After being reported missing on Wednesday, the former Notre Dame attacked defensively Louis Nix III was found dead on Saturday. Nix was 29 years old.
Nix was missing in the Jacksonville area since Wednesday, last seen on Tuesday. Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office pulled a car from a pond near Nix’s apartment that matched his vehicle description on Saturday night.
Nix was shot in December during an attempted armed robbery at a gas station in Jacksonville, his hometown, while putting air in the car’s tire. The bullet in his chest left Nix in the hospital for almost two weeks, and some of his fragments remained in his sternum and in his left lung.
“I know it sounds like a cliché, but more than anything, I’m happy to be alive,” Nix said in mid-December. Eric Hansen from South Bend Tribune.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office did not indicate that the shooting is related to Nix’s death.
Nix was the defensive fulcrum of Notre Dame’s invincible 2012 regular season. Then, as a junior, he started 11 games and led all Irish strikers with 50 tackles and made five pass breaks for the team. As this defense allowed 10.3 points per game in the regular season, it was Nix holding the point of attack and often overtaking it.
When No. 17 Stanford scored the first for the 4-yard line goal in overtime that October, it was Nix who stood up to stop Cardinal running back Stepfan Taylor from reaching the goal line. On the first descent, Nix absorbed the lead blocker’s helmet into his chest, while Taylor gained just one yard. Slow to rise from the blow, Nix missed the second fall when Taylor pushed from 3 to 1.
The position that followed on the goal line is remembered by Manti Te’o’s tackles, cornerback Bennett Jackson sweeping the edge and hitting Taylor before he even reached the line, for Zeke Motta’s safety finish, but Nix jumped from the middle and collapsed the line on the third descent and then absorbed two blockers on the fourth descent.
Taylor’s reach for the end zone in the final play remains a point of contention, but if it weren’t for Nix, Taylor would have crossed the goal line without a problem, if not in a previous snap.
Notre Dame’s defense knew this, Te’o taking time out of his celebration in the locker room to find Nix.
“Hey, Lou, they can’t block you,” said Te’o, emphasizing each syllable. “You are the best nose guard in the whole country.” (Skip to the 3:44 mark in this video.)
That would be the theme of Nix’s career, active for the Irish from 2011 to 2013, ending with 122 career tackles, including 14 by defeat, along with eight pass separations.
“Louis Nix was a beast,” Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said in 2013 after a defeat in Michigan in which Nix had only four tackles with one for loss and the Irishman lost 41-30. “They couldn’t block it. (He) played as well as he did for us. (Michigan) simply had no answers for him inside. “
This is the underestimated and anonymous duty of most quality defensive tackles. They absorb double teams without giving up an inch to propel Te’o to stardom.
Nix’s 2013 year ended prematurely after he was sidelined with a knee injury. In an attempt to give him time for rehabilitation and to protect himself from further injury, the Irish intentionally resisted Nix against the Air Force and Navy triple option offenses, but Nix appeared only once more for Notre Dame before knee surgery at the end of the season.
He did what he could to play through a broken meniscus to help the Irish defense – a 7-2 season dropped to 8-4 when Nix missed the year’s end – and the long-term damage to his knee affected his NFL career . Chosen in the third round of 2014 by the Houston Texans, he needed a second knee surgery before his first training camp and a third knee surgery ended his debut year before he appeared in a game.
Nix would play four games for the New York Giants in 2015, before jumping from his training team to the Washington training team and the Jacksonville Jaguars training team.