What Navy coach Brian Newberry said about Notre Dame after Irish win
DUBLIN, Ireland — Navy coach Brian Newberry said he doesn’t feel any worse about his football team following a 42-3 loss to Notre Dame than he felt going into the game. That is a testament to how good he thinks Notre Dame is.
“They just beat us,” Newberry said. “That’s the bottom line. We just got our tails beat today.”
Newberry added “you have to be dang near perfect when you’re playing a team like Notre Dame.” This is everything else Newberry said about Notre Dame in his postgame press conference. Some quotes are shortened to just focus on Fighting Irish-centric portions of the presser.
Opening statement
“The first thing I want to say is that’s a heck of a football team that we played tonight. I can’t say enough good things about coach Freeman and his staff and his players. I thought the quarterback, Sam Hartman, played extremely well. Disappointed. It’s not what we hoped for an expected. But it was a good football team, and we knew— didn’t take a miracle to win the game, but we knew we had to be at our best. I didn’t think we were.”
On the Notre Dame rushing offense
“We’ve been good against the run around here for a long time. We were poor on first down. They were able to stay on track. We’re they’re able to stay on track, it makes it hard to make a really good call. They had a good plan. The coaches did a nice job. They had a plan for our pressures and our zeroes. The plan was to show some stuff to see what they were going to do. Let them show their hand a little bit. It didn’t work out quite like we wanted it to.”
On Notre Dame QB Sam Hartman
“He’s a really good player. We knew that going in. He’s a smart player. He sees the field really, really well. He was able to ID things we were doing really well and put the ball in the right places when he did. We missed him in the backfield and had a guy come of coverage and had a bust there [on the second Jaden Greathouse touchdown reception]. But he’s a really good player, and we knew that going in. He’s like a coach out on the field. He ran the offense well. He’s super efficient.
“The thing they were able to do that was a little disappointing to me was they were able to run the ball. The controlled the line of scrimmage. Their offensive line was really good today. They controlled the line of scrimmage, their running backs ran hard, we didn’t tackle well and that’s a bad combination. When they did throw it, they were deadly efficient.”
On the Notre Dame rushing defense
“We got some positive yards. We knew going into the game they weren’t going to be 10, 12, 15-play chunks. We knew we were going to have to grind it out. In the second half there was a drive that was about 14 plays. I knew that was the kind of game it was going to be. But we kind of shot ourselves in the foot when we’d get something going and get behind the sticks a little bit on offense and just couldn’t recover from it.
“They’re a good football team. A veteran football team on defense. They see the option every year and know how to defend it well. And they had a good plan.”
