How Notre Dames 2017 loss to Georgia brought the Irish to the precipice of greatness and be

May 2024 · 9 minute read

Editor’s note: This is part of a two-story look at the 2017 meeting between Notre Dame and Georgia and its impact on both schools. Seth Emerson’s feature on the Bulldogs can be found here.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Mike Monaco stood in the north end zone, waiting. Maybe Notre Dame would send a player down the tunnel for a postgame interview on the school’s postgame show, maybe it wouldn’t. This was just the second game inside the remodeled Notre Dame Stadium, with that video board towering over everything. And so the postgame show was still new, too.

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So Monaco, a Notre Dame alumnus who now calls games for Big Ten Network and the Boston Red Sox’s minor league affiliate in Pawtucket, waited. Yes, Brian Kelly’s boorish postgame press conference after Notre Dame’s 20-19 loss to Georgia that night caught fire on social media, burning out days later. The interview Monaco got, though, lasted within the Notre Dame football program for the rest of that season, for all of last season and today heading toward Saturday night’s game in Athens almost two years later.

Since Notre Dame fell on the night of Sept. 9, 2017, thanks in part to an outrageous one-handed touchdown catch, a late hit out of bounds by a sophomore defensive end and a top-10 pick making the kind of egregious mental error he hasn’t made since, Kelly’s program is 23-3. It made the College Football Playoff last year. It has been ranked in the top 10 since the start of last season.

It’s too reductive to say what happened against Georgia back then has informed everything that’s happened to Notre Dame since, but that night remains in the program’s DNA, just like it does for Georgia. It’s easy to forget that the Bulldogs had gone 8-5 under first-year coach Kirby Smart the season before their trip to South Bend. They’re 25-5 since leaving South Bend with roughly 30,000 traveling fans. They played for the national title two years ago. They made the Sugar Bowl last season.

It’s easier to remember that back then the Irish were rebuilding from a 4-8 disaster that prompted Kelly to overhaul his program, rebooting at both coordinator positions and in the weight room.

Under those circumstances, what came immediately after the Georgia game would inform where Notre Dame was headed, one way or another. It would leave a wake. Or Notre Dame would create its own current. And that’s when linebacker Drue Tranquill started walking down the tunnel toward Monaco.

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“No smile, no nothing. This guy looks pretty pissed off right now,” Monaco said. “He started to give a cliché Notre Dame answer about traits. Then he pivots to this intense and honest assessment of it.”

Tranquill, a two-time captain, spoke while wearing a three-year-old hooded sweatshirt from the Music City Bowl with the sleeves cut off. He had that hood pulled up over a white Notre Dame hat. This was not the polished postgame look Notre Dame likes to create most weekends, but that wouldn’t have matched up with Tranquill’s visceral comments anyway.

“Moving forward, I’m scared for other teams,” Tranquill said. “Because we’re coming to punish each and every team that we play.”

In that moment, Tranquill said more about where Notre Dame was going than his head coach ever could. And based on how players from that team remember the aftermath of losing to Georgia from inside the Irish locker room, it was the players who would be setting the course moving forward more than the coaches. And maybe that’s why that night has had such staying power, because it represents something bigger than a Tebow-esque soundbite.

Kirby Smart used a win over Notre Dame to show that his second year at Georgia would end differently than his first. (Matt Cashore / USA Today)

Mike McGlinchey was back at his apartment near campus, making sense of the worst public moment of his college career. A two-time captain on college football’s best offensive line, from which he would be one of two top-10 picks, had to reconcile getting beat around the edge by Davin Bellamy with barely 90 seconds to play, a sack that turned into a Brandon Wimbush fumble that turned into Georgia running out the clock.

Offensive line coach Harry Hiestand had already tried to console McGlinchey after the game. Then offensive coordinator Chip Long called later that night to do the same, talking to McGlinchey less like a coach and more like a teammate, talking about how he’d call a better game, that he’d rely on the offensive line more, that McGlinchey would never make that kind of mistake again.

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“We wanted that one more than we’ve wanted any other game that I’ve ever been a part of at Notre Dame,” McGlinchey said. “I know all offseason, all we talked about was, ‘Oh man, we’ve got the Georgia Dawgs coming to town. We’re going to use that game to let everybody know who the hell we are.’

“And when we came up short, especially me individually, I felt as though that loss was on me. I had that same feeling that Drue did. And for the rest of that season I don’t know if I gave up another play the rest of the year.”

Notre Dame averaged 344.8 yards rushing during the six games that followed Georgia before the season derailed at Miami at the hands of head coach Mark Richt, who was replaced in Athens by Smart. Against the Bulldogs, though, the Irish managed just 55 rushing yards on 37 carries. There was no edge for Wimbush to get as a scrambling quarterback, and the notion of Josh Adams as a future Heisman Trophy candidate felt absurd.

And yet, internally, Notre Dame believed that kind of success was coming. As much as McGlinchey appreciated the pick-up from Hiestand and Long, it was the players instead of the coaches who repurposed the Georgia loss for good use.

“The coaches didn’t have to say shit,” McGlinchey said. “We knew what we had for that game, the way that we brought it, and the way that we kind of stunned Georgia, I think they thought they were going to come in there and kind of run us over.”

That was the narrative back then, and it’s the narrative now as Notre Dame heads to Athens as nearly a two-touchdown underdog. Notre Dame, though, has since learned that back then Georgia had more respect for the Irish than public perception let on.

When Alex Bars and Sam Mustipher made the Chicago Bears practice squad this summer, it meant going against former Georgia linebacker Roquan Smith every day. At some point since becoming teammates, Mustipher and Bars have both talked about that game with the player picked between Quenton Nelson and McGlinchey in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft. Bars and Nelson even ran into Smith this summer at a Cole Swindell concert.

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“Roquan is a super smart dude, and he said he’d never watched more film on an opponent until he played us,” Bars said. “He said we were definitely better than he thought, a lot better than he thought we’d be.”

That feeling was actually mutual, according to McGlinchey. The week before coming to Notre Dame, Georgia had a relatively laborious 31-10 win over Appalachian State, a game in which starting quarterback Jacob Eason suffered a knee injury and was replaced by freshman Jake Fromm. The Bulldogs weren’t pushed that afternoon at home, but they didn’t steal anybody’s souls either.

“Appalachian State had some success on them, and we were like, ‘Oh man, if this is what we’re gonna be blocking, we might have a hell of a day. We might shock the world here.’” McGlinchey said. “And then the first three snaps happened and we’re like, ‘Oh no. This is gonna be a dog fight until the very end.’”

The game finished how it finished, McGlinchey with his hands on his head while Lorenzo Carter recovered the fumble that Bellamy forced. Still, Notre Dame believed it had turned a corner that night, even if skepticism outside the program remained. The Irish actually dropped out of the rankings after losing to the Bulldogs, slotted in the Also Receiving Votes group between Maryland and San Diego State.

“People outside of the locker room, the narrative was Notre Dame never wins the big game,” Mustipher said. “You were at that game. If a few plays go our way that didn’t, we win that. It was proof that we turned the corner. After that game, it wasn’t a concern because it was a loss. It was, ‘All right, we’re on the precipice of greatness.’”

A strip sack of Brandon Wimbush with less than two minutes to play started the Bulldogs’ celebration. (Matt Cashore / USA Today)

Notre Dame blew out Boston College the next week, then handled Michigan State in East Lansing. The next month USC and N.C. State were emasculated in South Bend. Normally, that would be enough to crystallize Notre Dame’s self-belief. But from a distance, the Irish also watched the Bulldogs lay waste to everyone in their path, winning their first six SEC games by an average of four touchdowns.

At the time, Georgia’s results ensured Notre Dame would maintain an argument for inclusion in the College Football Playoff into November. Two years later, they represent something more important. That season’s first two months built the confidence of both programs in durable ways.

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“I don’t think at that point that we realized how good we were,” said linebacker Greer Martini. “To see the rest of the season pan out, and to see who they were playing and who they were beating, you gained confidence through that.

“I think that was so early in the season that we didn’t know how good we were at that point, but then following Georgia’s path as well as ours, you can kind of tell we were two competitive teams and that we were two of the better teams in the country.”

It has stayed that way, too. “College GameDay” will be coming to Athens for Notre Dame’s first visit, which marks the first top-10 nonconference matchup at Sanford Stadium in 53 years. A Notre Dame win would represent Brian Kelly’s biggest in his decade here and probably the program’s biggest since taking down Florida State in 1993.

Two years later, the Notre Dame players who played Georgia still remember moments from that night. For Daelin Hayes, it was missing Sony Michel on a quick pitch on third down that moved the chains. For Martini, it was meeting Michel in the hole and losing his breath on impact, needing to sub himself out. Mustipher remembers the Georgia fans holding up their cell phones with flashlights on to start the fourth quarter. For McGlinchey, it’s giving up the strip sack. Bars just remembers the red.

“I don’t know if it was 50-50, but it sounded 50-50,” Bars said. “That red glare popped up.”

That red will pop again on Saturday night when Notre Dame heads to Georgia, a longer shot to win but bringing a cocksure belief earned two years ago that it actually can.

“Looking back at it with what the record is, it was definitely a turning point for the Irish,” Martini said. “Hopefully we can go down to Athens and beat them in Athens, that would be huge.”

(Top photo: Joe Robbins / Getty Images)

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