Few teams face the type of late-season challenge that No. 9 Notre Dame must confront this weekend.To put it simply: How does a team stay desperate after posting a 70-7 victory?The Fighting Irish (9-2) will try to avoid a follow-up letdown when they travel west to play Stanford (4-7) on Saturday night.Notre Dame is coming off a massive home win against Syracuse last weekend in which the team posted its highest point total since 1932.Coach Marcus Freeman said he and his coaching staff track “MAs,” which is short for missed assignments. He acknowledged that the staff counted fewer MAs last week than it had all season.”But there still were some, all right?” Freeman said.Yet even Freeman could not pretend that Notre Dame had a ton of mistakes to correct going forward.”There were some guys that did grade 100%,” he said, “and their challenge is, ‘How can we do that the next Saturday?’ And the only way I know how to do that is to prepare the right way. And if you didn’t get 100% or grade at 100%, let’s go to work and let’s try to attack and find ways to fix it.”The Cardinal will try to play the spoiler role in their season finale. They face little pressure as they already have been eliminated from bowl contention, and few will expect them to challenge a top-10 opponent.Yet Stanford is coming off a 31-10 win over Cal, and it will attempt to end the season by registering back-to-back victories for the first time. Prior to beating the Golden Bears, the Cardinal lost by five points on the road against North Carolina.Stanford interim coach Frank Reich said he and his players were excited for this weekend’s challenge.”Obviously, this team that we’re playing is very good, so that’s where all our focus needs to be,” Reich said. “And I think as a player, you enjoy playing the legacy programs, the teams that have that kind of reputation, that have earned that reputation.
