Blue & Gold Illustrated: 2012 Notre Dame Football Preview
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28 ✦ BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED 2016 FOOTBALL PREVIEW BY ANDREW OWENS T he script quickly flipped from joy to devastation for safety Drue Tranquill after each of his two season-ending injuries at Notre Dame. Toward the end of his freshman campaign in 2014, he was inserted into the starting lineup against Northwestern. The following week, he suffered a torn ACL in the first half against Louisville and, not knowing the full extent of it, played the rest of the half and even recorded his first career interception. After a long jour- ney led to his return in 2015, he proved to be a vital component of Notre Dame holding the explosive triple- option Georgia Tech of- fense to seven points in the first half of an even- tual 30-22 win Sept. 19. Near the end of the first half, he scampered to- ward the end zone and broke up a Yellow Jack- ets pass. To celebrate the play, he jumped up to celebrate with linebacker Joe Schmidt before the unluckiest of injuries occurred. Tranquill landed awkwardly on his knee — not the one that had been surgically repaired the previous fall — and suffered another torn ACL. Overheard on the NBC microphones was Tranquill howling in agony as another season was ended prematurely. "I felt my knee kind of give way and I kind of was screaming like, 'No, not again,'" Tranquill said this spring. "The physical pain was really bad right away, and it was kind of the emotional pain of knowing I'll never play with guys like Matthias [Farley] and Joe again. "It was kind of a realization that I was about to go through eight months of what I just went through again. [It was] very difficult." "What do you say about a kid that gets up and chest bumps and doesn't turn his ankle, but he tears his ACL," a crestfallen Brian Kelly wondered the next day. "I don't know what to say anymore. [Tarean] Folston is run- ning and he tears his ACL with no contact. I mean, it's just one of the craziest things. "You can't explain it, so it doesn't do us any good to really spend much time thinking about it, other than we feel terrible for Drue, for Malik [Zaire] and for all of the players that we've lost. But not much we can do about it, other than dig down deep and play the best we can for these guys, be- cause they have given up everything to play this game. So that's all we try to focus on." In addition to Tran- quill's fluke injury in week three, Folston had been lost for the season just seven plays into the opener on a non- contact play. In August, freshman Shaun Craw- ford backpedaled and tore his ACL on another non-contact instance. "It's just one of those things that is there anything you could have done differently in that situation?" Kelly said last fall. "That's certainly what I try to do in each one of these situations. And that one there [tight end Dur- ham Smythe] was nothing you could do about it. It was just part of the game. "If there's anything we can do in terms of injury prevention, they're generally ones that would happen in practice that probably hurt the most. Did we do something in practice that could have put us in a better position? "But during games, very rarely is it some- thing you can control." *** After two years of devastating injuries — one could make the argument that a fully healthy Irish squad reaches the four-team College Football Playoff in 2015 — Kelly is no longer content with attributing the losses to bad luck. He and the Irish football pro- FEELING THE HURT Notre Dame has been snakebitten by injuries the past two seasons, but hopes that luck will change in 2016 "Science will play a part in making sure that we're staying ahead of injuries and not coming back and saying, 'Gee whiz, we're just unlucky.' That's not acceptable. It's been a priority for me to exhaustively look at all areas on how we can be on top of injury prevention for this football team." HEAD COACH BRIAN KELLY