EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Marcus Freeman used to recoil at the mention of Northern Illinois, seemingly offended no one could let the defining moment of his make-or-break third season go. The light would dim in Freeman’s eyes a bit when the questions came about how a College Football Playoff contender could lose at home to a middling MAC program and how major investment at quarterback could pay such a small dividend. These were unanswerable questions, at least not on the record.
Notre Dame’s head coach didn’t want everything about this season to be tinted by Northern Illinois, but he couldn’t stop the stain from spreading. Freeman talked about Notre Dame needing to handle success better, playing complementary football more, reaching the team’s full potential every day and about a dozen other talking points that coaches spout when they want to change the subject.
Turns out, Freeman never quite moved on from the worst loss in his tenure.
He turned it into fuel, instead.
In preparing to play the part of hunter at MetLife Stadium to Navy’s Bambi, Freeman reminded the roster of what happened in the home opener, back when Notre Dame’s season was so developmental. He played clips around the facility. Freeman still defends those practices as necessarily physical, even after that boxing match at Texas A&M. He may never let go of the fact Notre Dame didn’t take the mental prep for Northern Illinois as seriously as everyone needed to take it.
“I don’t want to lose the pain from that game because, at times, we are motivated by fear. At times, we are motivated by we don’t want this to repeat itself,” Freeman said. “And so, there’s times I’ve got to remind them of that pain so that we can make sure we don’t forget it. We’ve got to use that.
“I said we’re going to be grateful for it if we utilize it, when we learn from the lessons that it’s taught us.”
When Northern Illinois happened to you, you’d better live in some kind of terror that it can happen to you again.
If Saturday proved anything for Notre Dame, if hammering undefeated Navy 51-14 represented a signal, it’s that the Irish are learning as they evolve. Suddenly, a team you couldn’t quite trust looks like a sure-ish thing. There was no reason for Navy to be able to hang with Notre Dame and Notre Dame didn’t give Navy one, a dynamic that can be applied to every game in November. Yes, those six turnovers made the garish margin inevitable, but the way the Irish jumped on the Midshipmen left Navy little chance even if it had played well.
Notre Dame scored touchdowns on its first two possessions. Navy fumbled its first two away. When Blake Horvath went 47 yards for a touchdown in the second quarter, he injected the game with some drama, cutting the Irish lead to 14-7. That tension lasted all of 65 seconds of game time before Jeremiyah Love burst from behind a Pat Coogan block for a 64-yard score. Navy never threatened to keep it close again, undone by errant pitches and James Rendell punts.
Notre Dame has now won a modest six games in a row, the longest streak of the Freeman era. It’s both a sign of how much Notre Dame’s head coach had to learn to do this job and a reminder of the potential still there under the third-year head coach. Sure, Freeman’s 10th win against an AP-ranked team matches Frank Leahy’s mark for a Notre Dame head coach in his first three seasons. That’s trivia for a cocktail party, a historical oddity with no relevance to the present. What matters is how Freeman is making Notre Dame more predictable each Saturday, able to string performances together instead of having them feel random.
“The outcome is what you wanted, but the mental approach we’re taking this week is so crucial, right? Of how we can improve, and it’s got to be hard,” Freeman said. “I just told those guys you don’t improve by doing the same thing you did the week before.
“Human nature, gravity takes over. You’re going to get worse. So, we have to prepare mentally, in a difficult way, physically, in a difficult way, for the next opponent if we want to truly elevate and improve. And so, that’s the mindset we have, and hopefully, that’s the reason why, as a whole, we’ve been handling the success that we’ve been having the past couple of weeks.”
The biggest challenge from here might be managing the praise that’s inbound. Notre Dame doesn’t play again until after the first College Football Playoff rankings come out Nov. 5, and the Irish feel almost certain to be included. They’re the No. 7 seed in The Athletic’s updated projections model, with an 84 percent chance to make the field. The story of Notre Dame football is about to move away from what happened in September and toward what could happen in December.
And optimism can be a hell of a drug.
It all will create a different kind of stress, although the Irish seem more capable by the week of handling it. Notre Dame feels mature enough to own the failure of Northern Illinois without being put off by it. Riley Leonard revealed that he’s conferenced with former Notre Dame quarterbacks to figure out how to do this, including a connection with Sam Hartman. The former Irish quarterback told Leonard to just let it rip. That’s exactly what Leonard is doing.
Jack Kiser was more succinct about the lessons learned from Northern Illinois.
“Every day we know what could happen if we come in and don’t try to live up to our potential or live up to the standard,” Kiser said. “We just used that as motivation. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. Every day we’ve got to put in the work and make sure that does’t happen again.”
Week by week, Notre Dame looks like a program more comfortable in its own skin, perhaps college football’s most self-aware Playoff contender.
Notre Dame is hardly perfect. The Irish know as much, which maybe is more feature than flaw.
“I’m not satisfied. Nobody in that locker room is satisfied. We’re greedy. We want more,” Freeman said. “We want perfection, and so we let others tell us what type of win that was. We’re going to celebrate it because a lot of people in that room put in a lot of work to achieve that. So, we got to celebrate it.”
After the second idle week, it’s Florida State and Virginia at home, then Army at Yankee Stadium and USC in the Coliseum. The Irish will be favored heavily in the first two and should be in the third. The finale is a harder call because even checked-out USC teams seem to give the Irish trouble.
Then again, Navy was supposed to be a potential trapdoor on this season, too. Instead, the Irish ran the Mids out of MetLife Stadium with minimal fuss.
This version of Notre Dame seems capable of remembering what it felt like to lose to Northern Illinois while not letting it anchor the season to a failure. It’s all a difficult line to walk, remembering the worst day of the season without letting it condemn Notre Dame to a replay.
“But when you have success, sometimes, you forget about that pain of what NIU left in all of our hearts and our guts,” Freeman said. “And so there’s moments that I want to reflect on that, and I don’t want them to lose it, and that’s kind of when I use it for motivation.”
(Top photo of Jeremiyah Love: Joshua Sarner / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
