Notre Dame's defense is falling apart, and a chunk of the fan base has decided Navy's offensive line is to blame. It isn't, and pretending otherwise lets the people actually responsible off the hook.
Drayk Bowen, who had a team-high seven tackles before halftime and entered the day as Notre Dame's leading tackler on the season, got rolled up on late in the first half and had to be helped off. That's a real and costly injury for a Notre Dame team that was already thin. Nothing reported from Saturday points to a chop block, a dirty play, or anything an official flagged. Navy's option scheme has carried a reputation for low blocking for years, and that reputation is doing a lot of work right now that the actual game tape isn't backing up. Nobody's pointed to a penalty or a replay that shows otherwise. What people have is a scary visual and a grudge against the blocking scheme that predates this Saturday by years.
The counter is simple. Navy plays a physical, option-heavy style that puts bodies at players' legs by design, and that's where the ugly collisions come from. Navy ran for 163 yards in the first half before Notre Dame's defense held it to 49 in the second. That swing happened because Notre Dame figured out how to tackle option football for thirty minutes straight, which is exactly what Navy does to everybody it plays.
Notre Dame's threadbare defense has nothing to do with Saturday. DJ McKinney is out for an extended stretch with an ankle injury from the BYU game. Brauntae Johnson has been out since Week 1 with a foot injury. Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa was already sidelined with a thumb injury from the North Carolina game before Navy even kicked off. Bowen's injury landed on top of a crisis that had been building for six weeks, and it's the only piece of that pile that happened against Navy.
Notre Dame, now 7-1, heads into a game against Miami with a defense held together by whatever's left of the depth chart. Blaming the opponent that just ran through them for a half is a lot more comfortable than asking why the training room has been this full since September. Freeman's program has absorbed one defensive starter after another without much public reckoning about why, and Saturday gave everyone a convenient villain in blue and gold stripes instead.
The damage came from Notre Dame's own run of injuries, piling up for two months before the Midshipmen ever showed up at Gillette Stadium. If the defense can't hold up against Miami, the attrition Notre Dame let accumulate over six weeks is why.
