SOUTH BEND —Nearly 11 full weeks after the national championship loss to Ohio State, Christian Gray found himself Friday morning finally discussing the most painful third-and-11 conversion of his Notre Dame football career.
“Sometimes it happens, you know?” the junior cornerback said. “You win or lose, you know what I mean?”
On the evening of Jan. 20 in Atlanta, freshman wide receiver Jeremiah Smith won his 1-on-1 battle with Gray. The play went for 56 yards as quarterback Will Howard, standing tall against an all-out blitz, sent a perfect parabola down the right sideline into Smith’s waiting hands.
Ohio State held on to win, 34-23.
Comeback thwarted, Notre Dame saw its national championship drought reach 36 seasons and counting.
“Unfortunately, he got — they got — the best of me,” Gray said of Smith and the Buckeyes. “I ain’t going to lie to you. It was a good play. It was a good play by them in every way. But we’re going to be back there this year.”
As tears flowed freely in the losing locker room that night at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Gray’s teammates eventually shielded him from reporters who approached his locker. Head bowed and covered by a towel, Gray could hear some of the raw anger that was reported in the wake of a single media question.
“A reporter guy asked me a question, just an ignorant question, and then my teammates came up to me and protected me,” Gray said. “They’re my brothers. They all came up to me and protected me and said, ‘Get out.’ (They) told the reporter to get out. That’s not a respectable question to ask.”
What was the offending question from the credentialed reporter?
“He just asked, ‘How was guarding Jeremiah Smith?’ “ Gray said.
Putting 'Third-and-11' in context
Until the conversion, Smith was held to four catches for 32 yards, a pedestrian night by his lofty standards. One of those was an 8-yard touchdown catch that wiped out Notre Dame’s early 7-0 lead and kickstarted a string of 31 unanswered points for Ohio State.
Even with the deep ball, Smith’s only catch of the second half, his 88 total receiving yards ranked eighth out of the 16 games it took him to amass 1,315 air yards and 15 scores.
Smith, by all accounts, is a future NFL star. There is no shame in losing contact with him that far down the field.
Seventy-four days after The Conversion, Gray lifted his eyes after a Friday morning practice and shared precisely how long it took him to recover from that mental gash.
“Next day,” he said. “I told myself that day there was going to be hate. It’s going to be everybody else trying to tell me something, trying to tell me everything else. But all ...
