SOUTH BEND, Ind. — A question that had been seemingly answered ad nauseam over the past nine months with candor, vision and relentless drive on the recruiting trail, suddenly needed to be revisited after a piece of eighth-ranked Notre Dame’s expected ceiling this season collapsed Saturday at Notre Dame Stadium.
Who is Marcus Freeman?
His status report — the first Irish head football coach ever to start his regime 0-3, after a 26-21 upset loss to three-touchdown underdog Marshall — doesn’t necessarily define him. But two come-from-ahead losses, including the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl to end last season, and a puzzling and regressive slide against the first Sun Belt Conference team ever to grace an Irish football schedule screams for something that will.
“Everybody watches how you act when things are tough,” Freeman said after Notre Dame’s nation’s longest win streak against unranked teams truncated at 42 games. “When things are good, it’s easy man. Everybody’s happy. It’s easy to be a leader when everything’s going well. When things are going not-so-well, to me, that’s when the character of leadership will show.”
For better or for worse.
It’s the actions now that matter most, not the words.
And against a Marshall team that had to synthesize 48 new faces on its 85-man roster this offseason — 24 new freshmen and 24 pickups from the transfer portal — the action that spoke the loudest on Saturday was the Irish defense coughing up a 90-plus-yard drive late in the fourth quarter for the second week in a row with the game on the line.
Ohio State’s 14-play, 95-yard scoring drive on Sept. 3 provided the Buckeyes’ with the game-clinching touchdown in a 21-10 fending off of the Irish. A week later, Marshall’s 11-play, 94-yard drive gave the Thundering Herd (2-0) the lead for good, at 19-15.
Sixty-four of the 94 yards on the drive came via the run, with Marshall manhandling Notre Dame’s purported strongest position group, its defensive line.
Marshall outrushed the Irish 219-130, with more than half of ND’s rushing yards coming from QB Tyler Buchner’s team-high 13 carries (for a team-best 44 yards) and wide receiver Lorenzo Styles’ end-around for 22 yards.
ND’s traditional running game netted 57 yards on 20 carries, and with All-America left guard Jarrett Patterson in the starting lineup this week after missing the opener with a sprained foot.
“We felt it was a good week of preparation, but it didn’t roll over to the game,” Freeman said. “So let’s go look at our preparation and look and say, ‘Where can we enhance the way we prepare to make sure we’re finding a better way to execute?’
“I wish there was one thing — ‘If we did this, bam, it would happen in the game.’ It’s really an evaluation of everything we’re doing. Schematically, personnel-wise, everything to look and say, ‘OK, how can we improve the next time we’re on the field?’”
Meanwhile, Buchner, so poised against the Buckeyes, took a step backward in presence and performance against Marshall. While he ran for both of ND's non-cosmetic touchdowns and a two-point conversion for a short-lived Irish 15-12 lead, his pass efficiency rating was more than 40 points down for his starting debut last weekend in Columbus, Ohio (96.5).
That translated from 18 completions in 32 attempts for 201 yards and two interceptions. That included a handful of misfirings in the deep passing game of wide-open receivers and a 37-yard pick-6 three plays after the Thundering Herd’s go-ahead drive that Marshall cornerback Steve Gilmore cashed in for a 26-15 lead with 4:35 left.
Junior backup Drew Pyne came in during ND’s next drive and threw an interception of his own, to a defensive lineman, no less.
Freeman said the QB switch was injury-related but didn’t have any details of the severity of the shoulder injury that sidelined Buchner for the remainder of the game. The Irish (0-2) host Cal (2-0) next Saturday.
“I don’t know if it’s my experience as a head coach,” Freeman said. “I don’t know if that’s a reason why or a lack of execution, but it starts with me.
“It starts with me as a head coach and looking at myself and saying, ‘What do I have to do to help this football team?’ Really look at everything we’re doing, because the performance isn’t where we need it to be.”
Nor is that adherence to Freeman’s blueprint. It seems like light-years from the identity he spent nine months working toward in the offseason — a D-line/O-line-oriented team that consistently wins the line of scrimmage with its toughness, savvy and physicality.
And that gap in reality and how Freeman handles it will begin to answer the question of who he is as a head coach. So will the leaders among the players with whom he’s surrounded himself.
"The older guys just need to step up and keep everybody together,” senior safety DJ Brown offered. “We know times like this are hard.
“So, division in the team is probably the worst thing that could happen. Just try to keep everybody together. And keeping positive energy is what the older guys need to do to step up."
“We had a great camp,” added tight end and captain Michael Mayer. “We had a great summer. We got a lot of great players on this team, a lot of great players. I think we're just still trying to figure it out a little bit.
“And that's what we're gonna have to do that practice this week. And throughout the rest of the season, we're gonna have to try to figure it out. And that's really all we can do."
The biggest dreams for 2022 are already broken. Two weeks into the season, the Irish are effectively eliminated from the College Football Playoff pool and likely one more loss from not being able to talk about New Year’s Six aspirations without eliciting a smirk.
And some of the teams biggest stars and most influential personalities in the locker room, such as Patterson and defensive end Isaiah Foskey, deferred their NFL ambitions a year to come back and be a part of something bigger than the Cheez-it Bowl.
What Freeman must do is get his team to focus on and buy into incremental progress. Which feels like a rebuild. And if they can’t or won’t do it, it will be.
“This is how great teams are made,” insisted defensive lineman Howard Cross, who led the Irish with a career-high 11 tackles. “They pick up the pieces and put it back together. … We've got to move on and fix this, because we know we can. We can be a great team.”
How fast, how soon?
It all starts with the boomerang question: Who is Marcus Freeman?
We’re about to find out.
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