Blue & Gold Illustrated: 2012 Notre Dame Football Preview
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82 ✦ BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED 2017 FOOTBALL PREVIEW BY BRYAN DRISKELL I n the first three years of the College Football Playoff, only one team — Flor- ida State in 2014 — has advanced to the final four with a defense that ranked outside of the top 30 nationally according to the Fremeau Efficiency Index. Only one other program ranked outside the top 20, and only three of the 12 teams to make the CFP in its first three seasons ranked outside the top 10. There is little doubt that putting together a quality defen- sive effort greatly enhances a team's chances at a playoff run. During that stretch, the Fighting Irish have ranked 58th, 63rd and 79th in defensive effi- ciency, and had their worst three-year stretch of defense in school history. Notre Dame's inability to make stops in key moments and to keep points off the board resulted in head coach Brian Kelly making an unprecedented in-season change, when he dismissed coordinator Brian Van- Gorder after a 1-3 start. Following his pro- gram's 4-8 season, the Irish head coach tasked former Wake Forest defensive coor- dinator Mike Elko with righting the ship. Elko will look to build a championship- caliber defense in South Bend, and the man- ner in which he plans to build his unit will look quite different to Notre Dame fans. He sat down with Blue & Gold Illustrated in mid-June, and broke down his defense and his expectations for the 2017 season. Blue & Gold Illustrated: Is the founda- tion of your defense built around how your teams play or the specific schemes and looks you give opponents? Elko: "The game is played on the field. Too many times we try to play it in the meet- ing room. At the end of the day, the better we are fundamentally the less stress there is on the scheme. If we can come off blocks, if we can talk, if we can run hard to the football, then those things will overcome any bad situation we get into, any misplayed defen- sive situations we get into. "Even when everything is running well and we call the perfect scheme, we still have to tackle. That's the one thing through and through, every single play is always the end all, be all. If we can do the fundamental things correctly, it becomes a successful play or a minimized negative play. That has kind of become our emphasis with it. "… We try to do a really good job of get- ting the kids into all the football positions they need to be successful as opposed to spending all of our time talking X's and O's — and then in the Temple game we miss a tackle or we come free on a blitz and we don't get the guy down [because] we've never drilled or worked any of that stuff." BGI: So how your team plays the game is the foundation, and then comes the emphasis on scheme? Elko: "It's a building blocks thing. Where does defensive football start? It starts at the fundamental level of understanding the game, understanding what's going on, then it moves to running, tackling, block destruction. "Then it moves to execution of scheme. Those to me are the fundamental building blocks of defense." BGI: So when you made the decision to come to Notre Dame and you looked at film and you break down your team, what were the things you identified that you really needed to address and improve here? Elko: "We didn't think we played the game fundamentally well. That was the one thing that jumped out to us on tape. We Notre Dame hired Elko to turn around a defense coming off its worst three-year stretch in program history. PHOTO BY JOE RAYMOND DEFENSE Q&A Resurrection Mike Elko must revive an underachieving Notre Dame defense