The final horn sounded in West Lafayette to cruelly close a winless September for Notre Dame last season. To no one’s surprise, the Boiler hecklers savored every moment to give the Irish a proper sendoff as they left the field.
Screams of “you suck” and “have a safe trip” and “Charlie, you pompous ass” rained down from the stands, yet many of the Irish players felt some relief after the game.
Yeah, Purdue won 33-19 and handed Notre Dame the first 0-5 start in program history. But on the strong arm of Evan Sharpley, the Irish finally gained some yards, scored some points and even won the second half 19-10.
And while many of the players talked about improvement and flashed some smiles outside the locker room during post-game interviews, Trevor Laws sat alone in a corner, head in hands, fighting back tears. It was a snapshot into the kind of player and man Laws is. Purdue wasn’t a turning point, it was a low point.
The fifth-year senior, who went unelected as a captain but emerged as one anyway, wasn’t interested in Silver Linings. He wasn’t interested in winning one half of football. He wasn’t interested in any “improvement” talk, and he was going to fight “learned helplessness” like he did double-teams.
The Purdue postgame told so much about Trevor Laws because it became much of the reason he emerged as a second-round NFL Draft choice despite being undersized.
BlueandGold.com had a chance to talk with Laws and have him look back to his final season at Notre Dame and look ahead to what he hopes his future in the NFL holds.
This is the first of a three-part recap of the interview with Laws:
BGI: While coach Weis and many of the players were talking about the Purdue game as something to build on and almost something to enjoy, you couldn’t even lift your head. The moment told a lot about your feelings.
TL: “Throughout the season I just kind of felt like, ‘this is Notre Dame football, we have so much to live up to, so many people to play for, so much tradition to uphold.’ And some of things that were going on were unacceptable. It just became so frustrating for me. We feel like we’re out there giving it our all. I know I’m giving it my all. I know people around me are trying hard as they can, and for some reason, we just can’t get it done. It was just one of those things you give it everything you got, I went away from all those losses with kind of crushing feeling.”
BGI: Through all the ups and downs – mainly downs – your motor, passion and desire never wavered. How frustrating did it become to come back for a fifth year, work so hard and find very little payoff?
TL: “It was a very frustrating year. You go out there and one of the things I wanted to make sure that happened – for myself and the younger guys – was that I gave it my all every play, play in and play out. That’s what ended up happening. I wasn’t going to quit on these guys. I had these good games where you go in the locker room after the game and even though you played well, you feel terrible. The whole team feels terrible that you just lost. You go home that night, a great game individually is kind of a bittersweet thing.”
BGI: You lead the nation for tackles by a defensive linemen with 112, which was also second all-time at Notre Dame. You lead the team in tackles, which is something a lineman isn’t supposed to do, and you get three wins for your efforts. How would you evaluate such a strange season?
TL: “I look back on it. I know that it was a monumentally horrendous season for our team. But when I look back on it and reflect, I really look at the good times. Winning the last two games was just so huge for the team. After all that we had been through, it was just a great feeling, just to see the guys get those two wins coming out of there. I look at the good things, the plays, the moments, my friends on the team, that’s what I look back on.”
BGI: There were many theories on what went wrong last season, one of the most popular is that with only seven fourth-year seniors and 13 juniors, the imbalance on the roster was too much to overcome. Now that you have stepped away for a few months, would you agree with that? How would you diagnose things?
TL: “I remember during the season trying to answer that. I got that question a lot. It was tough to answer then but now that I look back on it, we just had so many young guys trying to do things they weren’t really capable of doing yet...just a big gap in recruiting we had. It was so big. Not many other schools suffer things like that with just a depleted senior and really junior class too. You just don’t have players from those classes coming out to contribute to the team that we had in previous years. I think that big lack of just people and bodies really hurt us, those two classes were just so small. We called on a lot of guys that didn’t have a lot of experience. They’re going to be great players some day but putting the whole season on their shoulders was something they probably weren’t ready for.”
BGI: Another theory is that the numbers gap between the fifth-year guys and the freshmen and sophomores hurt the team in terms of leadership. Anything to that?
TL: “It’s just a different team dynamic you get with so few seniors and juniors. It’s like there’s a whole group of people that aren’t there, that were always there on every other team I’ve been on. I think that the freshmen and the younger guys, they could kind of relate to us, but not as good as a sophomore to a junior, or a junior to a senior. And our team didn’t have that. We had so few guys in the middle there that were making plays on the field.”
Look for Part II on Thursday.
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The fifth-year senior, who went unelected as a captain but emerged as one anyway, wasn’t interested in Silver Linings. He wasn’t interested in winning one half of football. He wasn’t interested in any “improvement” talk, and he was going to fight “learned helplessness” like he did double-teams. 
