Last week’s total domination of Purdue was just what the doctor ordered, and exactly what Marcus Freeman needed to quiet the noise from the fanbase after losing to NIU. But Freeman has now demonstrated several times that he can come back from a bad loss and motivate the team to victory. This has left many in the fanbase wondering how he can motivate the team after a loss to win, but not before the losses happen? I would say it’s the lack of respect for an opponent because of who they appear to be, and not based on who they are or what they’re capable of. Any team can be beat, and you can never allow yourself to think otherwise or it will happen to you.
Photo by The Irish Tribune
Humility is a very important trait in any leader, but is often under discussed when describing what it takes to be a great one. Knute Rockne always preached to his teams about remaining humble and hungry at the same time. Rockne once stated that:
“Overconfidence is the toughest poison a coach has to face. It can wreck any team…If your team isn’t keyed up and the other team is, the other team can easily overcome a handicap of two or three touchdowns.”
Humility is a great way to recognize not only your strengths, but also your weaknesses. Rockne put it best when he said:
“Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.”
In doing this, you’re constantly allowing yourself to become better, grow stronger, and remain hungry for victory.
As we’ve seen under Freeman, his teams handle adversity very well, but it’s the success that they’ve struggled to hold onto long term. Freeman has to find a way to keep this team both grounded and hungry week in and week out. This is not an easy task to achieve when the schedule is weaker in terms of the quality of the teams. This makes it easy to look past them to the next stronger team on your schedule. Freeman’s main challenge will be keeping a fire in the belly of this team like he did for the Texas A&M game. This doesn’t at all get any easier for Freeman, as he takes on last year’s MAC Champion MIami (OH) on Saturday, and don’t let them fool you, they're a very talented team that would love nothing more than to beat Notre Dame.
During and after the NIU game, several people posted on social media that ND should stop scheduling MAC schools, as if that will fix the problem of Freeman losing against these smaller schools, but I’d disagree for two reasons. First, if that truly is the problem, you don’t run from your problems, you face them head on and conquer them. Second, he didn’t have a problem with Central Michigan last season when his team dropped 41 points on them. It’s not about anything except the team and staff getting too comfortable when the voices outside the program and within the fanbase were hyping up Notre Dame for an undefeated season because their schedule is “weaker” than in years past. Believing in yourself and being
overly confident are two very different things, and the latter one often results in a hard lesson in humility.
Not all this falls strictly on the coaches, as the players have to want it too. They have to be willing to put in the effort each and every day. It takes the entire team to make this work,
as Frank Leahy put it:
“The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.”
It takes every player and every coach to want to be successful, and to trust each other to do so. You really saw this in motion during the Texas A&M and Purdue games.
Freeman has done a great job in remaining competitive and/or beating teams that Notre Dame would have failed to do in the past. If he can figure out a way to keep his teams hungry for the lesser opponents and continue to beat the stronger ones, he could do something that hasn’t been accomplished since the days of Lou Holtz. I think one of the ways to accomplish this is to never allow the team to buy into any hype, and to prepare them for every team as if it was a Top 5 opponent. Football is a weekly war on a battlefield, and it doesn’t matter who your opponent is, what matters is you come out of that battle the victor.
As I've said before, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to pound your opponent into dust. Notre Dame proved that last week against Purdue when they refused to let up. This is the winning mindset that builds the starters' confidence and allows the backups to get into the game for meaningful game time reps. This keeps the hunger going and helps the younger guys progress for the future, which builds a complete team from top to bottom.
So, will Freeman have this team ready to compete at a high level on Saturday? We’ll get that answer shortly, but I fully expect this team to come out with their hair on fire after we saw last week against Purdue.
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