CFB · RECAPS · BYU · NOTRE-DAME · BACHMEIER · BIG-12
Bachmeier Scores Three Ways, BYU Knocks Off No. 2 Notre Dame 28-24 in Provo
By MVPeav · @MVPeav ·
Notre Dame walked into Provo as the No. 2 team in the country, riding a 16-game win streak, and walked out 28-24 losers after CJ Carr's last throw sailed into the end zone and fell incomplete as time expired. BYU hadn't beaten the Irish since 2004. That's a long time to wait on a goal-line stand.
And it wasn't a fluke of a final play. BYU led most of the night, gave the lead back, got picked off at the worst possible moment, and then Bear Bachmeier drove them 55 yards anyway. He scored three different ways in this game. I'm not sure the rest of the Big 12 was ready for that sentence.
Notre Dame outgained them. Notre Dame had more third-down chances. Notre Dame fumbled a spike at the 5. That last one is the whole story.
Up 21-10, Then BYU Let the Irish Back In
BYU went up 7-3 in the first quarter and 21-10 by halftime, and the half ended on one of the dumbest plays you'll see all year. Notre Dame had the ball at the BYU 5, Carr went to spike it, and the ball came out. Isaiah Glasker fell on it. That was Notre Dame's second turnover of the entire season, and it happened on a play where nobody was supposed to touch the ball.
ESPN's win-probability model had BYU as low as 19% in the second quarter, at the 10:31 mark. Half an hour of game clock later they were up 11 with the ball coming to them to start the third.
Then BYU did everything it could to give it back. A muffed punt return. A failed fake punt. Notre Dame got 31 and 39-yard field goals out of those gifts, the second one with 11 seconds left in the third, and it was 21-16 going to the fourth.
The part that would've kept all of this from mattering: JoJo Phillips caught a 39-yard touchdown that would've made it 28-10, and it got wiped out by a pick penalty on Kyler Kasper. You could feel the whole stadium do the math on that one.
Down 24-21, Picked Off, and Still Not Done
Was this a DPI? 👀 NOTRE DAME FANS ARE FURIOUS AFTER THIS CONTROVERSIAL NO-CALL AGAINST BYU. And the replay makes the situation even more interesting. On the final play of the Notre Dame–BYU matchup, a Fighting Irish receiver attempted to make a catch while being closely
Jonaz Walton punched in a 3-yard run with 9:31 left, Notre Dame went for two and got it, and the Irish led 24-21. Notre Dame's first lead since early in the second quarter, right on schedule for the ending everybody expected.
Then Jayden Sanders picked off Bachmeier at the Irish 15 with 8:05 left. BYU had driven into range to answer and handed it right back. That's the moment where a 6-0 start usually turns into 6-1.
BYU got the ball back one more time and went 10 plays and 55 yards, and Bachmeier hit Walker Lyons from 6 yards out with 1:47 on the clock. ESPN's model went from 52.2% BYU to 86.9% on that one throw. One snap, and the whole night flipped.
Notre Dame still got inside the 10 with the clock running out. The last snap came with 4 seconds left, Carr's pass went toward Jaden Greathouse, who'd been killing BYU all night, and it fell incomplete in the end zone as the clock hit 0:00. BYU's probability on ESPN's model went from 70.5% to 100% on that incompletion, which is a fancy way of saying the game was over.
Bachmeier Ran It, Threw It and Caught It
Here's the line that makes this one a BYU game and not a Notre Dame game: Bachmeier had rushing touchdowns of 5 and 1 yards, caught a 15-yard touchdown from Kasper on a trick play, and threw the game-winner. Three different ways to score, and he used all three.
The passing line was 23 of 36 for 224 yards with the one TD and the one INT, plus 13 carries for 45 yards. He completed 72% of his throws in the first half, which is where BYU built the cushion that ended up being just barely enough.
Preston Rex ran 10 times for 66 yards, 6.6 a pop, and most of that felt like it came when BYU needed to keep Carr on the bench. Not a huge workload, just an efficient one.
Carr finished 27 of 49 for 261 yards, no touchdowns, no picks. Nolan James Jr. had 16 carries for 77 yards and a score. The Irish moved it, they just kept stalling. Greathouse was the exception: 8 catches, 125 yards, a long of 38, the best thing Notre Dame had going. He just didn't catch the last one.
Notre Dame Won the Yardage and Lost the Game
Notre Dame football visits BYU in top 10 showdown | Top photos
The Irish outgained BYU 376 to 360. Rushing was basically a wash too, 115 for Notre Dame and 121 for BYU. If you handed me those numbers cold I'd guess Notre Dame won by a field goal.
Third down is where it went sideways. Notre Dame went 8 of 19 on third down. BYU went 8 of 12. Same number of conversions, seven fewer tries, and that's the gap between the team that scored touchdowns and the team that kicked field goals.
Notre Dame was 4 for 4 on fourth down, which tells you how often they had to go for it. That's not a stat you want to be perfect in.
And then the spike. First and goal territory at the BYU 5, end of the half, and the ball's on the ground. Add the two third-quarter field goals that came off BYU's own mistakes and never turned into touchdowns, and you get a team that did most of the hard work and none of the finishing. Carr averaged 5.3 yards a throw with no touchdowns. In a 4-point game, that's the ballgame.
The Sims Liked the Irish. So Did Everybody.
My sims had Notre Dame at 71% before kickoff, with a median score of Notre Dame 25, BYU 17. ESPN's FPI was even more confident at 78.2%. Nobody with a spreadsheet saw BYU winning this.
The actual result was BYU by 4. My sims' middle range for BYU's margin ran from -17 to +3, so +4 landed just outside the middle half. The middle 80% went out to +10, so it wasn't a crazy outcome, just a tail one. About 80% of my sims had BYU doing worse than this.
The individual miss that stings: my sims had Greathouse at 20 receiving yards. He had 125. Bachmeier's median was 160 passing yards and he threw for 224, Rex's median was 32 rushing and he went for 66, and Walton's median was 42 rushing and he got 17. The sims had the Notre Dame run game doing more and BYU's quarterback doing less, and the game did the opposite.
Chaos at the Top, and What's Next
(8) BYU 28 (2) Notre Dame 24 Final Score
BYU is 6-0 for the third straight year, and this one came with 65,179 people in LaVell Edwards Stadium watching the first Irish loss since 2004 land in Provo. The 16-game win streak is over. Notre Dame is 6-1.
This was the craziest week of college football in quite a while, and I'm not sure I'm overselling that. Five of the top 7 lost by my count, No. 1 Georgia included (27-24 to Auburn), and a sixth needed double overtime and a controversial call to get out alive. The AP's own math says five of the top 8 went down on the same regular-season day for the first time. Whichever way you count it, the poll on Sunday is going to look like somebody shook it.
BYU gets a week to enjoy it and then goes to UCF on Oct. 24. Notre Dame is off until Navy on Oct. 31, which is a long time to stare at a spike that didn't get spiked.