The Notre Dame football team will once again be without wide receiver Avery Davis.
Less than a month out from the massive season opener at Ohio State, the Notre Dame football program will have to adjust to life without wide receiver Avery Davis once again.
Pete Sampson of The Athletic reported Davis tore the ACL in his right knee in Friday’s practice. He had previously torn the ACL in his left knee in November of last year. While Davis made a full recovery and was slated to rejoin the team this season, the slot receiver is now down for the count. This is absolutely heartbreaking for the graduate student who just wanted to play ball.
Notre Dame is led by first-time head coach and former defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman.
Avery Davis suffered a torn ACL in his right knee during practice on Friday and will miss the season. Davis tore his left ACL last November and had recovered to rejoin the team. Davis was going to start in the slot for the Irish.
— Pete Sampson (@PeteSampson_) August 13, 2022
To make matters even worse, Davis was a team captain and one of only a handful of healthy scholarship receivers for the Golden Domers. Sampson added that Tobias Merriweather and Jayden Thomas have zero catches between them and Deion Colzie has precisely four. With Tyler Buchner taking over as the team’s starting quarterback, who is he throwing the football to now?
Aside from the brutal nature of two torn ACLs in two years, losing Davis takes a captain out of the mix and leaves the Irish with five healthy scholarship receivers. Two (Merriweather and Thomas) have no career catches and one (Colzie) has four.
— Pete Sampson (@PeteSampson_) August 13, 2022
The Irish will take on the Buckeyes in the Horseshoe on Saturday, Sept. 3 at 7:30 p.m. ET.
Notre Dame football loses slot receiver Avery Davis to a torn ACL … again
Although the Fighting Irish are widely seen as a top-five team entering this season, and definitely a top-10 team for those who are a bit more skeptical, losing Davis for the year does not help in the slightest. Freeman will be given the benefit of the doubt initially in his first year in the big chair. We all know he can recruit like nobody’s business, but replacing Brian Kelly was not going to be easy…
Interestingly enough, the team that Freeman may want to pattern some of his Irish program after is the group his squad is going up against on Labor Day weekend. That’s right. What Ryan Day has done in Columbus has been nothing short of remarkable. Yes, he inherited an Ohio State program that was humming after Urban Meyer left, but like Kelly, Meyer knew how to ruffle some feathers.
In short, Day is way more likable than his predecessor. Freeman has a chance to be the same in South Bend. Although it would be shocking for the Irish to become a playoff team in his first year on the job, the Golden Domers are probably not going to fall off as precipitously as was the case with many of the men hired between Kelly and Lou Holtz. The loss of Davis is significant, though.
The Ohio State game is only three weeks out, but Freeman and his team have some time to adjust.
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