Know Your Notre Dame Football Enemy: Bowling Green Preview
After last season’s Ball State game, never say a bad MAC team can’t scare Notre Dame football. That being said, it would be shocking to see a bad Bowling Green team win in South Bend.
How bad is Bowling Green? They averaged three wins a season over the three seasons that Mike Jinks was their head coach. Under first year coach Scot Loeffler, Bowling Green brought in the 12th ranked recruiting class in the MAC and 128th ranked class nationally. There’s not much talent coming in to slow down the bleeding — especially when comes to facing programs the caliber Notre Dame football.
That isn’t to say you can’t win at Bowling Green. Before Jinks, Dino Babers parleyed his 18-9 record into the Syracuse head coaching job. It’s simply not an easy job.
Mike Jinks, who had never been so much as a coordinator at the college level before becoming the Bowling Green head coach, was a running back with an Air Raid background. In a way, that makes sense with the product he produced offensively. Bowling Green wanted to throw the ball, but wasn’t very good at it. That’s probably because they were built like a power running team. Their personnel and style didn’t mesh.
The good thing about Loeffler is that he wants to use the large personnel to actually run the football. He comes to Bowling Green after three seasons as the Boston College offensive coordinator. If you know anything about the Eagles, you know they like to run in-between the tackles. Maybe the returning offensive line — averaging 313 pounds — will be able to show off their size. Their two main returning running backs, Andrew Clair and Rico Frye, average 209 pounds themselves.
All that size didn’t help them be better than awful at running the ball last season. Bowling Green ranked 117th in rushing in 2018, only gaining 116.6 yards per game. They need to figure that out, and Loeffler will put all his effort into fixing this issue — especially since all the passing production is gone now.
The team’s leading receiver — Scott Miller — graduated. Their quarterback Jarret Doege has transferred out. Doege — who started at Texas Tech — has made his way back to the Big 12. He’s now at West Virginia.
The Bowling Green offense has some major woes. The Notre Dame defense will be licking their chops. Bowling Green shouldn’t score a touchdown on the Irish defense.
For as bad as Bowling Green was at running the ball, they were worse at stopping it. That’s why Bowling Green ranked 127th — allowing 280.5 yards per game. This meant that teams didn’t have to throw the ball against the decent Falcons secondary.
That decent secondary returns a gaggle of players. They should be an experienced and talented group. Of course, that talent is on the level of the MAC and not that of a College Football Playoff contender.
With the coaching turnover brings a new defensive coordinator. Notre Dame fans will recognize him as the biggest staffing mistake during Brian Kelly’s time at Notre Dame — Brian VanGorder. VanGorder is quickly falling down the latter after producing one of the worst defense’s in the country last season at Louisville.
There’s no reason to expect Bowling Green to be able to stop Notre Dame. There’s absolutely no reason to think they’ll compete. Ian Book probably won’t need to throw the ball at all to win. Notre Dame should run it down their throats and not let the Falcons past the 50 yard line
If the Irish get caught looking ahead at rival USC’s trip to South Bend and let Bowling Green hang around, it might get interesting early — that’s about it.
Still, that’s not likely. Brian Kelly will have Notre Dame ready to make a statement about how dominant a team they can be. He’ll have the Irish focused on the task at hand.
Notre Dame will face back-to-back unfavorable schedules. dark. Next
Prediction: Notre Dame 45, Bowling Green 0
The talent gap in this game is ridiculous. Bowling Green is one of the worst teams in an average Group of Five conference. They’re going through a transition, both in system and coaches. Nothing about them is inspiring, and it’s impossible to find positives past an above-average-for-the-MAC secondary. It should be ugly.