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

It’s worth asking how we’d be talking about this if the counterfactual had played out instead: they sneak three times and punt in the heavy rain, and on one of those four plays the ball comes loose — the kind of late, wet fumble everyone has seen — leading to a quick scoop-and-score, followed by a far easier two-point conversion. At that point you’re heading to overtime, which is essentially a coin flip, and I suspect we’d be hearing just as much criticism about exposing the ball and the punt unit in those conditions.