Derek Schultz: Notre Dame’s unpredictability under Freeman may ultimately be his undoing

For two straight weeks, Marcus Freeman’s football team has left a stadium in complete silence.

Just one week after Northern Illinois shocked the home crowd at Notre Dame Stadium with a 16-14 upset in South Bend, Freeman’s Irish stunned a sold-out Ross-Ade Stadium by halftime, cruising to a historic 66-7 win over the in-state rival Boilermakers. A loss as a 28-point favorite to a directional MAC school followed by a 59-point road romp of a Big Ten opponent? That’s about as opposite as the extremes get in major college football. Yet Notre Dame accomplished both feats in the span of just seven days. And neither result does Freeman any good.

If there’s such a thing as creating frustration with a blowout victory, he just did it, making last week’s debacle against Northern Illinois—or the season-opening road triumph over a ranked Texas A&M team, for that matter—even more head-scratching. That’s the crux of the problem with Freeman as he hits the quarter pole of his third season as Notre Dame head coach: His teams have often been hard to explain.

Shocking losses visited Freeman almost immediately after he took over the program. In the 2022 home opener, the Irish were defeated by a former MAC school, Marshall of the Sun Belt, in a game that was not as close as the final 26-21 margin indicated. The Irish followed that several weeks later with a second unforgivable home loss, this time to a dreadful Stanford team that finished 3-9 and in the basement of the Pac-12 standings.

That’s not to say Freeman didn’t have high points, as the Irish absolutely crushed ACC champion Clemson by three touchdowns and racked up 48 points and nearly 600 yards against league runner-up North Carolina, but the results to Marshall and Stanford were impossible to align with everything else that happened his first full season.

While there weren’t any catastrophic defeats in his second year, Freeman’s Irish still did the inexplicable at the season’s most critical moments. Against fourth-ranked Ohio State, the Irish had only 10 defenders on the field when the Buckeyes scored the game-clinching touchdown as time expired, turning a potential tenure-defining win into a heartbreaking 17-14 defeat.

Any faint hopes of making the College Football Playoff were quickly extinguished for Freeman’s squad two weeks later, when five turnovers and a 26-3 second-half scoring avalanche from a middling Louisville quad resulted in a runaway defeat (before two garbage-time ND touchdowns). Those losses were surrounded by what was temporarily a season-saving rally at Duke and a four-touchdown shellacking of rival USC, with Freeman’s second season ultimately hitting the 10-win mark, thanks to a 40-8 bowl win over Oregon State.

Again, you can go ahead and cue Tom Hanks sitting at the bus stop and talking about a box of chocolates here.

Those wild swings have spat out results that look reasonably acceptable overall. Freeman’s teams have gone 9-4 and 10-3 in his two seasons, and we’re not too far removed from an era where Notre Dame fans were throwing a parade for campaigns like that under Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis.

However, expectations have changed for the Irish, and I’m not just talking among the delusional subway alumni—we all know some of these folks—who think it’s still the glory years of Ara Parseghian. Before Freeman’s elevation to head coach, Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame teams went 54-9 over his final five seasons. They reached the four-team playoff twice, and although both were blowout eliminations, the fact remains that they got there. The Irish won at least 10 games in 2017 (10-3), 2018 (12-1), 2019 (11-2), 2020 (10-2) and 2021 (11-2), finishing in the top 11 in the national polls in all five of those seasons.

During that span, Kelly had a knack for doing the expected, as the Irish rattled off 42 straight wins against unranked opponents, the longest streak in the nation at that time, and 28 straight regular-season victories against ACC competition. Freeman snapped the first streak in his first game against an unranked opponent (Marshall) and broke the second in his third ACC attempt (Louisville).

For all of Kelly’s failings in the big games against premier opponents on the national stage, he managed to hit all the layups over the final portion of his 12-year tenure in South Bend. Meanwhile, we’re barely into year three, and Freeman has already tossed a couple of his shot attempts over the backboard.

That’s not to say it’s been all bad. Any first-time head coach should have a learning curve, and Freeman was able to steer the Irish back on course after crushing midseason defeats—the aforementioned Stanford upset and Louisville debacle—in each of his first two years. After blowing a double-digit lead to Oklahoma State in the 2022 Fiesta Bowl, his first official game as head coach after Kelly bolted to take the LSU job the previous month, Freeman also navigated substantial NFL Draft opt-outs and transfer portal entries to engineer a pair of bowl wins to cap each of his first two full seasons.

As a man, Freeman is engaging, energetic and personable, which has led to some significant progress in recruiting, landing back-to-back coveted quarterback targets in Sam Hartman (Wake Forest) and Riley Leonard (Duke) in the portal and bringing in three straight top-10-level classes. He’s also boosted the Irish’s NIL profile and endeared himself to supporters and donors, which is an area his often icy and guarded predecessor routinely struggled with.

That said, being a friendly guy while churning out 9-3 seasons and winning the Nobody Cares Bowl isn’t going to fly for Notre Dame in today’s era. Not with instant improvement annually available through the portal, the College Football Playoff tripling in size, and Michigan, a fellow northern power and traditional rival, busting through the decade-long southern blockade of the sport’s national championship trophy.

Notre Dame never broke through to the tier of college football’s championship-level elites during Kelly’s tenure, but they were certainly knocking on the door as he departed. Now, under Freeman, not only are the Irish in danger of falling further back from the Ohio States, Georgias and Alabamas of the world, they might also be tumbling below the Penn State and Oregon tier, programs that are still standing at the front entrance of title contention and firmly entrenched in the expanded playoff mix.

If the early returns stick for Tennessee, Miami and Nebraska—and those traditional powers maintain any semblance of consistency—those are several more sleeping giants eager to snatch Notre Dame’s spot in the queue.

Kelly went to a national championship game in his third season. Program legends like Parseghian and Lou Holtz won championships in theirs. Only a quarter of the way through Freeman’s third year, that aspiration is probably already out the window for this year’s Irish, but there’s still an opportunity for him this season to show who he is as a coach and where his program is going.

Because, at least for now, the answer to those questions, like every outcome lately for Notre Dame, is still anyone’s guess.•

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From Peyton Manning’s peak with the Colts to the Pacers’ most recent roster makeover, Schultz has talked about it all as a sports personality in Indianapolis for more than 15 years. Besides his written work with IBJ, he’s active in podcasting and show hosting. You can follow him on X, @Schultz975.