Sergio Brown blocks a punt to give ND good field position, but the idiot gets flagged for excessive celebration and costs them most of the field position he gained. I still think ND wins.
Clausen: 20/23, 359 yards, and 4 TDs. Plus, at least two of the incompletions were bad drops. Not sure about the third. He's simply looking incredible. Of course, Hawaii is a terrible team, and that's precisely why I picked ND.
another long TD to Tate, this time on 3rd and 20. Clausen now 22/25 for 401 yards and 5 TDs. Tate has 6 catches for 177 yards and 3 TDs
Clausen looks incredible this game. I still think Charlie is getting the short end of the stick, he's coaching a rather young team. He should get another year or two to show whether or not he can produce with his own players.
I think he can be really good if he gets protection. Admittedly, I don't watch ND that often, and Hawaii's secondary isn't too good, but he can really throw it. When he's not given time, he gets in trouble. Meanwhile, I'm particularly happy because I picked this correctly and almost everyone I read online was on Hawaii. This is pretty meaningless, but still, on TGG, the other four to pick it all went Hawaii. Hawaii usually does have very strong homefield, but ND was there for a week and had time to adjust, and Hawaii is just really awful this season. The difference between last year's team and this year's team is night and day. ND isn't very good, but Hawaii is... bad. For example, there's a guy named Brian Fremeau who has tried to mimic DVOA for college football and develop a decent statistical system. He ranks Hawaii #101.
I underestimated Hawaii's terrible secondary but lets keep this in perspective they only won against Hawaii and managed to find a way to lose to terrible Syracuse earlier. Notre Dame is still very weak it is just that Hawaii was weaker.
Hawaii sucks. That is true. No one said Notre Dame is a great team because they whipped up on Hawaii. No one even said they're a good team. The fact remains that they blew out Hawaii after you guaranteed a Hawaii victory.
The way I saw it there was 2 ways of this going, either the game is close and the refs would give Hawaii the victory like it always seems to occur in Hawaii, or the other way which I neglected because Notre Dame was bad (I mean come on losing to Syracuse???) and my knowledge of Hawaii was very poor which did happen would be that Hawaii after falling behind they go on a personal foul spree and crumble since that is also how Hawaii also does it.
Hawaii does suck, and the main reason they were bowl eligable is because of the bullshit officiating that MSU is talking about...but the refs in this game weren't WAC officials, I think they were from the Mountain West...I'm not actually sure though. I know that Fresno State wasn't a very good team this year, but the WAC referees beat them in Hawaii, not the actual Warriors. They called back two kick return TDs and an interception when the Bulldogs played at Hawaii this year. If the Warriors are in a close game at home, they'll usually win because of some game changing calls. Notre Dame has been awful in bowls, most people thought they'd continue their losing ways against Hawaii...who had home field advantage...but the Warriors didn't have a in-conference officiating crew. Side note: NEVER, EVER go to a Hawaii home game. Their fans have to be the worst in all of sports - spitting, throwing bottles, pushing, and basically anything you can think of to get a rise out of the visiting fans. They hate people from the continental US.
yay a bowl victory in 10 years. it was against Hawaii in the Hawaii bowl yay........... Clausen looked fantastic... now if only the OL could look like that against top 15 teams in the NCAA he'd look like that a lot. I don't know about him being a good pro though.... eh.
