Brian Newberry calls Notre Dame a heck of a football team

Navy head coach Brian Newberry had a tough opponent in his first-ever game as a head coach with Notre Dame in Dublin, Ireland. It did not go very well.

The Fighting Irish dominated the Midshipmen to the tune of a 42-3 victory.

Newberry started his post-game press conference after the win by complimenting Marcus Freeman and the Notre Dame football team.

“That’s a heck of a football team that we played tonight,” Newberry said. “I can’t say enough good things about Coach Freeman, his staff and their players. The quarterback, Sam Hartman, played extremely well. I don’t know if he missed a whole lot tonight.”

Sam Hartman was 19-for-23 passing with 251 passing yards and four touchdowns. Audric Estime led the rushing attack with 95 of the team’s 191 rushing yards.

Jack Kiser and Marist Liufau led the Notre Dame defense with Kiser notching eight tackles and Liufau nabbing seven tackles and forcing a fumble.

The game wasn’t much of a game. The Fighting Irish scored the first 42 points of the game and Navy didn’t get on the board until less than four minutes left in the game with a field goal.

The Midshipmen totaled only 169 yards of offense during the game and averaged 3.1 yards per game. This is despite the fact Navy held the ball for nearly seven minutes during the game.

“It’s not what we hoped for, what we expected,” Newberry said. “It was a good football team and didn’t think it would take a miracle to win the game, but we knew he had to be at our best and I don’t think we were. I thought we did some decent things offensively. I thought we moved the ball. We couldn’t sustain some drives. Missed a field goal there in the first half. Missed on some some shots. We knew we were gonna have to take some shots and we had ’em couple of times and they were open. Didn’t hit them. You have to hit those in a big game like this. The disappointing thing on defense on the opening drive with third and long twice, you don’t get off the field. Maybe that’s a different start to the game if we can get off the field there. I don’t know. Our tackling was as bad as it’s been in a long time. Something we got to obviously go back, go to work on.”