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Notre Dame Football: Sam Hartman’s deceptively strong season

By Oliver Vandervoort

Nov 25, 2023; Stanford, California, USA; Notre Dame Fighting Irish quarterback Sam Hartman (10) gets ready to take the field against the Stanford Cardinal during the first quarter at Stanford Stadium. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports
Nov 25, 2023; Stanford, California, USA; Notre Dame Fighting Irish quarterback Sam Hartman (10) gets ready to take the field against the Stanford Cardinal during the first quarter at Stanford Stadium. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports /
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The narrative for most of the second half of the Notre Dame football season has been that Sam Hartman was a disappointment. But that’s not really true.

Now that Sam Hartman’s first and only regular season as a member of the Notre Dame football is over, it’s time to really take a look at what he accomplished in South Bend.

While it’s true that Hartman didn’t lead the Fighting Irish to the championship, it turns out that he had a better season than some fans are willing to give him credit for. Even if he had some problems with his opponents down the stretch.

There is a reason why we look at an entire season when talking about statistics. It’s because we all know that a player can have one very bad game. He can also have one very good game. He can also have more than one of each. But it’s how the entire season plays out that should be how a player is judged.

So here’s the naked truth about what Notre Dame football got when it lured Sam Hartman to South Bend. The quarterback finished this season with a pass efficiency rating of 159.5. That puts the Irish signal-caller at 17th in the country.

Notre Dame football got the best transfer quarterback it could

While some might scoff at being in the Top 20 as not all that great for a team that had National Championship designs in mind. However, the second punch here is that his pass efficiency rating is the best of any transfer quarterback this year.

In other words, for all the talk of overvaluing Sam Hartman this season, he still seems like the best Notre Dame could do. It’s also the best that Notre Dame has done with any quarterback since Jimmy Claussen in 2009.

PFF also thinks that Hartman actually had a pretty good season. The site gave him a 80.1 overall grade for the year. There are more than a few college football teams out there that would kill for that performance.

Sam Hartman finished the year completing a career-high 63.5 percent of his passes for 2,689 yards, 24 touchdowns and just 8 interceptions. That Notre Dame football couldn’t turn that performance into a better record than 9-3 might not be on the quarterback.

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