Given that the 2023 winner of the Dodd Trophy as college football’s Coach of the Year was Florida State’s Mike Norvell, it’s a reminder that it’s a snapshot in time and not predictive of what is to come.
Not that 2024 winner — Notre Dame third-year head football coach Marcus Freeman, announced as the recipient Tuesday morning — needed that reminder.
As his seventh-seeded Irish (12-1) put the final touches on their prep for Wednesday night’s College Football Playoff quarterfinal/Sugar Bowl matchup (8:45 EST, ESPN) with 2 seed Georgia (11-2) at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Freeman’s mindset continues to sync up with how he goes about his business. (UPDATE: The game has been postponed to Thursday.)
In football and in life.
How can I get better today than I was yesterday?
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And the road to get there for Freeman (31-9) includes introspection, self-correction and self-coercion out of his comfort zone, sometimes in painful doses.
Which explains why his New Year’s Eve thoughts aren’t likely to waft into the fan-think world of how big a win it could be over a program that symbolizes everything the SEC is and what the Irish largely have not been since Lou Holtz’s run ended in 1996.
Instead it’s another push — opportunity, Freeman would say — to get better, a chance to take another step toward a Jan. 9 date in Miami Gardens, Fla., the final stride before the Jan. 20 national title game in Atlanta.
And what that looked like this offseason is partly what you might expect and a lot more what you would not.
Not so unusual were late May trips to visit the coaching staffs of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, Washington Commanders and Los Angeles Chargers. Super-unusual was the pitstop Freeman made after those and before returning to campus to welcome his players for summer school and summer workouts.
Spending 36 hours on a nuclear-powered Naval aircraft carrier deployed in the Pacific Ocean — with a bunkmate and a communal bathroom and zero privacy. And asking questions that Freeman was convinced could apply to making Notre Dame’s 2024 season better than the 2023 version that crescendoed with a bowl trip to El Paso,Texas … and a postgame victory shower of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.
“I was on a mission,” Freeman shared with a small group of beat reporters this summer of his experience on the USS Abraham Lincoln. “Basically, what the Admiral was telling me was they were going through spring ball. They were going to get ready to dock and then they’re going to go out for the game.
“It’s real. We were talking about how they were practicing. ‘What are they looking for? How many mistakes do they make? How do they correct them?’
“They have 5,000 people on that battleship, but it was so good for me to just get a different perspective, different ideas of how to prepare better, and then say, ‘OK, what’s best for Notre Dame football?’”
And one of the things the soon-to-be 39-year-old (Jan. 10) has learned during his first three years on the job with no previous head coaching experience — and reinforced during his purposefully evolutionary summer — is that the job is NOT about figuring out a template and setting it in concrete.
It’s about figuring out enduring values and principles and evolving your program through the changes around you but letting those core values and principles guide that evolution. And college football has never seen this many changes, so seismic and so saturated, off the field to go along with the more typical X’s-and-O’s morphing.
And finding a way to embrace and embody those changes and marry them to your values, rather than ruminating on how to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
Another summer to-do list must was Freeman visiting with Sam Hartman, Notre Dame’s one-and-done transfer portal pickup for the 2023 season that preceded this year’s version, Riley Leonard of Duke.
Interestingly, it was Hartman who was one of the strongest voices who helped Leonard though the early season culture shock of the managing the enormity of the expectations around him and picking up the pieces after ND’s 16-14 loss to Northern Illinois on Sept. 7 that seemingly knocked them out of the CFP conversation for good.
Instead, it inspired college football’s most powerful in-season reboot in 2024.
But Freeman’s business with Hartman was to find out what didn’t go right in 2023. So that he could be a better head coach in 2024 and he could give Leonard an opportunity to have the team experience — a playoff experience — that Hartman didn’t get a chance to deliver.
“I’ve got to make sure I say this the right way — I don't know if we always put him in a situation to be as successful as he can be,” Freeman said this summer. “He gave us everything he had. And there was a lot of good. It's not what he wanted, not what I wanted.
"But I did learn that what's most important is that you dive into a relationship. You spend time with the guys. I spent an enormous amount of time with Sam, one-on-one, getting to know him.
“The quarterback position is so important. I've said that before. We have to trust each other, and I spent a lot of time gaining his trust. And the same thing with Riley. I spent a lot of time with him, on phone, in person, trying to formulate a relationship that I've built for how many years with Steve Angeli. I spent a lot of time with Steve Angeli, I spent a lot of time recruiting CJ Carr, Kenny Minchey.
“Riley Leonard, this happened in January. I learned that from Sam — spend time. Be intentional. Dive into a relationship. Get to know him. He needs to get to know me. Be vulnerable with that person.”
Now here they are together on the biggest stage Freeman the coach and Leonard the player have been on. And grateful, but not obsessed with the accolades that have come their way.
"I’m always a believer that with team glory comes individual glory," Freeman said Tuesday of the Dodd Trophy, an award in existence since 1976 and only won one other time by an Irish coach — Freeman’s predecessor, Brian Kelly, in 2018.
"And it’s a reflection of a lot of people, men and women, in our program that have put a lot of work into the success that we’ve had. It’s an amazing recognition. The values that Coach Dodd believed in, I believe in wholeheartedly.
“But it’s a reminder that this isn’t because of me. It’s because of us — every man and woman in our program that has put in the effort to help us be at this point.”
With the man leading them not just pointing the way on how to reach their potential but living it.
Even in a cursory joint press conference Tuesday morning with Georgia counterpart Kirby Smart, Freeman was not only able to fit in a Herschel Walker reference during the largely uneventful 18 minutes of 29 seconds of 11th-hour media Q-and-A, he doubled down on his message with his final words.
“Somebody said that to me last week, ‘Yeah, everybody has an obsession with winning the national championship,’” Freeman said. “But my obsession is to get this program to reach our full potential. And if we reach our full potential, if the result of that is earning the national championship, great.
“But we don't walk into the office every day and say ‘Let's win a national championship.’ We walk in the office and say, ‘What do we have to do today to elevate and get better and reach our full potential?’
“Because at the end of the day, that's all we control. We control how close this program can get to reaching its full potential, and we'll see what the result of reaching our full potential truly is.”
And in Freeman’s style, they won’t go tiptoeing toward the big stage as they seem to have in 2012, 2018 and 2020 before getting pushed off of it.
Not that the result is guaranteed to be different, but the approach is bolder now. Getting better every day for Freeman, also means not being afraid to make a mistake, as long as you make it going 100 miles an hour.
This year that’s shown up most overtly on fourth downs. Fake punts. Fake field goals. And just plain going-for it. And the Irish enter Wednesday night as the No. 5 team in fourth-down conversion rate at 76 percent and best in the CFP field.
That’s more than double than what teams have been able to convert on them (36.1%, which is seventh in the FBS).
“I can't say that I have, no,” Irish offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock said of whether he’s ever experienced a head coach with such a penchant for fourth-down conversion tries. “The players love it. I love it. And I think it goes to the theme of us as a football program.
“I mean, we're playing to win. And we're not afraid of what that means. And not everybody is.”
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