UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

There was mismanagement by Brian Kelly in 2018, but the mismanagement came from not pulling Wimbush earlier.

The offense was absolutely stagnant with Brandon Wimbush at the helm in the early portion of 2018's season.

Back in 2017, he developed a bad case of the yips. There were numerous times that he'd overthrow a 5 yard pass, even when throwing to a big fellow the likes of Alize Mack, and other times that even a 6' 3" Equanimeous St. Brown had to leap and stretch to grab, which resulted in his getting absolutely smashed by 230 lb linebackers. There were even a few times that the hits St. Brown took ended up getting his neck crunched.

I do agree, that in 2017, he had a pretty good season, but when opposing defenses figured out that you could simply stack the box and force him to make an accurate throw, they shut down our previously high powered offense, even with those two first round picks on the left side of the line. A quarterback at this level should have been able to complete a pretty good percentage of his throws against that kind of a defense, but his sub-50% passing showed that his accuracy wasn't going to be enough.

We had all hoped that Brandon Wimbush would refine his mechanics, and improve his short and medium range passing skills during the off-season, but throughout the first three games of the 2018 season, we didn't see any improvement, and if anything, he regressed. There were times that he could have simply ran the ball for a first down, but he kept hesitating, thinking he could wait and complete a pass, only to miss an open receiver. Barely beating a weak Ball State team and a very mediocre Vanderbilt team showed that we would have been doomed if that kept up.

I remember walking into Notre Dame stadium in 2018 for the Ball State game, thinking that we would see a nice blowout, only to be feeling rather edgy for the entire game, and leaving the stadium with a big sense of relief. Well, that plus walking over to The Linebacker for some much-needed refreshment brought more relief... There were many times during that game that had he simply ran the ball, we would have scored at least two or three more TD's, but he ended up throwing three INT's instead.

Even the later game against Florida State, he didn't exactly have a very good game. By that time, though, the defense was in a really nice rhythm, and Dexter Williams carried the day with an incredible 200+ yards rushing game.

I wanted Brandon Wimbush to succeed just as much as anyone else, since he's one heck of an athlete, and was blessed with a very strong arm. That, plus he's a really nice guy, a class act, and a fellow ND alum who I am proud to call one of the fellow alums.

Unfortunately, he could never muster enough accuracy to thrive at this level like he should have, and the fact that UCF benched him in favor of a true freshman pretty much cemented the fact that he wasn't going to make it as a quarterback.