As we approach next Monday’s national championship game pitting our beloved Notre Dame against Ohio State, there’s one thing that needs to be made plain. While us ND fans want this championship badly – and I’d argue of the fan bases that at least nominally have reason to expect to compete for titles, no fan base has been through more crap and deserves it more than this one, but GoldenIsThyFame covered a lot of that ground already – the people I want this for most are coach Marcus Freeman and his players.

Why I want this for Freeman

You might recall that I drew the happy assignment of writing this website’s article about Freeman being hired as defensive coordinator a few days after the Irish’s 2020 CFP loss to Alabama. What I didn’t write about was that as our writers’ room hunted through the DC candidates, something ineffable drew me to Freeman. I hadn’t heard him speak, hadn’t heard a player of his speak, didn’t know anything about him as a person. But the results he got at Cincinnati and the recruiting prowess he brought made me think he had to be the guy. He just had to.

So when ND and Brian Kelly hired him – right out from under the noses of then-defending national champion LSU (retroactively as ironic as anything in recent college football history) – I did literal fist pumps at the desk of my day job. (You probably don’t do fist pumps at your desk because your favorite team hired an assistant coach if you have a healthy relationship with it, but I digress.) I obviously didn’t know how the next 4 years were going to transpire. But I knew something big had just happened for Notre Dame.

As 2021 progressed, Freeman’s on-field results were decidedly uneven at first before some late-season improvement. But those results almost didn’t matter as reports – mostly unsourced, but still – began to trickle out all year about what a transformational impact he was having on the locker room and the football program at large. How his leadership style was resonating with players and support staff alike. There was the story Kyle Hamilton relayed about Freeman taking the defense aside as Kelly got pissed off at how the offense was doing during an early-season practice and telling them in so many words that he was glad Kelly was pissed off, because it meant they were doing their jobs. There was the interview on The Athletic’s ND podcast where he talked about how he sold Notre Dame to recruits through the lens of asking them who their favorite rapper was, then telling them an ND degree could put them in a position to follow the path of a rap mogul like Jay-Z.

Then Kelly left, and those stories started getting louder. The players didn’t even go 24 hours after the Kelly announcement was made before they (offense included) started publicly stumping for Freeman on social media. Then-athletic director Jack Swarbrick famously said at Freeman’s introductory press conference that the players he consulted for feedback on the next move told him, “Don’t screw this up.” (Just yesterday, we learned that Kyren Williams, who was one of those consulted leaders and who had nothing to do with Freeman’s job at the time, intentionally changed his route into the football facility in 2021 so he would pass Freeman’s office and get a chance to talk to him.)

And while he didn’t say a public word during the intervening week, privately Freeman put on no airs hiding that he wanted the job, even as Kelly tried to poach him (and then-OC Tommy Rees) for LSU. My favorite story came from the ND reporter who was told Freeman could be offered $20 million per year as a defensive coordinator anywhere else in the country and he would want to be the head coach at Notre Dame more. I remember saying at the time that while obviously there are more important things when hiring, as a fan the fact that he wanted the job this badly made me want him to have it.

Freeman had such a hold on the fan base at this point – just 11 months after being hired! – that completely insane stories started floating around about him verbally tongue-lashing Kelly at the five-minute “I’m outta here” meeting with the ND players following the latter’s decision to go to LSU. It didn’t matter that the story was obviously false; fans wanted it to be true.

I think the fact that I identified Freeman as the guy and hitched my wagon to him before 98-plus percent of the fan base did added to why I have ridden the roller-coaster of the past 3 years harder than most. I took the Fiesta Bowl loss in his first game as HC hard. I’m the guy who sarcastically complimented Freeman on flushing goodwill down the toilet faster than any coach I could recall after Marshall. I’m the guy who half-seriously wondered after the Stanford game later that year why I even watch football. And my torching of the entire program, Freeman included, after Northern Illinois (after which it took me multiple days to even be sure I would watch the following week) should probably go up in the Bad Fan Take Hall of Fame someday.

It’s not because I wanted to be right about him. I don’t really care about that. I’ve been wrong about Notre Dame stuff over and over and it’s never bothered me much. I care more this time because, just as much today as the day he was hired, Marcus Freeman is the person I want leading this program, and I want him to succeed. Frankly, I feel like he deserves to succeed. It’s been extremely gratifying to observe most of the rest of the college football world (besides James Franklin) fall in love with him too. Literally as I write this, two glowing hagiographies of the Freeman hire from national writers are in open tabs on my Internet browser.

Any number of things could sum up why we all love Freeman, but the most recent was this response, given right as he reached his professional peak to date in the Orange Bowl, to being the first African-American (and first Asian-American, as he’s taken pains to point out) coach to lead a team to the national title game:

I mean, I know I’m biased, but how could there be a better answer than that? He doesn’t outright dismiss the question – no fair-minded person would dispute “all coaches” deserve the chance to lead – but he redirects it, like all the other questions he gets about himself, to his team and his staff, with an implied boost to the school he represents as well. It’s such a ridiculous cliche, but it’s also true; the guy just flat-out gets Notre Dame. Freeman was always a leader, but now he is an elite coach. We all knew he could be. Now he is, and he proved it by out-coaching a two-time national champion in the Sugar Bowl.

I’m not going to sit here and bag on Ryan Day or anybody else, but I want Freeman to be the standard-bearing coach in this sport, as much because of the person we’ve gotten to know as anything. And if he can pull off one more W on Monday, he’s almost certainly getting a statue in South Bend someday. That’s where we are now.

Why I want this for the players

Where do I even start with the guys on this team? I guess the way to lead off is to mention Jack Kiser, Howard Cross, Rylie Mills and Xavier Watts, who all had good reasons to leave and start their professional careers when last season ended, but came back (admittedly with some help from Notre Dame’s NIL war chest) to lead the defense one more time. Defensive coordinator Al Golden is as good as anyone in the country, but no doubt that group deserves some credit for what Notre Dame has become on that side of the ball. In true Notre Dame fashion, all of them are “misfits” (Freeman’s latest term for the team) of sorts; none were overly coveted, five-star level recruits. Kiser is truly remarkable, an afterthought as a recruit (his ‘best’ offer besides ND was probably either Michigan State or Iowa) who will go out as the Notre Dame record holder in games played (70, a mark virtually impossible to beat). Watts is an incredible success story – recruited as a wide receiver, shifting to linebacker at one point after that went nowhere, and somewhere along the line going to safety, where he became a two-time consensus All-American.

The defense as a whole has weathered unbelievable attrition. Jordan Botelho, Boubacar Traore and Ben Morrison all suffered season-ending injuries in a 4-game stretch earlier this fall, and Jaden Mickey hopped in the transfer portal (he’s going to Cal) in the midst of that too. And yet week after week, they deliver. Three points to IU prior to garbage time (a game in which they lost Mills) and 10 to Georgia before overcoming several haymakers against Penn State.

On offense, the line has obviously been obliterated by injury. There have been so many injuries up front (Ashton Craig, Rocco Spindler, now Anthonie Knapp, probably 3 more I’m forgetting) that Charles Jagusah, whose torn pectoral muscle in fall camp began the season from hell on that front, has somehow found his way back into the lineup because of all the injuries that have taken place since. And yet there they were, helping ND significantly outgain Penn State in the second half to secure a spot in the title game.

But of course, the offense comes down to Riley Leonard, another person I’ve been on the roller coaster with this year, as my instant reactions have shown. Whatever his foibles are as a player, though, Leonard has proven, like his head coach, to be a remarkable leader. If you somehow haven’t yet, read his Players’ Tribune essay. It’s overly long, but informative about both him and Freeman. He’s a big lovable dork, with incredible, understated toughness, and apparently the nicest person on the planet. And he’s shown himself to be an elite teammate. Seeing him bull through contact for critical yardage over and over again all season and refuse to answer a compliment with anything but gassing up his teammates, it’s crystal clear why he won over the locker room so quickly in South Bend. I’ll go into a fight with that guy any day.

Leonard is just one of many who’s put it on the line for their teammates all year. Jeremiyah Love is doing more on a sprained knee than most running backs can healthy, and his two CFP touchdowns to date will both live on in ND fans’ Internet histories forever. The wide receiver room is full of guys who no doubt think they’re capable of far more than their stat lines show, but have you heard a single word about discord from them all year? Mitchell Evans isn’t what he was a year ago, but he’s come up with big catches over and over again when they were needed. Cross hasn’t let a bad wheel keep him from getting on the field. I could go on and on.

It’s like I said after the Sugar Bowl: This team just does not stop. It doesn’t matter who goes down, they just keep coming. They have no business whatsoever having made it this far, but they have simply refused to accept anything less.

Like Leonard keeps saying: Culture wins. Every college football program thinks they have an elite culture. Almost none have had to prove it the way Notre Dame has had to this year. And because of it, they’re in the final game, with (by advanced numbers) somewhere between a 30-40 percent chance to hoist the trophy at the end. I’ll take those odds. While Ohio State is more talented, healthier and has been the best team in the country wire to wire apart from one insane (and hilarious) brain fart, I’m just not betting against this group. Ohio State may win this game, but they’re going to have to take it from Notre Dame. And if we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that the Irish won’t let go easily.