Here we are in the seventh inning stretch. We've had another bye break, and there are just two games left in the regular season. All through the Nation fans are wondering which Irish team will show up — the team that turned the tables on Florida State (by being themselves), or the team that kicked the can against Boston College and Navy (by being their own inverse).

HOW COME, COACH?

I've been a big proponent of the inverse-Irish theory myself. I wrote after the Boston College loss that the inverse-Irish showed up instead of our regular team. That's a fanciful notion, and perhaps it's the best explanation after all of the team's recent turn for the worse.

There are other explanations, however. You could defend as reasons any or all of the following:

The Critical Players Theory — Sapp and Hilliard, crucial to the defense, have been out for a while. Hilliard is a force in the middle and makes things easier than anyone knows for the rest of the line and the middle linebackers. All of the Irish front seven depend on his play to open up theirs. Sapp is the brains of the secondary, like Watson is the brains up front. He gets everyone in position and on the same page. Against an option team like Navy, Sapp is the last line of intelligent defense — the default last tackler who will always be perfectly placed, intelligently positioned. Without Gerome, well, mistakes were made by many.

The Overdog Syndrome — This explanation says the team plays better as the underdog and feels under-challenged as the overdog. That's bad news, but hey, some teams are like that. The good news — if this explanation is right, the only tough game we'll face is against Rutgers this weekend. We'll certainly be underdogs the rest of the way.

The Wounded Duck Dilemma — The team has played hard for seven games and has taken its bruises. Jeff Faine is playing on one good leg and fumes; Rashon Powers-Neal wasn't playing at all; and with Marcus Wilson unable to block linebackers, Ryan Grant has been playing from a virtual hospital bed — he's in when he should have been healing. The warriors are wounded, and the wounded make mistakes.

The Patchwork Offense Explanation — Willingham is adapting his offense to Bob Davie's athletes. This from no less than Bill Walsh, who praises him for it. There's a downside, though. It's a tough job, and yields a patchwork playbook. Given this, the guys have played above themselves. So be glad and be patient — help is on the way, next year.

The Worn-Out Warrior Condition — Hey, the guys are exhausted. Give'em a week off and they're good as new. Just gotta catch their breaths. Been a long fall, ya know.

Any or all of these could explain the last two games. The only benefit of my own Inverse Irish Theory is that since it doesn't depend on reason, it's immune to reasonable attack.

THE GOAL BEHIND THE GOAL

I think what's really going on, however, is much simpler than any of the explanations above. It's the "goal behind the goal" problem. You've seen it a thousand times, both in your own life and in the lives of countless sports teams. You watched it happen to a Notre Dame team just last winter.

It's this. People have a wonderful ability to succeed. Almost everyone succeeds at his or her real goals. Often, however, you can't tell what people's goals really are until you see what they've actually accomplished. The goal behind the goal — that is, the real goal behind the sound-bite goal — is more frequently revealed by what a person accomplishes than by anything else.

Only from the hindsight of 1939, for example, could you tell that Hitler's real goal, almost from the day he came to power, was war. His stated goal through those early years, was Lebensraum — room for ethnic Germans to live and breathe. Perhaps he even believed it. But the thread to war started in the early 30s, and it's a straight one.

For sports teams, the principle usually works like this. At the start of the season, the stated goal is always to win the championship, whatever that means. Inexplicable failures along the way, however, reveal other agendas, other goals. Teams lose for a number of reasons, but if the reason is an inexplicable lapse in performance over a reasonable stretch of games, you could say the team, as a team, has stopped performing, usually because it has reached its real goal.

Thus, the goal of most young pro teams is to reach the Super Bowl, not win it, regardless of what they say publicly. How do we know? Because most of the time, they inexplicably play below their previous level when they first arrive at the big game. Only when just getting to the game is not enough does the team have a real shot at winning it.

This is also how we know that, secretly, Mike Brey's Irish hoopsters didn't have winning the NCAA Tournament as their goal. Making the middle rounds and playing well against Duke was good enough. How do we know? Once they went ahead against the Blue Demons, their level of play unexplainably dropped, and they lost the game. They had accomplished their real goal, regardless of the stated one. (Perhaps that only has to happen once.)

Note that in all of these cases, the team drops its level of play at the point that the real goal is reached. That's how you know that the team has achieved its real goal, regardless of the stated goals. It stops because the job it really set out to do is done.

THE SEVEN-GAME STRETCH

How does this apply to this year's Irish? Simple. When did the Irish "inexplicably" drop their level of play? After they'd put the Florida State game out of reach, by going up 34-10 in the fourth quarter. The Irish slide starts there, with the 14 points given up to the Seminoles in the last two minutes of that game. And the slide hasn't yet stopped, after two full games.

I believe that regardless of the words coming from the players, before the season, by the weird and wonderful process of group-think, they had unknowingly set Florida State, not the National Championship, as the real target. The coaches didn't do this, but the players did.

You probably did this yourself. For the most optimistic among us, the peak was Florida State — the rest was, well, the rest. It's certainly reasonable to think the team, in the recesses of its collective heart, thought the same; its actions sure bear that out.

Would the players be aware they did this? Not really. But it can happen all the same. There's lots of cross-talk that glues a team together, lots of chatter and banter, which added together creates the group-think that makes a team a team. No individual controls what all this input adds up to in terms of deeply held team goals.

Whether you agree with this analysis or not, the facts are the facts. The Irish stretched themselves through seven games to get to and win the eighth, and when they did they stopped playing like themselves.

Sadly, I don't think this analysis is wrong. The fact that the team peaked and fell in the fourth quarter against Florida State is quite a clue.

IN THE REALM OF THE INEFFABLE

That's as may be, Rock, I hear you say, but the past is still the past. What about tomorrow? What about Rutgers and USC?

Good questions. I don't think the problem the team is facing is either mechanical or strategic, so a mechanical solution or a change in strategy won't work. That places the answer in the realm of the ineffable, the realm of group-think.

Or worse, in the realm of the undoable. Consider the months of planning and "gelling" it takes to get a sports team to set and then achieve its initial goals — all the pre-season preparation, all the games already played, all the effort of will that's expended toward that end.

It's like you've worked all year to lose 20 pounds, and then you decide to go for the next five. You'd think it would be easy to knock off "just a few more," but of course, it's not. The next five pounds, once you stop, are next to impossible to lose. It's all you can do to keep the last five from returning.

Same with sports teams. It's hard to set group-goals, real ones, and hard to achieve them. That process doesn't turn on a dime, and generally doesn't turn in mid-season.

So after months of optimism about this Notre Dame team, I'm now sounding a note of caution. My original season predictions may well come true (if you're curious, you can read them here.) But that prediction assumed a twelve-game goal, not a seven-game stretch to FSU plus a breather.

Can this Irish team restart its engines? One can only hope.

THE SCARLET KNIGHTS

I'll forego the usual analysis and say just this. Had this game been played before the FSU game, the final score would be 28-7 at least. (The Rutgers points come via special teams — Rutgers has one of the best kick returners in the country.)

So consider this week's game an indicator. If it's at all close, if the Irish sputter like a mis-timed jalopy, you'll know that Rock was right — that the group mind of the team, that ephemeral something that transcends individuals and creates the one from the many — has truly decided to knock off and go home. In that case, the game is thus left to Irish individuals — as individuals — to win.

Will they down the Knights? Most likely, though a loss is possible. But more important will be the character of the win. If ugly, pray that the Overdog Syndrome is a better explanation than the one I'm proposing here. The players will be huge underdogs to the Trojans, and they may need that to save them.

Then again I could be wrong, and the guys just needed a break. Worn-out warriors taking a seventh inning stretch. Batter up? We'll see.

PINSTICKERS OF THE WEEK

We're nearing the end of the road. There aren't many opportunities left to get those teams that need getting. But as tired as our guys may be, other teams are in the same long stretch. And these games represent unusual and heated rivalries.

So how do we climb the polls? Let's count the ways.

First, give the noble Knights what they came for — experience losing to a far better team.

Second, slide thin steel, accompanied by your choice of incantation, into these team bobbleheads:

• Ohio State vs. Michigan — The big enchilada, beef with double cheese. A Michigan victory tumbles another undefeated into one-loss soup, gives ND a boost via strength of schedule, and as a bonus, provides a BCS quality win as well. All good things. Pins to you, Bucks. You can't last forever.
   
• Washington State vs. Washington — A long shot, but not out of reach. This is a quirky series, spoilers tend to win, and Washington could pull this out. Go Rick. Cougars get the pins.
   
• Oklahoma vs. Texas Tech — Another enchilada, but veggie. Can Texas Tech do to Oklahoma what it did to Texas? Hope so. Go Red Raiders (can't tell that from the uniforms, can you). Sooner get pins once more.
   
• USC vs. UCLA — I hate to say it, but if USC wins, ND's strength of schedule goes up. If the Trojans win, though, we better hope the god that invented hubris is on duty next weekend. If we play like we have been, we'll need all the divine intervention we can get. But here goes — fight on, Trojans; Bruins get the pins. (Did I say that? Yikes.)

That's a load of pins, but we could do some real good this week.

Let's see — we reverse the Seven-Game Stretch Syndrome, beat Rutgers, and burst the Trojan bubble; all of this week's pinstickers come home; and suddenly Notre Dame could pop to fifth in the polls. Not bad for one week's work.

Add to that Miami's coming game with a wounded Virginia Tech, Wash State's season-ending contest with UCLA, Oklahoma's with a weak but hopeful Oklahoma State, and various conference title games, and yes, there's hope indeed. Just gotta get those pesky group-think goals in order and we're all set.

Yours in goals (may we score many),

Rock

(c) Rock Kanutski
All rights reserved.
 

The season according to Rock:

Out On a Limb: This Problematic Season
(season's predictions, after Purdue)

Backward and Forward: Between the Michigans
(before Michigan State)

Back In the Saddle
(before Stanford)

Midterm Grades: Is There an A In Team?
(before Air Force)

One More Myth, One More Legend
(before Florida State)

Once and Future Giants
(on Willingham)

Like Fighting Your Brother
(before Boston College)

Playing the Pickup Game
(before Navy)