Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman met with the media shortly after his 11th-ranked Irish rallied past No. 17 Duke, 21-14, Saturday night at Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, N.C. Here's everything he had to say. Answers are largely verbatim. Questions are edited for brevity and clarity.
OPENING STATEMENT
‘I just told the team I’m just so proud of them, man. I’m proud of the way they truly focused this week on improvement. It was a rough week, and everybody knows that, but they continued to battle. And then, to win that game the way we did, it’s not the way you want it on the front end. You don’t want it to come down to a fourth-and-18 or whatever it was, but that’s a sweet victory. Because what I told them last week is that great teams find a way to win when it matters the most. They find a way to execute when it matters the most.
“We were on the opposite side this week. We had a chance to execute, and we did it. And I’m proud of this group. Yeah, there’s a lot of clean-up. There’s always a lot to clean up, but for those guys to keep battling, keep believing, is a great feeling, as a coach, for them. With that, I’ll open it up for questions.”
Q: When you get the ball back on the 5-yard line with 95 yards to go and the way the offense was looking, what are you thinking? And then with the way the drive transpired, how proud were you to see them get it done?
Marcus Freeman: “When Sam Hartman’s your quarterback, you have a lot of faith. He’s been in those moments. He’s not a first-time quarterback. The moment wasn’t too big for him, and I don’t want to just give credit to one person, but the plays he made on that series were huge. The ability to pull that ball down and run for it, I truly believe in my heart he learned from last week on the fourth-and-1, when we thought we got it and we didn’t.
“There can’t be a ‘maybe’ in that situation. I don’t care if it’s fourth-and-1 or fourth-and-18, if you’re going to take off, you have to make sure you’re going to get the first down. And that’s what he did.”
Q: You really had to patch the receiver group together tonight. How much of an impact did that have and did Duke just sit in the box and wait for something else to happen?
MF: “Yeah, obviously with injuries to three guys, now, in that room, we didn’t have much depth. Braylon James is close. He’s getting there, but he just wasn’t ready today. And what you see through the course of the game, if you can’t rotate wideouts, they get tired. And so, I’m so proud of the gutsy performance that they did have out there. Rick [Flores Jr.] had the two-point conversion, and they continued to battle. But we were thin, and we need those guys to get back for next week.”
Q: Two players who kept you in the game, Howard Cross and Mitchell Evans. What did Evans do successfully for you to make up for what you were without today?
MF: “These last two games, Mitchell Evans is making plays, man. It’s a reflection of the way he practices. He practices at a high level. And so, what you see, when you continuously practice at a high level, those are going to be the things you do in a game. He’s done a great job. He's a target. He’s a threat for us. He’s a playmaker who we can throw the ball to and believe he’s going to make a play.
“Howard Cross played relentlessly. We didn’t roll as many defensive linemen last week, and what I challenged those guys with was, if you’re going to be in there, we’ve got to have relentless effort. And we’ve got to keep rolling guys and keep them fresh. And Howard had a really good game.”
Q: With the offense struggling most of the second half, what do you say to them when you get the ball back late?
MF: “Win the interval. Win the interval. What happened before this play, before this series does not matter. We’ll get the rest of that stuff cleaned up. I said it right to them, ‘Win the interval.’ And I heard a couple of them say It during the timeout. Just win this play. And that’s what they ended up doing.”
Q: After last week’s game, I know last week was hard to process. How do you begin to process what happened in the last minute of this one?
MF: “What we can’t do is let the outcome cloud our eyes from the mistakes we’ve made. We have to make sure we’re as aggressive in cleaning up our mistakes and attacking our mistakes and learning from them and realizing why we made those mistakes, as we were last week. And sometimes the feeling of victory can make you say, ‘All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know we should have done something different.’ But we continue to have to attack everything we do and figure out why we weren’t as successful as we wanted to be. But also, we want to figure out what did we do in that last series to make sure that we finished this game with a victory? And that’s something that we’ll do.”
Q: The decision that led to Audric Estimé running — for a touchdown, was that influenced at all by knowing that you could have Spencer Shrader kick a field goal? Did you have confidence in Spencer Shrader to do it if needed? Or were you drawing it up to score?
MF: “We were drawing it up to run the ball, get the clock down, call timeout and kick the game-winning field goal. It’s a great coaching point, because we practiced that, that we probably should go down. And people say, ‘Don’t take points off the board. You probably should go down right there at the 1-yard line, kick a [short] field goal and win the game that way.’ And so, great teaching opportunities, but I’m glad he scored and I’m glad we won.”
Q: You had a bunch of pre-snap penalties. Did you sense everything went through physically, mentally and emotionally last week that it was a little bit hard to get back up to peak performance?
MF: “No. A couple of those pre-snap penalties, like three of them, I think were — give Duke credit for the crowd noise. And we were trying to go on a clap. We were trying to go on first sound, and it was pretty loud out there. And that’s something that whenever we travel, we’ve got to be prepared for. So, we’ve got to do a better job there. Some of the other pre-snap penalties, we’ve got to fix. We've got to clean up lining up offsides. That happened twice today, and some of the pre-snap penalties were self-inflicted. But I don’t know if it’s due to the [trying] week. I don’t know, but we’ve got to fix it. That’s the reality of it. We’ve got to fix it.”
Q: Did you get an explanation for the Bryce McFerson punt that was originally ruled down at the 1, and then switched to a touchback?
MF: “They said it didn’t look like the ball went over the top of the pylon, and I didn’t get many explanations that I was really looking for. But we won. We won.”
Q: How close was Jaden Greathouse to being able to help today and was it a hamstring?
MF: “Yes, it was a hamstring, and it happened Thursday in practice, maybe. I can’t remember what day it was. He was going to try to warm up and see. He’s a tough kid. He got out there for warmups, and there was just no way that he was going to be able to do it. And so, we were talking about maybe using him in the red zone, but he just couldn’t. With how hard he plays, the way he runs routes, it wasn’t what was best for him or for the team. And so, I believe he’ll be back. I believe [Jayden Thomas] will be back. JT was running today in our pregame practice. Just not ready to compete in a game yet.”
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