

You'll note that Weis teams had a negative 'net' yards per carry differential, giving up more yards per carry than they gained in four of the five years. Kelly's been successful in rebuilding this 'net', putting us in positive territory (barely) in his first year and well above it in his second.

To put some historical perspective on this, prior to Weis, there had been only three years in the "post-Devine" period where ND has had a negative 'net' yards per carry differential:

-- Gerry Faust's 1984 7-6 season: -0.52
-- Lou Holtz's 1994 6-5-1 season: -0.17
-- Bob Davie's 1997 7-5 season: -0.35

Kelly still has more work to do here. Holtz's 1988 National Championship team had a 'net' of +1.72 and his 1989 team had a net of +2.08.

I'll state further that I think a "mentally tough" team has to be built on top of a "physically tough" team. From what I've seen over the last two years, I think we're now past the physical development part of the rebuilding job and a good way through the mental part. My expectation from here is to see Kelly start producing the same sort of results we saw at Cincinnati in Years 1 - 3, as I think he inherited a very physical team from Dantonio. He inherited a powder puff team from Charlie Weis.