ATLANTA — Marcus Freeman was last off the field, holding his right index finger high as he headed up the southeast tunnel of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The Irish coach didn’t mean to signal his program was No. 1. Because it’s not. He knows that.
Beating Georgia Tech with its backup quarterback was hardly a statement. But this was worth an acknowledgment as Notre Dame made moderate work of the Yellow Jackets, a 31-13 win that probably won’t be remembered much in December.
And all that’s fine. Boring is good. Boring wins.
The biggest compliment Freeman could get on Saturday was that pounding Georgia Tech into submission felt like something from the playbook of the Irish’s last coach. This all felt a little Brian Kelly, which is a compliment to where Freeman has the program after this season’s uneven start.
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Notre Dame felt predictable, other than special teams. It played in third gear. It beat an ACC team it should beat. It broke a sweat but never lost its wind.
Winning might be hard. It doesn’t have to always look that way. And it didn’t on Saturday.
“Overall, man, everybody had a part of it,” Freeman said. “There’s no one person that you try to give success (to). Point out it’s a group effort, that it took everybody in that room to get their job done to achieve the team glory that we aspire to have on Saturdays.”
It might seem paradoxical — what in college football isn’t these days? — that Notre Dame is growing up and getting younger at the same time. The Irish lose an All-America cornerback and replace him with a freshman who barely misses a beat. A future NFL running back embraces life as a lead blocker for a quarterback who can’t quite seem to put Notre Dame’s passing game together. The Irish already start freshmen at left tackle and cornerback. They probably should start one at defensive end, too.
There might not be a classically great team in Notre Dame’s locker room, at least in the sense that the season feels like it has a ceiling. All these injuries do count.
But the Irish are still very good. They’re good enough to run the table, a chance for Freeman to show he has grown as a coach because it requires a 10-game winning streak for a coach who never has won more than five straight. Freeman talks about getting Notre Dame to play to its full potential. It’s becoming clear what the full potential of this team is. The Irish are more than good enough to make the College Football Playoff, probably good enough to make some noise in it but perhaps no longer loaded for a run to mid-January.
“We want to be perfect, but it’s a reflection of where you prepare. And so us as coaches are going to continuously challenge them,” Freeman said. “There’s more. There is no finish line to the way we prepare and how we prepare. That’s going to give us a chance to be more experienced on Saturdays and perform better.”
Notre Dame still feels like it’s a quarterback away from being the team Freeman imagines. It still takes too much squinting to see Riley Leonard in that light. He has thrown six touchdown passes all season, which doesn’t put him in the top 100 nationally. He has run for an astounding 10, which is service academy-esque. But his first-quarter interception on Saturday is the kind of throw that would put plenty of quarterbacks on the bench or at least get the backup warming up.
Leonard misread the coverage and launched a prayer to Beaux Collins anyway. The receiver seemed to give up on the route, probably because he thought the ball wasn’t coming his way against that coverage. Leonard said Notre Dame had practiced that play all week, and it worked virtually every time the Irish called it. It just never got run against the look, which should have killed the deep shot the moment Leonard read out the secondary. Instead, Notre Dame got to think about Leonard’s last interception, another deep shot, the one that got picked off against Northern Illinois. That one led to a potentially season-crippling loss. This one didn’t leave that kind of mark.
“Didn’t read it the right way and made a bad decision. But he’s confident; that’s a part of the game, right?” Freeman said. “That you’ve got to be confident in your decisions, even if sometimes they can be wrong because there are other times you made a wrong decision and ended up being a great play because he made it fast.
“So, he’s a confident individual because of the way he prepares, and he did a great job after that interception. We believe in our offense.”
When Notre Dame plays defense like this, that faith can be rewarded.
Notre Dame’s offense remains developmental, but it’s making gains. What the Irish are doing with Al Golden’s defensive playbook feels like a sure thing heading into the season’s second half. Notre Dame has allowed just three rushing touchdowns all season. All have been 1-yard scrums. It gives up a scoring drive in the first quarter, then shuts the door. And if the Irish can keep what remains of the defense healthy, there’s no reason to think this defense won’t travel to the East Coast twice before finishing in Los Angeles.
That’s part of the reason why Leonard’s decision-making — he forced a deep pass to the end zone in the fourth quarter when Notre Dame was trying to run the clock — can be so maddening. He should know better. And Notre Dame is virtually impossible to beat when he does, at least in the regular season. Leonard doesn’t need to be a playmaker with his arm. He just needs to avoid big mistakes.
Basically, take what the defense gives him because with his legs, combined with Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, the defense is always giving something. It’s just hard to understand why that’s not more automatic for a senior quarterback.
“Great question,” Leonard said. “There are a lot of different factors when it comes to that. I think the biggest is you throw a certain ball in practice five times, and I threw that ball five times to Beaux. Well, that doesn’t mean anything. That’s completely irrelevant to what’s going to happen in game.
“So pre-snap I’m thinking, ‘OK, muscle memory and do what we what we did in practice. If I just have just an inch, pull the trigger.’ Well, that inch closed pretty quickly. I think it just kind of came down to practice and understanding that in the game, it can be different.”
There’s still time for Leonard to make performances like Stanford more the rule and throws like his interception against Georgia Tech more the exception. Freeman continues to coach with a growth mindset, which is why it feels like the Irish are getting better even when they’re far from perfect.
What happened at Mercedes-Benz Stadium probably won’t be saved for posterity, short of a beautiful fake punt, even if it only led to a field goal. But again, that’s fine. Not every weekend needs to be a national statement or an inflection point on the season. Not everything Notre Dame does needs to be a referendum on everything.
Sometimes boring can be progress. And that’s exactly what the Irish accomplished on Saturday, regardless of how memorable it was. Or wasn’t.
(Top photo of Riley Leonard: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
