Experience Will Make Marcus Freeman And Notre Dame Better In 2023

Marcus Freeman learned a lot about being a head coach last season, and a more experience 2023 team has Notre Dame poised to take off

Things certainly didn't go as well as Notre Dame fans hoped they would in 2022, the first season of the Marcus Freeman era. A young head coach that was embraced almost in full by the Notre Dame fan base and Fighting Irish alums went through a number of ups and downs in his first season as a head coach, and that experience him and his football team ready to make a big jump in year two.

Freeman was a successful defensive coordinator prior to being named Notre Dame's head coach, and a 9-4 season didn't live up to preseason expectations. After a rocky 3-3 start, however, Notre Dame started to look like the team we thought it would, or could be during the preseason. The Irish won six of their last seven games, with four of those wins coming by at least 17 points.

But it was a tough early season loss to Marshall, and a seemingly devastating home loss to a poor Stanford team that sticks out about last season. It was those tough spots, however, where Freeman learned the most about himself, and the growth from it fueled the late season surge.

"]I learned about myself, that in those down moments, those tough times, that I can't panic as a leader, right," Freeman said when thinking back to year one lessons. "I can go in my office and really think about how to improve this and fix this process, and not just trust the process, but fix it. But as a leader, when you're around a group, you can't show panic."

Notre Dame's first game after the loss to Stanford was a 44-21 home win over UNLV, followed by a 41-24 road smack down of then 16th-ranked Syracuse, which was followed by a 35-14 home beat down of then 4th-ranked Clemson. The head coach showing resolve and poise following a moment in which the season was on the brink coupled with some behind-the-scenes changes to allow Notre Dame to immediately move past the Stanford game and start playing to the team's potential.

"You can show a sense of urgency, I have a lot of sense of urgency, but I don't want to panic," explained Freeman. "As I tell the coaches, everybody will follow in those difficult moments what the leader does, and so the ability to get up there with your, your chin up and say, 'Okay, we took one on the chin, here's what we learned, here's what we have to fix now with urgency.' 

"That's what I learned most about myself as an individual," continued the Irish head coach. "And listen, struggles happen. I think we all as individuals can look at our lives and say, struggles happen, and hopefully we're better because of them. They suck when you're going through them, but they're going to happen and it's going to continue. There's going be other struggles in life as we continue to move forward, that you try to prevent, but sometimes you can't prevent them. So the ability to embrace and learn and get through those struggles are so important."

Those tough losses could have resulted in Freeman and the Notre Dame staff saying, "Well, that didn't work, let's blow this whole thing up." That's not what they did, however, and the ability to zero in on who the team was served as a key to the turnaround, and it's part of the reason the 2023 team has a chance to be vastly improved.

"It was the ability to say, 'Okay, we have to continue to focus on what we're doing well, and even if the opponent knows this is what we're gonna do, like we have to have a belief, we do it so well that we're going to be able to beat the opponent and still execute what we want to," Freeman stated. "In the first six games we were so inconsistent, right? And what we were doing, and I know we played well versus North Carolina and BYU, but we still didn't continue to remind ourselves our backbone on offense was ability to run the ball and the ability to put Drew Pyne in situations where he could make easy decisions and execute.

"I think that's what the Stanford loss made us say, 'Okay, let's stop, hold on, let's look at this game, and the lessons we're taught'," continued Freeman. "We have to be able to run the ball here. We can't false start, if we have to go on one every time, go on one. Right? So let's not hurt Notre Dame."

Notre Dame rushed for just 150 yards against a Stanford defense that was giving up 207 yards per game coming into that contest, and gave up 251.3 yards per game on the ground in the six games after beating Notre Dame. Going away from the identity of the team proved costly to the Irish, but that's exactly what Freeman was talking about, get back to who we are.

In the next three games after that loss, a stretch that included wins over a pair of ranked teams - including No. 4 Clemson - the offense rushed for 223 yards, 246 yards and 263 yards, an average of 244 yards per game on the ground. The Irish also racked up 281 rushing yards in the 44-0 win over Boston College and 265 yards in the Gator Bowl win over South Carolina.

Freeman and the Irish coaches didn't flinch after the loss to Stanford. Instead, they doubled down on who they are, and narrowed the focus of what they were doing. Instead of blowing everything up and showing panic, his message of "Do what we do" was a vote of confidence, that they were in fact good enough to be the team they were supposed to be.

In seven games after that loss to Stanford, the Irish offense averaged 204.8 rushing yards per game, and like Freeman said, they did that even with the opponent knowing exactly what was coming. But the players finally believed in the message, themselves, and the results were much improved.

It wasn't just the run game that improved. The Irish defense also started to play better football. 

"As we moved to the last six games, we were able to say, 'Okay, this is what we're going to focus on defensively," Freeman continued to explain. "I felt like we really kind of came into our own, those last six games. We spent so much time talking about our offense and the pro style system our offense plays, our defense is (also) a pro style defense. It's completely different than the Marcus Freeman defense they had before. 

"As time went on, our defense really started to learn the intricate details of what Coach (Al) Golden was asking, and that's what I even see now as you go forward, like the second year in the same scheme. These guys are really performing at a high level right now."

In the first six games of the regular season the Irish defense gave up 348.5 yards per game and 5.3 yards per play. Over the last six games of the regular season, which included matchups against three ranked opponents (two of which were Top 10 teams), the Irish defense gave up just 306.3 yards per game and 5.0 yards per play.

For context, if the defense gave up 306.3 yards per game for the entire season it would have ranked 12th nationally in fewest yards allowed, and 8th among Power 5 teams. That's less than 10 yards a game fewer than what national champion Georgia allowed last season.

The turnaround was fueled by the lessons that were learned during the early season struggles. The losses to Ohio State, Marshall and Stanford, and even the sloppy win over California, were lessons that ultimately Freeman was going to have to learn at some point in his head coaching tenure. His ability to quickly adapt and learn those lessons, to use those failures to actually build confidence in his players, is something that will make him a far better coach in season two.

And that is where much of the optimism for Notre Dame in 2023 should come from.

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