Obviously
It was the annual Blue-Gold game for Notre Dame Football, but all eyes were on the green jerseys out on the field. The Irish are in the middle of a quarterback competition, and fans from all over the country were ready to absorb every down as they make their own assessments of Steve Angeli, Kenny Minchey, and CJ Carr.
With so many injuries and other players being held out for precautionary reasons, this spring game wasn’t like some of the more recent ones with a draft. This game was purely OFFENSE vs DEFENSE with a scoring system intricate enough to be taught by Dr. Hauenstein in Notre Dame’s math department. Because of all of this strangeness, we got a final score of BLUE 76 (offense) and GOLD 31 (defense).
But whatever.
It was clear to this reporter that of the three quarterbacks, CJ Carr had the best day. Carr was 14-19 for 170 yards with 2 touchdowns and one interception. It wasn’t just the stat line that was impressive (although the interception really dings it up) it was the throws that Carr made along the way. The accuracy and feel were exceptional, and there were at least 4 passes that made me audibly gasp a little bit because of how pretty they were.
To be fair, I didn’t think Angeli and Minchey played a whole lot worse than Carr despite lesser numbers. Angeli looked very comfortable within the offense, and if the quarterbacks weren’t protected today — Minchey had several moments where he could have done a lot of damage on the ground.
It was fun to see the freshman receivers like Elijah Burress, Jerome Bettis Jr., and Scap Richardson run around out there. Burress and Scrap both caught a touchdown for the Blue squad.
As far as the defense is concerned — Karson Hobbs made a lot of noise today, and I liked what he was doing on the back end. In fact, Notre Dame’s secondary looked really good most of the day with some big plays by Ben Minich and Luke Talich. It was Minich that picked off Carr and Talich had a couple of gorgeous goaline tackles. Despite the score, there were a lot of things to like about the defense with new defensive coordinator, Chris Ash.
But again… this day was really about the QB competition. Notre Dame still has three more practices before the spring practice season ends, so don’t expect to find out if there is any type of hierarchy at QB for at least another week or two.
My biggest takeaway I’d also the softest… Notre Dame can win a lot of games with any of the three signal callers. Today it was Carr that edged out the other two, but how much that means to the overall situation is still to be determined.
