SOUTH BEND — A full month has passed since Notre Dame football’s 34-23 loss to Ohio State in the CFP national championship game, but some continue to second-guess Marcus Freeman’s fourth-quarter calculations amid a furious comeback that fell short.
Rob Ash is not among them.
As director of coaching development for Championship Analytics, which counts Notre Dame among its 100 FBS clients, Ash had no quarrel with Freeman’s decision to try a 27-yard field goal with 9 ½ minutes left and the Irish trailing the Buckeyes, 31-15.
“That was definitely the right decision at that point in time,” Ash said Thursday in a phone interview. “We strongly recommended a kick there.”
With possessions at a premium, Notre Dame faced fourth-and-goal from the 9-yard-line against the nation’s best red-zone defense. Freeman saw his decision backfire when kicker Mitch Jeter hit the upright and the Irish later converted a second two-point conversion attempt to pull within eight.
“I just thought instead of being down 16, let’s try to go down 13,” Freeman said in his postgame news conference. “I know it’s still a two-score game, but you have a better probability of getting 14 points than you do 16 points.”
Ash, who visits with Freeman and other client coaches each offseason as a sort of analytics sherpa, corroborated what many fans and pundits decried as fuzzy math.
“Given the exact score differential … 16 is only a two-possession game like 20% of the time,” Ash said. “Then you have to factor in a 9-yard conversion just to get the touchdown. And then the other piece that people forget is even if you were successful on the 9-yard conversion and made the two 2-pointers and everything worked right, which is not likely to happen, you still only tie.”
Notre Dame’s offense entered the season finale eighth in FBS with a 73.1% conversion rate (19 of 26) on fourth down. Ohio State’s defense came in tied for 16th nationally in fourth-down conversions allowed (41.4%).
“If it was a shorter fourth-and-goal situation, I probably would have gone for it,” Freeman said that night in Atlanta. “But I just felt fourth and nine was not a great chance for us to make that and decided to kick it, and we didn’t make it.”
Timing and the art of football analytics
A former college football coach of 41 years, including 36 years as a head coach at Drake, Montana State and Division III Juniata, Ash led his teams to 247 career victories.
Newly hired Notre Dame defensive coordinator Chris Ash (no relation) played safety for Rob Ash at Drake and was hired as his defensive coordinator at 24. CAI advised Rutgers footballduring Chris Ash’s three-plus seasons as head coach (2016-19), and the six-employee company sends weekly packets to its FBS clients as well as seven NFL teams.
CAI’s association with Notre Dame dates to Brian Kelly’s tenure.
“Every year I sit down with Marcus for a couple hours,” said Rob Ash, 73. “We go through every situation, primarily from their season, but a lot of other ones from across the country. We provide materials every week to our teams with situations that came up in other games while they were playing their game. They don’t have to make the mistake to learn the lesson.”
The most common discussion centers around what CAI terms “situational scoring.”
“We talk about those things all the time,” Ash said. “For example, if you’re up by three late in the game and it’s fourth and goal at the 2 or fourth and 1 at the 5, those are situations where we’d say go for it instead of kicking a field goal. The exact score makes a huge difference.”
Then again, Ash said: “Fourth and 1 at the 5 is going to be a go sometimes and it’s going to be a kick sometimes based on the score and the time remaining and who you’re playing. It’s not cookie cutter.”
Notre Dame’s fourth-and-2 fake punt attempt from its 33 against Ohio State also failed, but Ash was impressed with the season-long success rate on fake kicks and punts for Freeman, special teams coordinator Marty Biagi and first-year director of analytics Anthony Treash.
That included an 18-yard pass completion from Tyler Buchner to Mitchell Evans on a fourth-and-9 fake punt from the Irish 26 against USC.
“The analytics favors fake kicks,” Ash said, “because they have a very high incidence of success and they also have a very high incidence of producing explosive plays, which are statistically very important in games.”
He also notes fake punts are “a lot less likely to work at the 50-yard-line where somebody is going to be more suspicious of the fake than at the minus-29, where they’re going to be less suspicious of the fake.”
For all the preplanning and mock scenarios, the game-day decision (and its potential fallout) ultimately rests with the head coach.
“If their level of confidence in the fake matches the projected make rate on our recommended go, then they run the fake,” Ash said. “Now, a level of confidence is kind of subjective, of course. That’s where the magic of coaching comes in.”