Flexible Marcus Freeman Tweaks Notre Dame Practice Plan
Marcus Freeman has only been Notre Dame’s head coach for a little bit more than a season but the young head coach has already shown he is willing to change. Last year’s 0-2 start to the season that included an upset loss to Marshall in Freeman’s first home game necessitated a quick change of messaging.
Freeman went into that season talking about winning national championships, but the message was far too broad. He quickly changed course and focused on winning the day and winning each rep at practice. There were still speed bumps the rest of the season, but the Irish finished 9-2 after the 0-2 horror show.
Year two under Freeman will see more changes. They won’t be easily recognizable to fans, but they will affect how the team does its business each week. Last year’s team practiced on Sundays and had Mondays off, but the team will have Sunday off this year and go to work on Mondays. Freeman says science and player feedback went into the decision to make the change.
"Some of (the players) are kind of ... some they like it, some like the Sunday practice and some didn’t," Freeman explained. "I don’t take too much into that. But ultimately, I just have to make a decision (for) what I think is best for Saturday and each place is different and that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learned in a year of experience is you can’t just take a plan and say it worked for me as a player or it worked at a previous place I was at and it’s going to work at Notre Dame.
"You've got to take into consideration what they’re asked to do on a Monday here compared to what it was like somewhere else,” Freeman continued. "That's kind of the biggest things. I wanted them to truly have a day off on paper, like you get one day off. But I wanted them to be able to take Sunday and really work academically and you don’t have anything mandatory from us on Sunday. Academics are so important, they have to have time to really work at that.”
Moving practice days will be in effect all season for the Irish, but after tweaking their practice schedule last week for the flight to Ireland, there will be some tweaks to this week’s to their routine this week as well to help get the players re-acclimated to the five-hour time change.
"A lot of those guys did not sleep after the game,” Freeman stated. "We got back to our hotel a little bit after 12:30 and I think the first bus took off at 5:30 in the morning, or 5:15, the second bus was at 5:30 and the last bus was at 6:00. They probably thought they were going to be able to sleep on the plane, but to sleep on a plane is not an easy thing to do. We decided to give them (Sunday off) off and encourage them not just to sleep all day because we wanted to get their cycles back to where it needed to be. Try to stay up, try to go on a walk and do some different things when we got back. I know a lot of them got good sleep last night but even me and our coaching staff, you don’t feel a hundred percent until you get two nights. The same thing as when we went there.
"When you’re changing time zones it’s going to take two nights to really get adjusted. We have to be smart with what we’re going to do (Monday). We’re not going to meet, we’re going to watch the game, we’re going to put it to rest and then we’re going to start moving forward to Tennessee State and go out and have more of a jog through instead of a practice on a Monday and as I looked at Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday ... the work is the work.”
Freeman said they would make adjustments to the daily practice schedule throughout the week based on need. He said they may scale down a practice by eliminating an individual period while still making sure to keep in specific prep for Tennessee State. The ultimate goal is to make small adjustments throughout the week to ensure the team is peaking Saturday afternoon in the home opener.
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