Overreactions: Another Embarassing Home-Opener for Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame

Another year, another unthinkable home loss for a Marcus Freeman-coached Notre Dame football team. Freeman “led” a lifeless team onto the field as a 4-touchdown favorite and walked off of it with one of the most embarrassing losses in program history – a loss right up there with the embarrassing loss to Marshall in Freeman’s first home-opener in 2022. A week after having the national media gush over them, the Fighting Irish will spend the next week as the butt of everyone’s jokes.  Life really does come at you fast. 

Marcus Freeman doesn’t know how to prepare a team for lesser opponents

In a cruel twist of fate, Notre Dame has a coach who can get his players up for big games after years of big game failures but seemingly doesn’t know how to get his players up for games against bad teams.  Today was the 3rd time that Notre Dame has lost as a 16+ point favorite in just 29 games as a head coach.  Great coaches don’t lose three games as 16-point favorites in their careers, much less in fewer than 30 games.

After the game, Marcus Freeman said, “We’ve been here before. Now it’s time to get it fixed.  We’ve got to get it fixed and get back to playing football the way we know how to play. We’ve played before, and we can and will.”

Sorry, but the time to “fix it” was after losing to both Marshall and Stanford in 2022. Three years into his tenure as head coach, a performance like today is simply inexcusable and calls into question whether Freeman is progressing as a head coach. It seems wild to type that a week after Freeman took his team into Kyle Field and knocked off Texas A&M, but today was one of the worst losses in program history. Marcus Freeman has had his hands on WAY too many of those types of games. 

The other wild aspect of Freeman’s not having his team ready for a team the Irish were favored by 28 points over is that just last week, we saw Freeman in the tunnel at Kyle Field pumping up his team before kickoff. Freeman can’t do that every week, or it loses its effect, but he also can’t just expect his players to do it on their own in games like this, but it sounds like he is. 

Freeman might be talking about “fixing it,” but if it’s still a problem at this point, how much faith can anyone have in him figuring out how to fix it midseason? It’s insane to think that this is where we are in year three, a week after one of the biggest road wins the program has had in years, but here we are. 

Notre Dame needs to change its offense or its quarterback

Riley Leonard looked rough as a passer against Texas A&M, but that was expected, given how food the Aggie defense is. He also did enough to make everyone think there was enough to work with. He was worse this week against a MAC opponent at home. Much worse.  He looked uncomfortable in the pocket and looked rattled at the slightest bit of pressure.  He missed open receivers and bailed too early on pockets instead of stepping into them. Then he threw one of the most unthinkable interceptions I’ve ever seen a Notre Dame quarterback throw. 

Look, I get the rationale of taking a shot on 2nd and 1, thinking that you could just run it on 3rd and 1. However, the one thing you can’t do there is throw an interception. Leonard uncorked one of the worst-looking deep passes you’ll ever see, and that essentially cost Notre Dame the game. Leonard has not shown any ability to hit a downfield pass two games in. 

At this point, Notre Dame either has to lean heavily into a power running offense featuring a ton of Leonard running, or they need to make a change at quarterback. We’ve seen much better play from Steve Angeli in the Sun Bowl than we’ve seen from Leonard in two games. Eight quarters into his Notre Dame career, Leonard has 0 touchdown passes and 2 interceptions. Angeli was 15 of 19 with 3 touchdowns in the Sun Bowl. 

If Notre Dame decides it has to stick with Leonard, and given the NIL investment in another transfer quarterback, they probably will; they have to commit more to the running game. This week, Jeremiah Love and Jadarian Price were awesome again, but Mike Denbrock called their number just 15 times combined. Leonard meanwhile attempted 32 passes and ran the ball 11 times. Notre Dame simply cannot try to run the offense they ran today again this season with Leonard in control. Over his last 12 games dating back to last year, he now has a grand total of 3 touchdown passes. 

With Leonard at quarterback, Notre Dame almost needs to return to a 2017-style attack when Brandon Wimbush was the Irish’s run-first quarterback.  

It’s not ideal to have to change up the style of offense you want to use during the season, so the right thing to do would be to give Steve Angeli a chance at running the offense if Leonard continues to struggle against Purdue next week. 

The defense wasn’t great, but it isn’t why Notre Dame lost

At times, Notre Dame’s defense was uncharacteristically pushed around by a weaker opponent. Northern Illinois ran when they wanted to, even if it didn’t necessarily show up on the scoreboard since the Huskies only scored 16 points. The one really alarming aspect defensively, however, was Al Golden’s inability to adjust to NIU running on 2nd and long with success all day long. It was maddening. Second and long turned into a money down for them all day long, and Golden had no answer for it. 

You should win every game where you hold your opponent to 16, so again, it wasn’t the defense’s fault that the Irish lost, but it was still far from an inspired effort. Take the 4th and 2 on NIU’s final drive that sealed the game. Adon Shuler’s effort on the play left a lot to be desired, even if it was unlikely he could have made the stop. We’ll never know because the effort just wasn’t there. 

A few players did show up to play

While most of the roster looked like they were treating Saturday’s game as an early spring scrimmage, a few players stood out. 

• Jordan Clark made several stops on third down that stopped drives. 
• Jaiden Ausberry was all over the field – especially in the second half. On a day in which effort was lacking at all levels of the defense, Ausberry showed out. 
• Jeremiyah Love is a baller. The fact that he only got 11 carries today is borderline criminal, given how ineffective Leonard and the Notre Dame passing game was all day. 

Sadly, that really might be it. Notre Dame’s defensive line was king of pushed around. The young offensive line handled the NIU pressure worse than they did the pressure from Texas A&M last week. Receivers were dropping balls. It was all in all bad. 

There is no point in talking about the playoffs again, at least for a while

Sure, Notre Dame’s playoff hopes aren’t totally gone with the expanded format, but after a loss like this, who honestly thinks Notre Dame can run the table anymore? Notre Dame couldn’t get first downs against a middle-of-the-pack MAC opponent today. Maybe today was just a bad day and Notre Dame can right the ship and get on a roll, but today’s loss was so alarming that no one – especially the playoff committee – is going to give this team the benefit of the doubt.

It’s unfortunate because, after last week’s win, Notre Dame had everything laid out perfectly in front of it, but that is now all gone. Right now, it’s reasonable to wonder if Notre Dame will be able to beat Purdue next weekend because if they can lose to perhaps the worst team on their schedule, they can lose to anyone.