Notre Dame Football’s End of Season Superlative: Team Wildcard

The term wildcard was sort of my own submission in the 2019 Notre Dame superlatives, and it has been an interesting category to track from start to finish this season.

First off, wildcard can be used a variety of things, but my focus for this was to hone in on players that could either make or break the season with their play — mostly because they could be a huge factor or a complete non factor. The approach was to view from the perspective of a true game-breaker. To a certain extent, the two reasons go hand in hand, but I wanted our writer’s opinions on which Notre Dame football players were big question marks in determining how the season could end up.

Naturally, the first guy that came to mind in our preseason article was Shaun Crawford. A gifted athlete, but has missed more seasons than he’s played since arriving in South Bend. A healthy Crawford is good for Notre Dame. With that said, our staff picked 6 different guys before the season. Donte Vaughn — for many of the same reasons as Crawford, Jonathan Doerer — it was a legitimate concern with Yoon out the door, Drew White — another guy taking over for a stud senior, Avery Davis — lots of natural talent and speed, but could it be put to good use, and Asmar Bilal — again lots of talent that hadn’t been fully developed.

In the mid-season article, some of our guys were no longer really wildcards or at least things became clearer. Braden Lenzy jumped onto the scene with his talent and received 3 votes to lead the pack. New guys mentioned and deserving of the wildcard title were Ian Book — an up and down season certainly made him an interesting name, and Jamir Jones — had just taken over due to injuries to Hayes and Okwara and played well.

Now that the regular season is behind us, two players really stood out from start to finish and they shared the 7 votes — Braden Lenzy and Ian Book.

Team Wildcard: Braden Lenzy (4 of 7 votes)

Others receiving votes: Ian Book (3)

Both guys make a ton of sense for this list, but Lenzy’s game breaking speed and our frustration that he didn’t receive more touches obviously stood out just a tad more. Whenever Lenzy touched the ball this year, it seemed like something good happened. That showed with 4 touchdowns and 435 scrimmage yards on just 20 touches. That’s an average of nearly 22 yards per touch and a 20 percent touchdown rate. If that was sustained for a significant amount of touches, we’d be talking about a clear Heisman favorite — and maybe Lenzy turns into that in the next few years.

Unfortunately, for one reason or another, Lenzy wasn’t utilized in the offense heavily until later on in the season — which is part of why he received the wildcard tag. In the USC game, he got two touches and took one to the house on a 51 yard run. Against Boston College, he took his only touch for a 61 yard touchdown. It wasn’t until the last 3 games that we could see the staff really trusting him to be on the field for the majority of the game. In those 3 games combined, he went for 254 yards and 2 scores.

Braden Lenzy is one of the most dynamic players in college football with the ball in his hands, and he proved that in limited action this season. He is someone that will absolutely have to be schemed for when playing the Irish in 2020.