Marcus Freeman Talks Bye Week Work, Fifth, Sixth Year And Redshirt Decisions For Notre Dame
As Notre Dame prepares to play its final home game of the season this Saturday, Sam Hartman will also play the sixth and final home game of his one-and-done career in an Irish uniform at Notre Dame Stadium. Maybe it’s also fitting that the last home game of any kind in his unique six-year career will also come against the team that gave his career its start.
Eight of the 18 touchdown passes Hartman has thrown this season have come inside Notre Dame Stadium after he threw 110 touchdowns for Wake Forest from 2018-2022 in the Demon Deacon’s unique slow mesh offense. He’ll be on the sidelines watching his old team run its offense this Saturday and he imparted at least a little wisdom on the slow mesh upon the Irish defensive staff during Notre Dame’s bye week.
"We spent a little bit of time with him last week,” Irish head coach Marcus Freeman said this week. "(We were) trying to look at different ways to coach the scout team and try to reciprocate a look that we think we’ll see from Wake Forest in terms of their offense. Sam is truly just all-in on making sure that we have success on the offensive side of the ball. So, I have to be smart and our defensive coaches have to be smart in terms of what we ask...how much time we ask from Sam ‘Hey, what do you see here, what do you think, what are they doing here’. Our coaches do a great job evaluating offenses and really game planning. I think they’ll have a great plan.
"But obviously you have a guy that’s been in the system in the building that we can ask questions to,” Freeman continued. "It’s no different than Javontae Jean-Baptiste when he was here when we played Ohio State. ‘Hey, anything you see? Anything personnel-wise?’ But at the end of the day Sam’s got to get ready for their defense and making sure that our offense is playing at a high level, and we’ve got to make sure we’re ready to go.”
Bye Week Work
Notre Dame is coming off its second bye week in a three-week span. The last time the Irish had a bye, they were coming off a 48-20 win over USC and into a 58-7 thrashing of Pittsburgh. Freeman said this week that each phase of the team had different things to focus on during the most recent bye after their 31-23 loss to Clemson.
"Offensively, I’ve challenged them,” Freeman began. "We have to find ways to the hands of our playmakers, right and we’ve got to continue to be creative in how we do that. We also in the pass game have to be able to take some of the easy throws that defenses give us and not always look for that home run or the contested ball. Let’s take what defenses are giving us. I thought we established the run game really well early in the (Clemson) game but they made some adjustments and we’ve got to be able to really block different stunts, different pressures and movements by the defense and still have success. Like sustain our blocks longer. We’ve got to be able to do that offensively. They know it. We can’t be status quo. We’ve got to have a better performance on Saturday, and we know that. They all want that and it’s one thing to want something, it’s another to do it. So, we have to put the work in to get the performance we want.
"Defensively, a continuous emphasis on tackling,” Freeman continued. "We’ve got to continue to tackle. Tackle at a high level. We play a lot of man coverage, and I told them the leverage in man coverage is details that we have to continuously work at. But as you look at Wake Forest, they present a different challenge for us. So, defensively, they spent a lot of time this past week of really doing scout work against some of the unique things you’ll see versus a Wake Forest offense.
"Special teams, the emphasis this week was on our punt game in that we have to ... it starts with the punt and the hang time,” Freeman said. "We’ve got to improve that and then we’ve got to improve our coverage. We’ve got to be better in our coverage lanes of punt coverage. Obviously, punt return decision-making and the fundamentals of that. As I told (Chris) Tyree, I have the utmost confidence in him but there was something that happened on that punt that was the cause of the result of muffing it.”
Fifth And Sixth-Year Decisions
Freeman and his staff have several decisions to make with various players who have either fifth or sixth years of eligibility remaining. They’ve already had initial meetings with those players, and they will reconvene after the regular season ends to make final decisions.
"Our job is to just give them the facts,” Freeman explained. "I don’t ever want them to say, ‘Well you just want us to come back for yourself, for Notre Dame’. No. We’ll just give you the facts. Hey, here’s what we’ve got from NFL grades. Here’s our vision if you do decide to come back what we would do next year. Let’s get back to these last two games. Let’s get back and focus on Wake Forest and then after Wake Forest we’ve got to focus on Stanford. We’ll revisit this after the Stanford game but during the bye week we did have meetings to just present information that we had so they can make a well educated decision after the season.
"But I don’t have any answer for you yet," he continued. "Hopefully, post-Stanford we will. But as I told those guys, they should go out for Senior Day, because no decisions have been made on their part. So, if they don’t know if this this last game or not, you should run out there on Senior Day. That doesn’t mean they don’t have the option to come back next year. But for 31 of those guys, they’ll be running out for Senior Day.”
Redshirt Decisions
There are just a handful of players who are at or near the four-game limit to preserve a redshirt season of eligibility. Boubacar Traore, Jaiden Ausberry and Eli Raridon have each played in four games this season, while Adon Shuler and Braylon James have played in three games.
"We’ve made previous decisions on a few guys but nothing came up this week that was like this is our fourth game, do we continue to play him or not,” Freeman said. "Some of those younger guys, we made decisions early in the year to redshirt them or not redshirt them. Cooper Flanagan, we decided early in the year to not redshirt him. It was a conversation we had, but some of those other guys like Boubacar and Jaiden Ausberry, when they got to their fourth game, we’ve kind of held them off.”
While Traore and Ausberry could not play in either of the next two regular-season games and still preserve their eligibility, they could still play in a bowl game and do so. The NCAA granted the fifth game waiver for bowl games last year and that rule is still in effect this season. So, any player who plays in four games during the regular season could also play in a bowl game and keep his redshirt season intact.
Players like Shuler and James who have played in three games could play in one of the two remaining regular season games as well as the bowl game and preserve their redshirt.
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