WE LOVE MARCUS FREEMAN AND NOTRE DAME, WHICH MUST BE AN AMERICAN FIRST
The days of legends and a leprechaun are replaced by a new leader, who becomes the first Black coach to play for a national championship — and those who aren’t enjoying the Irish aren’t watching them
Long gone are the days when I demanded accountability at the Grotto, assessed the frown of Touchdown Jesus and wondered if the leprechaun was weak. Selling legends no longer worked at Notre Dame, which decided to replace another grump in Brian Kelly and hired Marcus Freeman to enliven the culture. Suddenly, in 2025, imagine what’s happening at the glittering university by the Indiana Toll Road.
The Fighting Irish are playing for the national championship of college football, a sport they once owned and Hollywooded until 36 years of failure took over. Freeman turns 39 today and brings no recollection of Knute Rockne or even Kelly, who said when he took the LSU position, “I want to be in an environment where I have the resources to win a national championship.” He hasn’t been close in three seasons. His shot was answered accordingly by Freeman, who will make one hell of an NFL head coach, maybe as soon as next season, but first he must ponder Ohio State or Texas a week from Monday night.
Lou Holtz? Ara Parseghian? Please don’t compare.
Just watch him try to wrap a 12th title after the Irish won a magnificent semifinal over Penn State. He gleams and exhorts on the sideline and doesn’t care if his bulldoggish quarterback, Riley Leonard, is pulverized late in the first half. He returned from medical clearance and led the offense to touchdown drives of 75 and 72 yards, which was enough until defensive back Christian Gray dove and intercepted Drew Allar’s pass with a half-minute left in the Orange Bowl. There was Leonard, a kid from southwest Alabama who makes his mother nervous in the stands, moving his team to the Penn State 23. That was enough for Mitch Jeter to kick a 41-yard field goal for a 27-24 win and make the Irish the first program to reach a final in the 12-team playoff system.
There is a joy that we’ve never felt for Notre Dame, which carried itself with arrogance and an uppity TV deal with NBC. How does one have its own network and can’t compete for glory? How did the school hire Gerry Faust, a high school coach from Cincinnati who tried but struggled? How did the school hire George O’Leary, who was fired in the first week for misrepresenting his academia? How many times in Chicago, where the South Side is Irish gold, did I make the 90-mile excursion and see Bob Davie and Ty Willingham and Charlie Weis swing and miss in the eyes of the almighty boosters?
Say hello to Freeman, the first Black man to coach in a championship game. This is at a Catholic university that staged a Ku Klux Klan rally and battled students in 1924. Not that he would do anything, more than a century later, but credit his players Thursday night.
“You know, I’ve said this before. I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team,” he said through roars in the stadium. “It is an honor. And I hope all coaches — minorities, Black, Asians, whites, it doesn’t matter — are great people who continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. This ain’t about me. This is about us. We’re going to celebrate what we’ve done because it’s something special.”
Said defensive coordinator Al Golden: “They model the head coach. No excuses. Selfless. I don’t know if anything embodies it more than what we just witnessed. We needed every little bit of mettle to win that game.”
And say hello to Leonard, a transfer from Duke who symbolizes many players from other programs. Imagine Holtz and Dan Devine snatching from elsewhere? He hasn’t lost in 13 games since a discouraging home defeat to Northern Illinois in early September. “I don't even think I'd recognize the player that was playing earlier in the season,” Leonard said. “I don't think I would've written the story any differently. It's cool now to go back and look at it. I don't really do that too often, but I'm very proud of the person I've grown into. Like, you're living your dream. I don't want to live my dream and then end up thinking you shouldn't have taken that for granted. But moments like these make me appreciate it.”
How about Jeter, who is known in the locker room as “Mr. January” after he missed two field goals in the Northern Illinois loss? He came through. “Coach Freeman talks a lot about delayed gratification,” he said. “He's been talking like that all the way back to Week 2, when the (loss) happened. So it's kind of been my mindset, having delayed gratification now to be able to come out and give our team a chance to win a national championship.”
Now they’d like to play Ohio State. Why not? It would make a delectable ending to an inaugural playoff that has worked in ratings and mass interest. “We lost to them last year in a game we should have won,” running back Jeremiyah Love said. “Not because I hate them or anything. I want to play the best.”
America has transformed wildly — and erratically — since the Fighting Irish were big-city heroes. I grew up Catholic in Pittsburgh and watched Lindsey Nelson do highlights on Sundays. We watched Notre Dame as a grand independent, per its national classification, and today, the administration maintains separation that keeps the entirety of CFP revenue money. So far, the amount is $20 million while the winner of the other game must share within megaconferences of 18 and 16 teams. Who might dominate the new system? Can’t Freeman and athletic director Pete Bevacqua win the NIL race with monstrous money from rich donors?
The loser was James Franklin, as usual. Penn State took a 10-0 lead but couldn’t flatten Leonard or Golden’s defense. The Big Game Loser is 0-6 against teams in the CFP top five, 1-15 against teams in the Associated Press top five and 4-20 against top 10 teams. With six years left on his deal, Happy Valley will be sad until he departs. In a pregame press conference, with Freeman sitting beside him, he said, “This is no knock on Coach or Notre Dame, but I think everybody should be in a conference. Everyone should play a conference championship game or no one should play a conference championship game. I think everybody should play the same number of conference games.”
Franklin lost a big one yet again. He tried to cover for Allar’s killer mistake. “Everyone wants to look at a specific play," he said. “But there's probably eight to 12 plays in that game that could have made a difference. I'm not going to call out specific plays or specific players. There are a ton of plays where we could have done better. … He's hurting right now, should be hurting, we're all hurting, this ain't easy.”
Allar didn’t complete a pass to a wide receiver. In the end, he was trying to find Omari Evans or the ground when Gray snagged the pick. “Honestly, I was trying to throw it at his feet,” said the tearful junior, who will return to Penn State. “I should have thrown it away when I saw the first two progressions were not open. I didn't execute. … We didn't win the game so it wasn't good enough, it's plain and simple. I’ll try to learn from it, do everything in my power to get better and just grow from it.”
Said Gray: “Just catch the ball. Just catch the ball. That was going through my mind, and I knew I was going to make a play.”
Freeman was born to a South Korean woman and a Black man. He’ll be forced to discuss his destiny in the coming days, but at the moment, he wants focus to be on players left for dead four months ago. “We knew this was going to be a heavyweight fight,” he said. “But I told our guys — we’ve been here. We’ve been in this position. They believed and got the job done. In my opinion, great teams and great programs find a way to do that.”
“I think the biggest thing is just culture wins,” Leonard said. “You see a bunch of talented guys across our locker room, but you can see that anywhere in the country. At the end of the day, it’s which guys are putting their bodies on the line and doing everything they can for the man next to them. Nobody is thinking about draft stocks or next year or any type of individual glory. We’re all thinking about the man beside us. The truth is, I came here to win a national championship and go to the best team that would give me the best chance to do that.”
Notice how I didn’t mention Rudy until now.
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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.