Notre Dame is the Make-a-Wish team of college football.
I’ll explain.
Notre Dame only exists as a husk. A former blue blood whose only purpose in this sport is to make dreams come true for other programs.
UConn. Tulsa. South Florida. Duke. (A half-dozen other programs nearly joined this list late in the Brian Kelly era but he escaped every time.) Oklahoma State. Marshall. And now Northern Illinois. They’ve all scored their biggest wins in program history against Notre Dame, and all in the last 15 years.
You’re welcome for the gift. Sorry you couldn’t beat a team actually deserving of that honorific.
Notre Dame was completely and totally unprepared for this game. There’s no way around it. They scored on the first drive and thought NIU would just roll over and die.
When the Huskies did not roll over and die, benefiting instead from a wild confluence of events that led to Antario Smith being 20 yards away from any defender for a long touchdown run, this team folded. That’s what happened. They basically gave up.
But for Jeremiyah Love’s one-man show of a running play in the 3rd quarter, this game would’ve been a blowout. That, and NIU coach Thomas Hammock essentially started playing not to lose from the minute Smith crossed the goal line. (The 4th-and-2 field goal was an atrocious decision by the Huskies, and in a just world, it wouldn’t have been rewarded. But since this sport only exists and has only existed the last 30-plus years to torture Notre Dame fans, it was.)
Because Notre Dame is what it is, they lost.
The season is over. Even if Notre Dame was somehow capable of getting their crap together and winning out, no one with a loss like this one should get an at-large bid to the playoff.
And frankly, Marcus Freeman’s head coaching career will likely never come back from this.
You could forgive Marshall, because he was 3 games in and was dealt a bad hand with a lack of offensive skill talent. But this is his program now.
Freeman has been given everything ND coaches have been begging for for generations. Some degree of latitude on admissions, especially with respect to the transfer portal. Unprecedented financial backing with respect to coordinators and facilities. A schedule so easy that only 2010’s puke parade rivaled it in terms of creampuffery. (ND also sucked eggs against that schedule, for the most part.)
And instead of taking advantage of it, Notre Dame disrespected Northern Illinois and delivered a disgustingly pathetic lack of effort.
On one play, Jaylen Sneed had a NIU rusher stretched out and just stopped running. 8-yard gain.
On the 4th-and-2 conversion run by QB Ethan Hampton, instead of selling out to stop a conversion that would cost his team the game, Adon Shuler just…stopped running. Conversion.
It was disgusting. Nauseating.
Notre Dame deserves every bit of crap it will get for this. And so does Freeman.
Riley Leonard cannot start another game at quarterback. He can’t throw. There’s no way on Earth that this offense would’ve scored 14 points with Steve Angeli at quarterback. Zero. None. He would’ve game-managed his way to 20. He would never have misfired so horrifically on the interception that gave NIU the win. CJ Carr could’ve done better. The Huskies sold out on short passes because they knew Leonard wouldn’t beat them deep. And not only did he not do so, he barely even tried. (Though given the results, I guess we can see why now.)
I can’t think of any compelling reason, at the moment, why Notre Dame would have a winning season this year. If they can lose to NIU, they can lose to anyone else on the schedule.
My wife got me tickets to the Navy game in NYC for my birthday. I do not want to see Leonard take a single snap.
And we all have a timeout to take home with us, at least!
The serious part of this comment is that Freeman is still an awful in-game decision-maker and it’s really a problem. Would have been nice to have 40 seconds at the end instead of letting NIU run the clock under two minutes, imo
Credit to NIU, they earned every bit of that.
Imagine if someone told you after Marshall 2022 that would only be Freeman’s second or third worst loss.
We’re in trouble, guys. This program appears to have no way out of offensive purgatory. Home grown QBs don’t work; transfers aren’t much better. Ditto WRs. Veteran OCs are no better than rookies. We can get by with an NFL-level offensive line, but otherwise, disaster.
On top of that, Freeman now has a demonstrated problem with these hangover games. Marshall and Stanford in 2022, Duke and Louisville in 2023, NIU in 2024. We can assume that whenever we play a ranked opponent, we’re going to struggle big time the following week. Any seemingly big win will immediately be wiped out by an awful loss. Think about what that implies for any sort of playoff run, if we could even make it there.
This is going to sound dramatic, and maybe it is, but this feels like the death of the Freeman era.
I have a very, very hard time believing it’s not the end for Freeman in terms of someone you can believe in. Championship coaches don’t have this happen in year 3. They don’t.
Heart vs. head. I don’t want it to be true, but we all know what this looks like.
To my post just now. This is (for the cognoscenti anyway if they’re honest) the end.
I hung in there pretty loyally and hard for the last two years of Bob Davie and Charlie Weis. Markus Freeman is going to be hard to not follow that path. But there it is.
Some of this is just easy logic. If the best thing your starting QB does is run the football but, you’re afraid he might get hurt running the football, You need to have either a back up running QB or have a starting QB that can throw the ball. My god, I’m so disappointed in Leonard. Boy did I take the cheese on him.
Evaluation of transfer QBs, at least. 0.5 out of 3 so far. Someone got too excited by all the unwarranted NFL hype for Riley Leonard and thought it would work out. The point of a transfer QB isn’t to be developmental.
I agree with pretty much everything you have here. I couldn’t believe the Sneed play, I was yelling at the tv. He just … stopped?! What was that?!
Just a really poor lack of effort. That all starts with coaching. Came out thinking they were great because they won last week.
I’m done with Leonard as well. Zero TD passes in two games. Horrendous interception. Absolutely inexcusable at that level for a program that claims to want to compete for a national championship.
Haven’t been this mad about a loss in a long time.
This is gonna sound like a PFTCommenter take, but here’s the thing with these super senior transfer QBs: If they were actually good, they’d be in the NFL already.
If you can get a guy who had a great FR/SO year to transfer then that’s legit. The super seniors can probably help a lower P4 team rise up a bit. But if you want to pretend you’re at the big boy table you need more
No that’s definitely true. Maybe it’s my own fault for buying the leonard hype, whatever it was. But I’ve seen enough.
To be fair, he had one good year at Duke (as a soph), and people were talking about him as a potential first round pick, which mean he had potential. He then had a year essentially taken by injury.
So of course if he was good enough he might have already been in the NFL. But in this case it was more about the opportunity to be develop and get better (not a finished product at all). And one would think under Denbrock that kind of situation would work out well.
I didn’t watch all his Duke film or something like that but it’s not hard to imagine this was the worst game of his career.
Not sure what happened to him but are we like the Browns and we broke another QB?
Fire Freeman. Just pull the bandaid off. Even if we fluke into the playoff in his tenure we’ll get smoked. Roll the dice again, move on, fire Freeman
Setting aside how realistic this may or may not be, I think there are two approaches here.
One is Bama: Churn head coaches, fire them as soon as you’re convinced they’re not the guy, try to brute force your way to a Saban as quickly as possible. Michigan and Harbaugh could apply here too.
The other is the fear that your program becomes known as a coaching graveyard. If you come here and fail, as most do, your career is over. ND was here pre-Kelly.
Where are we now? I dunno.
The former. Notre Dame has the fanbase and resources to make it work. Also Freeman is young enough that he can bounce back
Yeah, I posted in the Slack that we have had no luck with coaches that had no history of head coaching success. Davie, Weis, Freeman…great coordinators. Faust…not a college head coach.*
But now that I think of it, none of them ever bounced back into a becoming a great HC. Which makes me think Freeman is the next Weis. Smoke and mirrors for a few years, then thud, and back to being an elite coordinator. Al Golden 2.0 is his ceiling.
Anyway, back up the truck and get a coach that has actually won something at the P4 level, or at least, like Kelly, coached a G5 onto the national scene, AS A HEAD COACH. Or like Holtz, had success at various stops.
(*Ty Willingham exception)
This has been known and clear since Ara Parseghian talked to that after his own tenure. And ND’s entire history for 120 years reinforces that.
As someone who also remembers the dark years of Gerry Faust’s Pinkett-Pinkett-Pass-Punt three and out offense, I was not expecting Price-Love-Screen Pass-Punt this year.
Please don’t mention punting.
Dark hypothetical: is Riley Leonard that much better of a quarterback, right now, than Tyler Buchner?
Certainly didn’t look like it today. Though it seems like he’s shown that he is in the past. He’s got a longer track record than Buchner ever had.
Not much more to contribute about how pathetic the game was. But I need to vent about how absolutely awful Jason Garrett is. He sucks so much. He is the worst announcer ever. Please make him stop saying naked.
I agree juice. It’s like NBC doesn’t know who their audience is. We’re all ready to kick the dog we’re so pissed and Hicks and Garrett are laughing and joking while extolling the NIU team. Ya, I know NIU is playing well but, I hardly think it funny, nor does the dog.
3:15 in the morning in France. This was one of the worst gut punches in my 70 + years of being a ND supporter and fan.
I usually drink whatever koolaid is around, but am also acutely aware that at ND you can tell about our HC by how his 3rd year goes. After last week I was so much hoping that MF could help us to the Promised Land. OK, I was skeptical about R Leonard being able to throw, worried about the O-Line, but was convinced that Denbrook was a good hire.
It sucks that it’s over so quickly. But now we have to live through the next three years (they’ll never fire him after 3, like Ty W.).
Cardinals announcer and legend Mike Shannon said many silly things while drunk on the air, but the one thing he said that made a lot of sense was that “You’re not as good as you think when you’re winning, and you’re not as bad as you think when you’re losing.”
We’re not this bad. But we weren’t as good as we thought after A&M. This team could come out and still win a lot of games, if they’re willing to make a QB switch NOW.
But we ain’t making a lot of noise in the playoffs either, unless Carr or Minchey turns out to be the next Montana. Which I was hoping for on that last drive, I really hoped Freeman had the guts to pull a Devine and put in the young guy. Noise, you remember the NC and Air Force Montana comebacks.
But he didn’t. And he were are…
I love Mike Shannon as much as anyone, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we beat Purdue next week.
But this is serious business. Long — years, if not decades long — patterns of failure, and no clear answers. Platitudes are not coming to save us.
It ain’t good.
Yeah, but I’m hoping a QB who can throw the ball might.
Last year, Sam Hartman threw 24 TDs to 8 picks with a shell of a receiving corps.
This year, we have Riley Leonard, who has 0 TDs through two games. If he could run like Vick or Lamar Jackson, or even Tim Tebow, that would be something. But he’s just NOT an elite runner. Is he even a more dangerous runner that Ian Book? We have more arm talent on this roster right now. Just need a coach with the stones to play them and sit the expensive transfer.
Just back from the Sunday market — and I’ll switch to the other thread now. But first, to reply: yes, I do remember Joe and the NC and AF comebacks. And yes, we have to wish for a switch to one of the other three QBs who can throw. But back in the Montana era, the coach didn’t have a million dollar “NIL” investment (and no doubt investors) to worry about. Plus there wasn’t the kind of media coverage that shows us what a fine young man Riley Leonard is, hence making the coach hesitate before pulling the plug.