DAY, FREEMAN ... COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS FAR MORE DRAMATIC THAN THE NFL
With massive changes to the sport, coaches are wearing wild emotions on their sleeves, capable of going after 80-something critics while Notre Dame’s leader can’t explain using 10 defenders twice
Will they be employed next season? With the topsoil moving haphazardly below their feet, how could they know? College football coaches might be submerged by a transfer portal, by a program dispensing NIL millions, by a narcissistic lout who takes over a force field in sunglasses. Why wouldn’t they freak out at any outcome in a season when, at present, 10 powerhouses with 4-0 records are looking to win a national championship?
What’s next, drawing nasty remarks and cartoons about opponents in stadium bathrooms?
So, absolutely, why wouldn’t Ryan Day unleash a two-year wrath on 86-year-old coach Lou Holtz? He has no idea if Ohio State will continue to pay him, especially if his team is overpowered by Michigan for a third season. When he hears about Holtz appearing on an ESPN program and badmouthing the Buckeyes — “You look at coach Day, he has lost to Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, and Michigan twice and everybody beats him because they’re more physical than Ohio State,” he said — what exactly would happen in Day’s brainwave when he ran up the middle in a toughness scrum and scored the game-winner at Notre Dame?
“I’d like to know where Lou Holtz is right now. What he said about our team, I cannot believe,” Day delivered after a manic 17-14 victory. “This is a tough team right here. We’re proud to be from Ohio. It’s always been Ohio against the world, and it’ll continue to be Ohio against the world.”
Fricking Ohio against the world. Wait, doesn’t Ohio State already run the football kingdom? Now the place is suddenly an underdog in that horseshoe pit? “I’m really upset about what Lou Holtz said publicly about our team, and about Ohio State, and about Buckeye Nation, and we’re not going to stand for that,” said Day, whose team remains No. 4 in the AP polls. “That’s not even close to true. I don’t know where that narrative comes from, but that ends tonight.”
And why wouldn’t the Notre Dame coach, Marcus Freeman, lose his mind when asked why he had only 10 defenders on the field for the final two plays? There are colleagues close to Touchdown Jesus who wonder why he was hired to begin with, and now, Freeman is acknowledging a lapse that could get him fired tomorrow? When Day the aggressor substituted running back Chip Trayanum for TreVeyon Henderson before the concluding score, Freeman and his staff should have known the officials would have let him install his 11th player as a way of matching both sides. Instead, he stuck with 10. When he’s relieved of his duties at some point, as they will at Notre Dame, you’ll remember his explanation.
“We were trying to get a fourth D-line man on the field, and I told him just stay off because we can’t afford a penalty,” Freeman said. “I didn’t have any timeouts, right? So we couldn’t afford a penalty there. Yeah, it’s on us. We got to be better.
“But to me it was, like, ‘Hey, don’t give them another opportunity to get settled and to try to make a different call, right?’ Hey, guys, ‘Like, stay off the field. Let’s not give them a freebie from the half-yard line, and let’s try to stop them.’ ”
By Monday, Freeman said his team will have a precise signal in the future to make sure his defense has 11 cogs, especially when a season is decided and his pristine university hasn’t won it all in 35 years. “You win or you learn,” he told ESPN. "Hopefully it never happens again, but do we have a signal to tell somebody, when it's loud and crazy, jump offsides and touch somebody? We tell our players, every play you can't be distracted by the things that don't matter. You have to do your job. The same thing applies to coaches. We can't get caught up watching the game and not do our job.
“I know people are like, take the penalty. By the time we realized — it got communicated — you couldn't get a guy from the coaching box to touch somebody on offense. To stop the play, you have to touch somebody on offense. We would've gotten a penalty and they would have scored, so it really didn't matter because we figured it out too late. What we learned from that situation is that, one, don't ever be in the situation where you've got 10 guys on the field, but two, if something happens, we have a signal to tell somebody to jump offsides and touch somebody.”
For Notre Dame — which hasn’t won a national title since, oh, Holtz led them to one in 1988 — the loss was the latest reminder how they continue to regress in the mighty picture. When coached by Brian Kelly, now struggling at LSU, the Fighting Irish were 4-11 against foes in the top 10. Under Freeman, they are 1-4 in the same class. The frills of conference realignment continue to push them toward the Big Ten, and at this point, new athletic director — Pete Bevacqua — will want to keep an NBC cable contract that just produced the second-highest rating ever. But why give Notre Dame a special independent deal when it doesn’t deserve one?
The chaos of 2023 has coaches incensed at each other and the entire mixture. For that reason, the college game will be more combative and volatile than the NFL, where Taylor Swift’s Sunday night cruise with Travis Kelce received more attention than almost anything else. We’re waiting on the Philadelphia Eagles or San Francisco 49ers in the NFC and the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC. Colleges? Who knows what’s next as Florida State makes a fresh run at the College Football Playoff? And we’ll see if Georgia survives a one-team, downtrodden Southeastern Conference and whether Michigan, Ohio State, Texas, Washington or Oregon come through in the final four? Notice how I left out USC, which again doesn’t have the defense.
Who didn’t enjoy Oregon’s Dan Lanning aiming at the mouth of Deion Sanders? “They’re fighting for clicks, we’re fighting for wins!” he told his team as the Ducks harpooned Colorado. And you had to love Washington State coach Jake Dickert romping on another octogenarian, ESPN’s 88-year-old Lee Corso, who called Dickert’s game against Oregon State the “No One Watches Bowl.” Why, because his network didn’t want either school in the expanded, USC-UCLA Big Ten?
“I don’t really understand that,” Dickert said. “What’s the merit, once again? The facts say, people watch the Cougs. And the people watch the Cougs more than every team that’s left over in the Big 12. Coach Corso is at the point now where they give him the seat and he reads off it and tries to make a joke — it doesn’t even make sense. It’s well-documented what ESPN has done to get our league to where it’s at.”
Just wait for this week, when Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams joins his coach, Lincoln Riley, for a USC invasion of Sanders’ mountain time zone. There is no inclusion of Clemson, which has blown the transfer portal, or Alabama, which beat Ole Miss but has dropped Nick Saban a notch in the standings.
The NFL is largely about injury assessment. Joe Burrow played on a strained right calf Monday night and barely beat the Los Angeles Rams, just to save the Cincinnati Bengals’ season. The 19-16 win said it was worth it. A few years from now, when his $275 million deal is warped, it might not be. “There is risk to go out there and potentially re-injure it,” Burrow said. “But there's also the risk to not go out there and be 0-3. So I wanted to be out there for my guys, and I was confident that I would be able to do what I needed to get the win.”
And Jalen Hurts played with flu-like conditions in Philadelphia’s win at Tampa Bay. “It's not the first time I've dealt with this or had to play with something like this,” he said. “And it always happens on Monday night for whatever reason.”
Watch the room service menu, dude.
When your team is 0-3 in the big leagues, you fix the mess. Kevin O’Connell was lauded last season for his work with erratic Kirk Cousins. But now he might bench a quarterback who runs an offense with seven fumbles, just tossing two goal-line interceptions in a loss to the Chargers. “I think that's something we're going to fix one way or the other,” the coach said. “Either guys are going to (fix) it or we're going to have to put other guys in the game that have ball security.”
But O’Connell will have a gig next season. In college football, if Notre Dame had 11 players on the field, Marcus Freeman would be the toast of the Grotto. Instead, Touchdown Jesus has a smirk that looks everlasting.
And Ryan Day? He wants a piece of Lou Holtz, every week. Maybe Brutus Buckeye wants a try.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.