ROSE BOWL/CFP SEMIS: Irish looking to avoid repeat of last meeting with Alabama

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish will try to avoid the same result handed them by Eddie Lacy and the Alabama Crimson Tide in the BCS Championship Game following the 2012 season. (Alabama Media Relations)

By GRAHAM DUNN

Brian Kelly knew the day would come when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish would once again meet the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Not that he has been counting the days.

“Look, if you're not getting better every year in everything in life, you're getting left behind,” Kelly said. “So you need to look internally at what you're doing. Even after going undefeated that year, we lost in the National Championship game, and we were looked at as not a very good football team. We needed to look at the things that could help us grow. And we've been doing that each and every year.”

It’s been nine years since the two teams met in the BCS Championship game in Miami. The Tide had its way with the Irish in a 42-14 drubbing that was never close.

“We're a different program,” Kelly explained. “We have to be. You have to change and you have to be able to stay up with the current trends and things that are occurring every single day. We all do, right? Whatever business we're in. So, yeah, we're a different organization.

“We're a different program. We stand for the same things. Our mission is still the same, to graduate champions. But the way we go about things on a day-to-day basis, you know, how we develop our players, who we're looking for in the recruiting process, they have to still fit Notre Dame and what we stand for. But you've got to be ever changing. You've got to be able to keep your pulse on what's going on in college football. That's just the nature of it.”

Kelly was in his third year at Notre Dame while Nick Saban was in his sixth and looking for his third national title.

To review, Alabama led by 28 points at halftime and had a 35-point lead before the Irish scored its first points of the game.

Since then, Notre Dame has been in the playoffs one other time, losing to Clemson in the semifinals in the 2018 Cotton Bowl.

But Kelly and the Irish are better, at least good enough to have beaten Clemson in the regular season and make the playoffs for a second time. They spent most of the season among the top two teams in the country.

But the ACC Championship all but opened up old wounds of whether they belong in the national championship discussion.

“I don't necessarily know if we were missing details (in the loss to Clemson),” stated offensive lineman Tommy Kraemer. “I think we were still on all our stuff. There were a few things here and there. We could have played a little more physical up front, but we learned from it. We're moving on and ready to take that to Alabama.

“It just comes back to the details. You know, it's not one thing or two things. It's just being detailed in everything we do, whether it's watching a little bit more film or getting a little bit more drills after practice. It always comes down to the details and our position. I think we've done a great job this week, and we'll continue doing it moving forward.”

Alabama coach Nick Saban is not concerned about what happened back in 2012. He stated this Irish team is more than capable of winning Friday in the Rose Bowl.

“I thought they had a very good team in 2012, and I've always had a tremendous amount of respect for Brian Kelly wherever he's been a coach. He's had a tremendous amount of success,” Saban said

“But I think their team reflects the kind of team that anybody would want to coach in terms of how they compete, how hard they play, sort of the discipline and all the intangible things you try to develop and build in your team and in your program. And I think they do it extremely well, and that's obviously a great compliment to him and his leadership and ability to get his team to be able to play that way on a consistent basis.”

If history is to repeat itself, Notre Dame will struggle against the Tide but this time it might be the passing game that Alabama possess, not that the Crimson Tide is lacking a running attack.

“Certainly we're cognizant of the fact that this is an electric offense and scores bushels and bushels of points,” Kelly said. “And we want to be able to play complementary football. That is, keep Alabama's offense off the field while we're certainly scoring as well.

“So I think we're not running the Princeton four-corner offense, but we are trying to run our offense, which has been one that has traditionally been a ball-control offense. So that still has to be in our mind in terms of we can't come into this game and change who we are, but the nice part about it is that's kind of been our DNA this year.”