Don’t you just love it when the entire perception of your favorite team is shattered within the span of a week? Right after the Texas A&M victory, I began work on an article title titled “Why You Should Trust Notre Dame this Season” where I would gush about how Marcus Freeman has transformed this program into a bonafide title contender. I decided to wait until after the Northern Illinois game because I wanted to include more awesome defensive stats since we would surely win by a lot. I took this screenshot as proof that I legitimately thought ND could be a championship winning team before trashing that stillborn piece.
So here we are again. Another loss to a VASTLY inferior opponent except this time, I’m not sure Freeman will come back from this. I’m not even sure if he deserves to have a chance to atone for the absolute travesty we watched last Saturday. The NIU loss is a before and after event. Before, Notre Dame had just won its biggest road game in 12 years. An undefeated regular season and a home playoff game was right there for the taking. And now, Notre Dame is once again a national laughingstock. National media personalities are apologizing for thinking this team was different and we as fans are as angry as we’ve ever been in the post-Holtz Era.
So what’s our excuse this time? Why does this keep happening? Is this because we aren’t talented enough? Is it coaching? A curse? Or something entirely different? We all want answers, but all you’re going to get from me right now is an scathing stream of consciousness. Buckle up.
Talent
Eric wrote this in his excellent post-game autopsy report:
I cannot stand how little access is given to this program in the spring and fall and it was incredibly irrational to believe that this was the most talented Notre Dame in 30 years. There just wasn’t enough substance behind talk like that and far from enough evidence throughout the off-season to back it up. Outside of Mitchell Evans, the offense really had no one proven to perform at a high level in their career and when things aren’t witnessed up close that much it becomes way too easy to gloss over things in the excitement of the off-season. The media should’ve been given more access and the people who care about the program should’ve been more aware that things aren’t quite so amazing as they seem before the season starts. This team had holes, it has very obvious holes right now, and it sucks that we went into this season feeling like there weren’t as many issues.
The talent gap is something we have talked about ad nauseam for almost a decade now and it is a real thing. But with all due respect to our fearless leader Eric, we’re talking about Northern Illinois, not Alabama. Yet, Notre Dame often looked like they were being pushed around by Alabama on Saturday but we’ll get to that part later.
What I want to focus on is the talent level of this particular team. A couple of things which I am copying over from my ill-timed “trust Notre Dame” article are the stats on how Marcus Freeman clearly has the Irish recruiting at a higher level than they were under Brian Kelly. It’s not debatable if we choose to trust the data:
Notre Dame went on the road last week and handled their business against a Texas A&M team which has an identical score in the Talent Composite and a 79% BCR. I’m sorry but I just cannot accept that lack of talent at certain positions is why we lost to Northern Illinois especially after what we saw in College Station. A slightly less talented version of this team should have beaten Ohio State and their insane 85% BCR last year at home. This 2024 team has 58 four and five-star players on the roster compared to 44 on the 2018 team which went undefeated and made the playoff.
Does Notre Dame have the talent to seriously compete for a title? That answer is no unless we employ Connor Stallions or become the greatest developmental program in the country. But does Notre Dame have the talent to beat a team like Northern Illinois at home without breaking much of a sweat? The answer should be an emphatic YES because what are we even doing here if that’s not the case?
What are you doing during the week?
Marshall. Stanford. Northern Illinois. The common denominators between the three inexcusable, unacceptable losses that Freeman has had at Notre Dame are as follows:
- The week after a big game/win over a ranked opponent
- Home game against a double digit underdog
- Irish were out-gained, posted a lower yards per play, and lost time of possession
Short aside: Notre Dame has had some great defenses over the past decade, but the 2023 unit might be my all-time favorite. The Irish defense was consistently elite in a way they haven’t been for a long time. There are nine categories which go into calculating Defensive FEI and Notre Dame ranked no lower than 20th in any of them. Opponents labored to get anything going as the Irish ranked 5th in preventing drives of 30 yards or more.
On Saturday? Notre Dame gave up 190 yards rushing which is the most they’ve surrendered since the 2022 USC debacle. NIU put together eight drives of 30 yards or more, an incomprehensible number because the most ND gave up in a game last season was five. NIU had more total yards, yards per play, and yards per pass attempt than any team since the aforementioned USC game. Let me repeat that for you: Northern Illinois moved the ball better on Notre Dame than did offenses featuring Caleb Williams, Marvin Harrison Jr., and Riley Leonard (lol) in 2023. The defense isn’t why the Irish lost on Saturday, but I’m not letting them off the hook.
So what manner of horrible things are happening in practice to explain this? In his Monday Presser, Freeman admitted that the players “believed the hype” after last week but that doesn’t pass the smell test to me. That does not explain be able to physically manhandle one of the most talented teams in the country on the road, and then being manhandled yourself by a G5 team starting several FCS transfers because their better players were picked off by lower-tier P4 teams! That does not explain giving up almost 6ypp to an offense which ranked 104th in Offensive F+/- last year and being out-gained by over 100 yards. I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it.
I am really trying to drill down the level of apathy needed to put forth a pathetic performance like that. And that apathy was on display Saturday with Jaylen Sneed loafing on several plays and Jaden Greathouse dropping Riley Leonard’s only well-thrown ball of the day among other examples. When you lose a game like this it comes down to coaching and preparation. It really felt like the Irish were going to coast after scoring first but then NIU scored that fluky touchdown and the players looked visibly dejected. They were probably thinking “ah dammit, we actually have to try now?” Except it’s really hard to lock in again when you already mentally checked out the second Mitch Jeter made the game-sealing field goal in College Station.
Offensive Playcalling
One play-action pass on Saturday. One carry for Jeremiyah Love in the 4th Quarter. Four carries for Jadarian Price, total.
May I ask why?
Quarterback
Here are the combined Irish QB stats from Marshall/Stanford/NIU triumvirate: 2 touchdowns, 5 interceptions, 56% completion percentage, 178 yards per game and a putrid 81.71 passer rating. One of those games was helmed by Tyler Buchner who while talented, suffered from Brandon Wimbush syndrome and the other by Drew Pyne who might be the worst QB to ever post a passer rating over 150 for a season. With the benefit of hindsight we’ve been able to dismiss those performances as being the result of a rookie head coach without much talent on offense.
Notre Dame trotted out Riley Leonard on Saturday who has been bandied about as a first round NFL Draft pick and was chosen by at least one national media member to win the Heisman this season. Yet with advantages that Pyne or Buchner would’ve killed for, he crapped out the worst performance of the three. Leonard’s atrocious play nuked the offense in a way that made it impossible to come back from against a team which ranked 66th in F+/- defense last year.
This is the third straight season that Irish fans have been publicly apoplectic about the quarterback position. We were willing to accept good but not great seasons from Ian Book and Jack Coan because we had no real alternatives but now we would be lucky to have that kind of steady production. I was really discouraged with how quickly the fanbase turned against Sam Hartman last year because in my opinion, it wasn’t entirely fair. He had lost almost all of his best receiving weapons by the Clemson game and his OC was trying to run an unimaginative throwback offense. I said in my piece about that stale offense last year that the takeaway from a lot of people about Hartman should have been “it’s pretty concerning how much worse he looks at Notre Dame despite having better players” instead of “haha wow he was overrated the whole time.”
We now have multiple blue chip quarterbacks waiting in the wings along with a steady Steve Angeli, but the Monday depth chart still listed Leonard as the starting QB. And I don’t want to be too harsh on this guy either because something is clearly wrong with him or else he wouldn’t be arm punting everything over 10+ yards downfield. The talent is real along with his impressive running ability. He could be a really good QB and exactly what this offense needs.
But mark my words: Notre Dame will not be in the business of signing another CJ Carr or even a Kenny Minchey if Leonard is allowed to go out there and perform like that with no consequences. Rumors started coming out over the summer about certain members of the 2023 Irish wide receiver corps slacking off during practice because they knew they wouldn’t get benched due to the thin depth chart. That cannot be the case with Leonard. If he can’t rise to the level of game manager against Purdue then we need to see the fresh blood we’ve been stockpiling.
Marcus Freeman
Let me make something very clear: the Northern Illinois Huskies missing their best defensive player and led by a 25-33 head coach should never, EVER beat Notre Dame the way they did on Saturday. Marcus Freeman is not a fresh face to Notre Dame anymore, he’s been on campus since early-2021. Year Three has always proven to be a remarkable benchmark for coaches in South Bend: we will know exactly what kind of coach you will be by the end. What are we supposed to gather from the first two games this season?
It’s even more frustrating to have this conversation now because Freeman orchestrated a huge leap last year that didn’t show up in the win column. 2023 was the first season in 50 years that Notre Dame finished in the top-ten in both points scored and points given up per game (by the way, that 1973 team won the national title). Four players made the AP All-American 1st and 2nd teams, tying Georgia for the most in the country. The 2023 team compiled a final F+/- rating of 1.72, their best finish ever. Notre Dame ranked ahead of Washington, Texas, Alabama, and Florida State in overall FEI, the teams ranked 2-5 in the final CFP rankings. By almost every measure, this was arguably the best Irish team since the Holtz era.
And they still lost three games thanks to critical deficiencies at wide receiver, the interior offensive line, and at offensive coordinator. They lost to Ohio State due to criminal mismanagement with the game on the line while the offense turned in disinterested performances against Louisville and Clemson. I’m starting to feel a little differently about those last two games which came after impressive wins against #17 Duke and Pitt. Were we beaten thanks to bad tactics or talent or did Freeman just prepare the team the same way he did against NIU? It’s a relevant question.
I think I speak for most fans when I say that we can’t do this emotional whiplash of beating a ranked SEC team on the road immediately followed by losing as a four-touchdown favorite. We already had to worry about no-showing in big games under Kelly and now we have to worry about doing that against the worst teams on our schedule? Freeman has done good things in big games that’s made even national sportswriters sit up and pay attention. But it means nothing if the team undoes all of that goodwill the very next week.
Now What
Who the hell knows? This is uncharted territory for Notre Dame football. We’ve had plenty of letdowns over the past thirty years but none so sudden and so shocking as this one. Everything was laid out in front of this team but they couldn’t even take care of business against a MAC school with a sub .500 record the last five seasons. Marcus Freeman is now 5-3 in home games in which ND is a 17.5-point favorite or more. At least we knew what was wrong with those Davie-Willingham-Weis teams when they were beaten: they were badly-coached and lacked high-end talent at key spots. I’ll repeat the headline, what’s our excuse now?
What I do know is that Marcus Freeman has forever lost the benefit of doubt. He has received unprecedented support from the university in terms of NIL investment, coaches’s pay, and new facilities. Notre Dame hired away the offensive coordinator of the #1 offense in America last year and held onto one of the most respected defensive coordinators in all of football. We knew he would need a lot of support to succeed as a first-time head coach at Notre Dame and he has gotten damn-near everything he needs. He has no one to blame but himself for the current situation. We all desperately want for him to win, but for some reason he can’t do it consistently enough.
The team has lost games against inferior opponents every year he’s been the coach with incoherence on offense being the prime culprit. It’s a sick joke that his first game as head coach was a pretty good offensive performance undone by the worst defensive effort I have ever seen from a Notre Dame team. I often wish we could just freeze time forever after Michael Mayer scored to put the Irish up by 21 in the Fiesta Bowl. We were all thinking the same thing: Marcus Freeman is going to win an NY6 bowl in his first game! And right after getting a commitment from a 5-star safety who is totally not going to flip!
The high-water mark of the Marcus Freeman era.
I know this is the most obvious statement ever but it would’ve been so much better to have just won against NIU by a single point. In this parallel universe a 2-0 Irish team would’ve lost a lot of national goodwill but at least we would have avoided the most catastrophic loss of the post-Holtz era. At least a special season would still be in the works and Notre Dame could have recalibrated against a good test this week in Purdue. Instead, we’re talking about whether the current coach will ever rebound from such a wretched and humiliating performance.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m just done with the excuses. I can promise you that if Freeman is eventually let go that Notre Dame will and should never hire another first-time head coach. We now have decades of evidence proving that this job is not for everyone. We need a coach who can recruit with the best, develop NFL-level players while maintaining academic prestige, and can make the right tactical decisions in important moments.
And we sure as hell need a coach who can find a way to beat Northern Illinois.
I’m the first to comment !
So hi from a Paris which is more lovely for having hosted a really great sporting macro-event in a way that surpassed all expectations — which lingering vibes are the only thing keeping me out of the slough of despair.
But hey, Golden, your very elegantly done piece of anger is helping me out. In a word — yep, it’s the head coach. But it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what is missing, as Eric alluded to. But you have done a great job of cutting away some underbrush to allow us to focuson the real problem.
Having said all of that — I notice Malik Zaire (of all people) just said loud and clear that ND is the easiest place to come play of all the large iconic US college football stadiums. So there’s that maybe as a contributing factor?
We should be able to beat NIU in a parking lot, in death valley with 100,000 fans against us, at NIU, and anywhere in between. Asking the fans to get up for a game against NIU, when the players and coaches won’t even do so, is absurd.
I 100% agree with Zaire that we don’t have an impressive home field advantage against elite opponents. But that shouldn’t be even a minimal factor against a program that had never defeated a top 10 opponent in its history.
Thanks MN! I actually first started writing for 18S when I was a grad student in London so I understand the pain of staying up until 3am for the primetime games.
This may be the best article on this site – which, to be clear, has the best ND football content on the internet – since Eric’s “we need to dump Wimbush and go with Book” piece six(!) years ago. Perfectly channels the state of the program. Bravo.
Beat me to it – this is a really excellent write up on the state of the program. What’s worse to me is we probably limp along to be like 8-4, win some mediocre bowl game, and we have to do it again next year. I want off this ride.
To self-reply – the point about overall talent is a huge one. Are we going to consistently beat Bama/Georgia/OSU? No, probably not. No one is. We should have won one last year though and we should be capable of it occasionally. We’re in the next tier of talent (I believe the 247 composite has us at #10). That’s even with a couple years of being behind the eight ball on NIL. Simply put, I refuse to believe a program like this, with a fanbase as large as anyone in the country, should be getting out spent and out recruited by Auburn or Ole Miss or whoever. It’s not 1995, no one cares about “Free Shoes University”, having a good football team with money spent on it does not hurt the profile of your school.
OP is right that the defense shouldn’t be let off the hook. They looked flat. Mediocre. But looking at the drives, outside of the crazy fluke play – stuff happens – the three NIU FGs came off drives starting at the NIU 35, the NIU 45, and the 50. It’s like the Marshall game. Defense played flat but they played good enough that if the offense puts in a D-grade performance they win pretty easily. We didn’t even get that.
8-4 and Freeman has to be out the door. This is his program now. His players. His coaching staff. There is nobody to blame but him. 8-4 should be the floor after a season where we make the playoff and look like a contender and everybody leaves. We’re not starting a bunch of young kids, breaking in a sophomore QB, and trying to build for the future. This is the future. This is the season it had to all come together with the returning Nagurski winner, a future top 20 CB, and defense full of veterans that will certainly take a major step back next season.
I can’t disagree with you, but I would bet $1000 that the second black coach we’ve ever had won’t get fired after 3 years, when the first black coach we’d ever had was the first person we had ever fired after 3 years.
Agreed, 8-4 should be shown the door. But I have a feeling he won’t unless the losses are very, very bad. Part of it is what IrishTexan said – which I think is very dumb – but part of it is that I still get the overall feeling that the school doesn’t care that much. Maybe the new AD will be different.
Well, one of the losses already is very, very bad. Just a few more to go!
We’re going to lose to Purdue on an offsides penalty and never hear the end of it
Will we have 11 men on the field at least?
Also no
It’s hard not to think that with a 9-3 record Freeman should be shown the door. With this talent, with this schedule – 10-2 should have been the floor. Even after this loss, going 8-2 the rest of the way would be a massive disappointment – presumably losing against the only other 2 respectable opponents in this scenario (Louisville and USC). This would be especially the case when we notice that A&M didn’t finish in the top 25.
Tough but fair. IMO 8-4 this season would be the equivalent of going 5-7 or 6-6 last year.
I kinda think we’re going to go 10-2, which is in some ways probably the worst landing spot of all. 9-3 or worse and, at a minimum, there’s a universal understanding that he needs to win a playoff game at a minimum next year to keep his job. 10-2 without the playoffs would feel super empty but everyone would have to pretend like everything is fine.
Thank you!
Unrelated to this great article but is anyone else having major troubles logging in on here? I’ve tried my phone and two computers and it’s the same error, refreshing the page a thousand time eventually brute forces my way in.
Yes I kept getting the error yesterday, it worked first try today though.
I can’t log in on my phone these days. I don’t have the same issue on desktop.
Yes, I couldn’t get in earlier today. Tried at 2 different times but finally got signed in.
I was at the game and as I watched Freeman walk into the stadium my thought was, “He has swagger, or over‐confidence.” It’s hard to figure in the moment. The players looked like they were headed to practice. It was completely different from the WF game last year (my only other point of reference). At the WF game the players seemed excited and wanting to play.
Heard from the Irish Breakdown guys that Thursday and Friday were walkthroughs, after going really hard early in the week.
Their point was that inconsistent preparation leads to inconsistent results. Especially with college kids.
Saying you don’t know who you’re playing the next week after a big win turns out to be a huge red flag. How about “We’ll enjoy this for a couple of days and then get ready for a tough, experienced NIU team?” You don’t think “I don’t know who we’re playing next week” wasn’t locker room bulletin board material.
Immature coach. +1,000 on no more hires without HC experience. Really interested to see what Lea and Elko do the next couple of years while we ride out Freeman’s contract.
And it’s now being reported that Leonard hurt his shoulder. That probably is an important reason why they stopped running him. When did that injury happen?
That also should have been an easy reason to replace him and give Angeli a try. Hopefully at least *now* one of those guys are taking reps this week to be ready to go.
I think it was the hard tackle he took towards the end of the first half, when he was slow to get up. Non-throwing shoulder, it should be noted.
But I’m hoping that they made this public so that we can have an “excuse” to play Angelli on Saturday
I thought I saw a report though that the plan is also that he’s starting. I hope that’s just a smokescreen so as not to tip our hand to Purdue.
I suppose it’s possible that they plan to just to numb it and they plan to run him. But either way, he’s just not good enough to play if he’s not running.
FWIW, ‘they’ didn’t make this public. The news was broken by On3’s NIL/transfer portal guy, not an ND reporter, which implies that someone outside Notre Dame – probably Leonard’s agent – leaked it. ND literally isn’t allowing the press to ask about possible injuries to Leonard.
One would think an agent leaked it to give excuse for the bad play. Could it also force or encourage ND’s hand to not play him?
I think Baker Mayfield had this kind of injury a few years ago when he was with the Browns. He was able to play with it for some time but it seemed to have affected his play. If I remember correctly eventually it got worse and he finally stopped playing. But not before it hurt his stock so to speak from poorer play and the rest of history for him and the Browns.
I’m not sanguine about Leonard playing with this injury. I *think* it’s something that would need surgery or at least a long time to heal if the goal was to get it healed before playing again (at least if it is in fact the same injury as Baker’s).
I believe you’re right about Mayfield. Non-throwing shoulder labrum tear. He had surgery on his after the season I think. Recovery is probably 4+ months. I had mine repaired about 12 years ago, it’s not a fun recovery.
And apparently today Denbrock was denying knowledge of Leonard being injured (in an II post)
Was hearing on a podcast some discussion about Leonard taking a redshirt.
Worst case for Leonard is he scrapes through the next two games with the D carrying us to wins, then he gets exposed at Louisville.
Louisville is game 5. Redshirt is burned. It’s clear that it’s time to move on to Angeli/Minchey/Carr. He can get surgery and hopefully get right, but then what? Try to make the XFL? Get on to a practice squad as an UDFA?
Better for him to get it figured out quick if the plan is for him to shut it down, get the redshirt, and take a transfer again.
Yea I would think it is in his best interest not to play hurt. If I were in his shoes, I’d think I’d want to shut it down, get healthy, and get ready for next year (even if that’s not at ND).
Otherwise like you said, he likely does not look good and instead of being a potential higher end draft pick, he basically misses his shot at the NFL.
As for next year for him if he took a red-shirt, I would think it might be more likely than not that he would NOT come back to ND. With all those young QBs, I doubt he’d want to enter a legit 4 QB race to be the starter next year. With those guys a year older (and so more ready to play), it’s hard to imagine they would just hand the job to Leonard.
I don’t hate to say “I told you so”, so here it is:
I told you so. OK, maybe not you specifically Irishchamp, but the board in general. I told everyone who was drinking the Leonard kool-aid that I had no faith in running QBs with an injury history to not go right out and get injured again.
It’s not just that he is injured again, which I expected. It’s that I think that his mechanics never really recovered, and probably never will.
Also, he clearly can’t process like he needs to in order to anticipate or throw anyone open.
On top of that, being an eye doctor, I read a fascinating article about top gun fighter pilots a while ago. Most people can pay attention to 2-3 things in their peripheral vision while concentrating on something straight ahead. Top gun pilots? They can concentrate on 9 or 10, actively. It’s not peripheral vision, it’s called peripheral attention.
There was a throwaway comment in the article about Tom Brady and LeBron James probably being able to do the same thing. And you can’t teach it, it’s just innate ability. You can hone it with film study, but you have it or you don’t. The great QBs can mentally pay enough attention to the D-Line, all their receivers, and all the D-backs, in real time. They are making progressions before they even know it. LeBron James, Magic, Larry Bird, they literally are/were keeping track of the ball AND every player on the floor. They have it.
And Riley Leonard doesn’t have it.
haha. I take the told you so in good spirit. But I do want to push back against it.
Just because a prediction comes right doesn’t mean that there was sufficient evidence to make that prediction ahead of time.
In this case, I still don’t think that (A) there was sufficient evidence to label Leonard himself more injury prone (than any other running QB) And clearly this has nothing to do with his ankle so it’s not like it’s a recurring thing or something like that. In other words, I don’t think his injury history was very long.
Even if (B) – and here’s where maybe the goal posts moved a little bit – I do agree that running QBs in general have a tendency to get hurt more than non-running QBs. This I think just about everyone holds.
So the question that we discussed briefly was around whether Leonard’s injury history was sufficient to worry about him more than other running QBs. I still don’t think it was.
Him getting hurt now can just as easily fall into (B), so to speak. As a running QB he’s more liable to get hurt and so it’s not a surprise that he got hurt.
Leonard’s injuries this and last year, occurred on pass plays while moving from the pass rush.
-Absolutely hilarious that Jim Tressel called Freeman after the A&M game and told him not to celebrate, but instead to focus on the next opponent, and Freeman told it to the media like a cute folksy story instead of sage advice.
-Recruiting a transfer QB coming off an injury, with a career 61% completion percentage who averaged 7 yard per attempt in his career was a poor decision. The media having no access all offseason hid the issues, but he looks rusty, indecisive, and slower than anticipated. If the dude can’t run 20 times per game, we would be better off with Buchner out there.
-Freeman has to win out or he should be fired. I hate calling for a guy’s job, especially when he seems like a great human. But it seems evident that he’s a defensive coordinator, not a head coach. All we heard in the lead-up to the A&M game was how intense practice was, how they were cranking the noise up to deafening volumes, how this was going to be the greatest week of practice of all time. And then the NIU lead-up was the softest week of practice ever. Where does he think the players got the idea that this would be a walkover?
I really wonder if the whole grad QB transfer thing is not what it’s cracked up to be because you never get a 2nd year with the guy. J. Daniels was good his first year at LSU but not THAT good. 2nd year = heisman (QB ranking PFF Year 1: 19th, year 2: 1st). . Bo Nix would be another example of a guy making a big leap in the 2nd year after transferring (QB ranking PFF Year 1: 21nd, year 2: 2nd).
It seems to take QBs at least a whole year to get comfortable with a scheme and execute it at a high level (in college or in the NFL). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some/a lot of Leonard’s indecisiveness is a result of switching schemes/coaches.
Was Daniels eligible his second year at LSU because of COVID? I know Nix got five years. What I’m saying is those two might be extra special because of getting another year of eligibility but I agree a one year transfer – who isn’t good enough to really be a top NFL pick in all likelihood – doesn’t seem to be much of a plan.
Yes, Daniels played 5 years because of COVID.
I think this is a key point because the evidence seems to support your conclusion. Just looking at DJU, he was a bad QB his first full year of starting, then was okay in 2022 before we ended his career at Clemson. Okay again at OSUw, and then reverting back to horrid this year at FSU. Just because a player is more experienced doesn’t mean they don’t need a learning curve.
Why would media access matter that much?
It matters to the extent we can get accurate, honest information. As it is, we instead get a small number of writers seeing limited things and always writing favorably to not rock the boat.
I mean of course I agree that it would be great to get a more accurate assessment of what’s going on but I figure no good coach would ever let that happen really!
I mean the only way (and I have no idea if this is realistic at all) would be to let some reporters have a lot more access but not to let them publish anything until after the first game or something like that. But I think that defeats the purpose a little bit – even if it would be quite interesting to have those hypothetical reporters writing about how this is not surprising to them as they as X,Y, and Z during camp.
Last time we won a National Championship, practices were open to the media. Just sayin’………..
Let’s do it!
How about more access but, no cameras.
I’m sure coaches also don’t want opposing teams to hear details about how certain players, units, parts of the game (like passing game, etc.) are doing either.
Yea, I don’t quite understand everyone being all up in arms that the stuff we heard from coaches or those connected to ND told us the optimistic slant of what’s going on. That happens every year. And so if it’s not seen, it shouldn’t be super surprising when the best version of what was shared doesn’t come to pass.
Well, the good news is that I finally got banner ads within articles removed.
Great article! And as for talent, we better enjoy it now while we have it — recruiting has taken a dive this year (which was supposedly one of the biggest reasons for MF in the first place)
It’s not looking good now but with recruiting it’s always hard to tell exactly until the end. I’m sure the hope was to go 13-1/14-0 and that would have helped spark recruiting. Now it would seem harder to get guys to jump on board if there starts be talk about Freeman’s job.