SOUTH BEND, Ind. — DeShone Kizer is stuck in a moment of self-reflection, having scrambled around the jarring juxtaposition that separates the Notre Dame quarterback’s present from his not so distant past.
Kizer has started nine games for the Irish this season. Notre Dame has won eight of them, keeping it positioned for a berth in the season-ending College Football Playoff heading into Saturday’s regular-season finale at Stanford. These are developments that would have been predicted by no one, least of all Kizer, earlier this year, when he was a distant third behind two other quarterbacks — Everett Golson and Malik Zaire — on the Irish depth chart and when football was sometimes the last thing on his mind.