Welcome to Irish Illustrate Insider, brought to you by Irish Illustrate.com. It is the Monday after

Notre Dame's 4131 victory over USC. Nordrome now 6 and 1 ranked number 10 in the AP poll and well

positioned heading into the by week as Notre Dame looks forward to

the home stretch with a great opportunity to at least put itself in position to land a

playoff spot. We'll see what happens with the rest of college football. But guys with Pete

Samson and Tim O'Malley, just some of your following follow-up thoughts from our post-game analysis on the field.

Yeah, I thought that it was a game for Deshaun Kaiser where maybe he didn't take a big step forward.

And I think we've spent a lot of time in the last few pods talking about how he's making incremental progress.

No turnover is significant.

But I think it was kind of one of those more game manager type games. I definitely would not take away his second throw to Will Fuller because

that was just a great, beautiful throw. The first one, I think pretty much any quarterback

under his roster could have made it. You shouldn't miss that one. You should not miss that one and he didn't.

And I thought it was interesting hearing for Brian Kelly because so many times we talked to him about like, well, could you run more? Could you commit to the run game? Or it's like, hey, the passing. I like the passing. Let's talk about passing. We can throw in wind and rain in any conditions. And this was kind of one of those times where he said, no, we needed to do more run-based stuff.

And even Sunday in the follow-up teleconference, he talked about taking things off the quarterback's

plate, which he is not really want to do most weeks.

So I thought it showed maybe an understanding of where Deshaun Kaiser is. And, I mean, I sort of look at those two 90-yard drives as really defining moments for Notre Dame's offense. And in those two drives, Deschon Kaiser was two of five or 12 yards in the touchdown of the court of Robinson, which is fine. It's not a criticism at all. I think it's a compliment to play calling in Notre Dame's offensive line. And to your point, we talked about this just pre-podcast and Tim and I

both alluded to it, I think, in columns. I think the offense can be better than it was. It left

points on the field and they scored 34 offensive points. I mean, nice play by Adori Jackson

to cause the fumble on Tori Hunter. Sometimes fans forget and media forgets that the other team has players too. He should have tucked it in a little more, but really nice play. First to go out of three, that one's on Notre Dame's offense, I think, but they went backwards and had to kick a field goal. And, you know, I don't want to say all four sacks were on Kaiser, because we haven't looked at the film fully yet for that.

I would have to guess at least three of them are going to be.

Kelly said three of them. Okay, three of them, okay, yeah. And, I mean, you can sit there and see him going through his progression and not, and, you know, maybe guys are covered too. We're not looking at all the dropping seven and eight guys. maybe they're covered, but he's holding a little too long in the pocket,

and I think you could have avoided some of the scuffles of those three-and-ounce early

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