Corwin worked hard here--very hard--and that may have accounted for his troubles. But his post-game take on Niumatalolo's comments was a bit off. Here's what Niumatalolo actually said:
“I think the one thing that helped us, and I really hope this doesn’t come across wrong, but I think the thing that helped us this year was last year because we knew that they’d line up the same way. We didn’t execute very well last year, and coming into this year they did a great job against us last year defensively, so we had a pretty good clue that they were going to come back and do the same things as they did last year, and we had a few things. We were expecting that same defense that we saw last year. But it was still a grind. I mean, they’re still a great defense, and we thought we had some alignments in some of our formations. But it was a grind to get yardage against them even though we thought we had some numbers advantages in certain formations."
So, Niumatalolo essentially said, hey, their defense was awesome against us last year (2008), we can probably expect them to do the same things this year because they basically shut us down cold. And, maybe Niumatalolo got that impression because JOHN TENUTA SUGGESTED THAT ND WOULD REPEAT THE SUCCESSFUL DEFENSIVE GAME PLAN FROM THE PREVIOUS YEAR (from the Journal Gazette):
Notre Dame had success keeping Navy’s rushing attack in check last season, Tenuta’s first with the Irish. Notre Dame held Navy to 11 first downs and 178 rushing yards. Tenuta said the Irish can use last year’s success going into this season’s game.“I think that’s the basis of what you install,” Tenuta said. “You go back to what we did well, and you build from there. That’s your starting point, but obviously, they know that too.”
(Credit to the Birddog site: https://thebirddogblog.com/2009/11/12/navy-23-notre-dame-21-corwin-brown-says-things/ )
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