Jonaz Walton Changed Notre Dame Football’s Backfield Against North Carolina

Notre Dame freshman running back Jonaz Walton was the most impressive back on the field for either team Saturday, carrying 23 times for 120 yards in the rain in a 37-26 win at North Carolina. He does not run like the rest of Notre Dame’s backfield, and given any semblance of daylight, he hits the hole with a gear Nolan James Jr. and Aneyas Williams do not have.

His 23 carries were as many as North Carolina’s entire offense had on the ground. James took nine for 65. Williams again finished behind both of them, with 42 yards on eight carries. Notre Dame ran it 45 times for 241 yards as a team for their best rushing performance of the season.

Plenty of Walton’s carries did not look like anything when they started. There were snaps where there was nothing there, and he came out of them with two, three, or four yards anyway. One of those is a shrug. A game’s worth of them in that rain is the difference between staying on schedule and punting, and the hidden yards added up in a game decided by 11 points.

Notre Dame Had the Plan Before the Weather Took Over

That production was not a staff finding a hot hand in a wet second half and riding it. “Yeah, we had a plan going in that we were going to use him early,” Marcus Freeman said, asked what kind of step the game was for the freshman.

The plan existed because Walton gives the offense something the other two do not. James and Williams have produced near carbon copies of each other this season: 262 yards on 55 carries for James and 266 on 60 for Williams, two backs doing the same job the same way.

“I think there’s some similarities with Nolan and Aneyas, and Jonaz just gives you a different type of kind of a different type of change-up. Maybe the speed, like Nolan and Aneyas are both plenty fast, but Jonaz has a different type of running style that I think gave us a spark, and he played really well today,” Freeman said.

Freeman made a point of calling James and Williams plenty fast, which is what a coach says about two backs he still needs. The rest of the answer said more. When he talked about Walton, he went to running style, and to what it looks like when the freshman has the ball.

Walton has 228 rushing yards on 39 carries, and more than half of that came Saturday.

The Third Quarter Told the Story

The third quarter is where it mattered. The rain hit the offense hardest after halftime, and CJ Carr never looked comfortable throwing a wet ball. “We knew we weren’t going to be able to throw the ball,” Freeman said, and what followed was a touchdown drive against a defense that knew what was coming.

“The backs were patient and trusted it, and so we were really in rhythm that third quarter of just sustaining that drive, being able to run the ball when they knew we were running the ball,” Freeman said.

Notre Dame averaged 5.4 yards a carry on the day, and the second half came against a defense with little reason to respect the pass.

“When they know you’re going to try to run the ball and you’re still able to run the ball because of the weather conditions, that’s a reflection of your team and the toughness and the physicality,” Freeman said.

A Backfield Order That No Longer Looks Settled

Carr threw four touchdown passes and still came away from the afternoon talking about the ground game.

“So, shout out to the O-line, and they deserve all the credit on the holes that were opening, and then the running backs running really hard in that first, second half,” he said.

The outside question was whether Notre Dame needed a day like this to prove it could run the ball when everybody in the stadium knew it was coming. Carr did not take it.

“No, we know what we have in those front five offensive linemen, and it’s explosive. And we know what we have in our backfield with the running backs. So that’s a very outside perspective. We know we can run the ball when we want to, and I thought we showed that today pretty well,” he said.

What Notre Dame has in that backfield is now what looks like an easy decision – get Jonaz Walton the ball more and more and live with the consequences of playing a freshman back because it significantly raises the ceiling of the offense. In better weather with the threat of the pass, Walton becomes even more of a weapon in this offense. The obvious concern with playing a freshman back inevitably comes back to pass protection, but if Walton continues to show the kind of explosiveness that Williams and James don’t, Notre Dame might just have to live with those concerns while getting Walton a crash course in pass protection over the final two months of the season.