Blue & Gold Illustrated: 2012 Notre Dame Football Preview
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BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED 2015 FOOTBALL PREVIEW ✦ 43 shorten the play sheet. There are other cir- cumstances in play there. We were protecting Everett with a very good defense. "Simpler offensively can be much better when you have a young guy there. You just want to let him go play and not give him too much to think about. In those instances, it was probably best for Everett and Tommy. "Malik's not really a young guy. He's go- ing on his fourth year here because he was a mid-year enrollee. He knows the offense very, very well. Tommy and Everett were young guys we were really trying to protect and keep things simple for them — and then we had a really good defense. Those are the two factors that stand out to me." Blue & Gold Illustrated: Where are the areas where you think Malik can continue to improve as a passer or at making smart decisions? Kelly: "Mechanically he gets a little overextended sometimes, which causes him to be a little less accurate than we would like him to be. He's made good progress with that. His lower trunk is big and strong, and sometimes he wants to strong-arm his throws, so he over-strides. A lot of that is he just has to be smoother in his transition throwing the ball. "The other area is tempo in reverse. He has so much information in his head, and he wants to use it all — and he doesn't have to. He can just run a play, but he wants to check to too many things. It's been a process for him. He's seen so much over the last few years with Tommy and Everett checking and changing things that he's a product of that. "When he gets up there, he wants to get into the perfect play. He doesn't need to, because he's a runner. At any time he can call one play, and it doesn't matter what a defense gives him — he can run it. We've got to get him thinking more in those terms. "With Tommy, you couldn't do that. The defense was going to overload pressure on a certain side. Tommy would have to check out of zone-option and go the other way — and Everett didn't want to run it. He'd rather check out of the run and throw the ball. With Malik we've said, 'Look, that's not you. You don't have to do that.' These are easy fixes for him." Blue & Gold Illustrated: When you were down 34-3 at Arizona State last year, there was still a feeling that Everett's skills as a passer could bring you back, and he almost did by cutting the score to 34-31. Is there a confidence with Malik that if you're down two scores, he can bring you back with the pass? Kelly: "Oh, sure, and we won't be down 34-3 with Malik because the game will be played a little bit differently. … We're very confident that he could run a two-minute drill. Having said that, we will spend more time on it. "We could kind of roll out of bed with Everett, and he could run a two-minute drill. We'd probably run it five minutes every week, and we'd feel like we're good. We have to spend a little more time with Malik on it because it's not something that comes as easy to him. But there are a lot of other things that come real easy to him that didn't come easy to Everett." Blue & Gold Illustrated: You had a safety net with Rees behind Golson in 2012, and you had enough confidence in Zaire last year to start him in the bowl. Is there a safety net this year behind Malik, and does that alter your approach? Kelly: "We don't have a guy like that. If we had three or four easy games coming into the start of the season, Malik doesn't play as much and you get your No. 2 a lot of work. You don't have that at Notre Dame. You open up with Texas. "We can't concern ourselves with anything else but getting our No. 2 ready to continue to help us to win. The unfortunate part about it is we didn't get our No. 2 enough work in the spring [with Golson still here]. It is what it is." Blue & Gold Illustrated: Are DeShone Kizer and Brandon Wimbush a different category of quarterback than Malik, where maybe you would have to go back to more of an Everett-type style with them? Kelly: "They are different styles. DeShone is very smart and extremely knowledgeable about what we're doing. We have a great deal of confidence that we could run almost anything with DeShone. You could put him up against Malik in terms of his knowledge base. It's execution with him. He needs to throw the ball more accurately. He makes good decisions — he just needs a lot more work and reps. "Wimbush is going to be that young, ex- plosive player that is just going to need some time." Blue & Gold Illustrated: You will face three fairly good defensive lines right out of the gate. Will you learn early there what your offensive line is about, or do you have a good idea about it already? Kelly: "We've got a pretty good idea. We're going to lean heavily on what we con- sider one of our strengths, and that' s our of- fensive line. We feel like we have to. "But if you want to over-commit to the run, we have great perimeter speed that you're going to have to deal with, too. That's why we've probably got the best blend we've had on offense. If you want to say that you're go- ing to put an extra guy down inside, you're going to have to deal with our perimeter play- ers one-on-one — and I don't think that's a good matchup for anybody." Blue & Gold Illustrated: Nine of the last 10 national champs have averaged a minimum 200 rushing yards, and nine of last year's final top 10 averaged at least 200 yards. Other than 2012 when you went to the title game, most of your teams have been in the 130- to 160-yard range. Can this team take on the identity you had versus LSU where you rushed for 263 yards and emphasized physicality? Kelly: "We have to play to what our strengths are, and it's taken us a while to build the depth nec- essary to pound the football. We haven't had that, and we've got that now. We've built this to get back to being physical. "If you put nine guys on the line of scrim- mage, I'm going to throw the ball 50 times, until you decide you're going to play us dif- ferently. If you want to even it up, I'm going to run the ball 50 times. We're now at a point where we feel like if you give us the oppor- tunity to run the football, we'll run the ball down your throats, and that's how we want to be. "We weren't quite there, but we think we are now — that we can impose our will in terms of running the football. If you can run it, you have a great chance of winning foot- ball games. We understand that. What I feel we have to be able to do is the quarterback has to be part of our running game. If the quarterback is part of the running game, we will be one of the top rushing offenses. "The No. 1 personnel grouping today in college football and the NFL is 11 person- nel [one running back, one tight end, three receivers]. You can't pound the football like Notre Dame pounded it 20 years ago. There's not a fullback on the field. It's not built that way. So how are you going to do it? "You can do it with the quarterback. If you have a quarterback that is central to the running game like at Ohio State or Oregon, the teams that are rushing for a lot, they're including the quarterback as runners. That's where we think our edge is this year. The quarterback is going to be central to the run- ning game, which is going to open up every- thing else for us." ✦ "We're now at a point where we feel like if you give us the opportunity to run the football, we'll run the ball down your throats, and that's how we want to be." KELLY