Yeah 10-3 in year they easily had a top 5 hardest schedule in college football is awful. And without their transfer portal QB they light up a pretty solid PAC12 team yesterday as well. Not sure they’re dead although I’m still not sure the head coach is the answer jury is out.
ND was minus Sam Hartman at QB, Audric Estime at RB and minus its four top receivers.
ND had 19 players out for the Sun Bowl due to transfers and NFL declarations/opt outs. How many did Oregon State have?
ND's offensive coordinator had left for the Troy head coach job and ND had fired its wide receivers coach at the end of the regular season.
The truth is that ND was much deeper in talent than OSU was and it showed.
The Irish are 19-7 the past two years under Marcus Freeman, who is killing it in recruiting and in the transfer portal. (the latter a new thing at ND).
Freeman just hired Mike Denbrock from LSU as his new offensive coordinator.
ND took the coordinator from Brian Kelly's #1 offense in the country with a big $9 million, 4 year deal.
Defensive coordinator (top ten defense this year) Al Golden is reportedly going to sign a contract extension for big $$.
ND is 73-17 the past seven years, with two playoff bids, under two different coaches. If that is "dead", then every school but 5-6 are not rotting corpses, but skeletons.
The talk around ND is that the administration is all in with Freeman and have loosened some self imposed restrictions on football.
With a new school president and a new AD coming in, maybe ND will decide to reduce some other internal restrictions (core class recruit requirement, restricted undergrad transfers, etc.) as well.