Well, we didn’t make the playoff. One spot in the rankings short. Two or three plays (take your pick—there were at least four awful ones) against Cincinnati short. We did make a New Year’s Six bowl—the Fiesta Bowl, specifically—and it’ll be our eighth try since the BCS began to win one of these premier bowls, in which we’re 0-7.
To be fair to Notre Dame, these seven opponents have been better than the median BCS/New Year’s Six team. Three of the seven were national champions. The other four all finished ranked in the AP Poll’s top four. But still…it’s been a while since we’ve won a game this big. It would be nice to win a game this big. And, after a wild week, we’re favored in this one. Favored by about a field goal.
I’ll admit to being rather easily moved, but I was moved watching the players greet Marcus Freeman for the first time as their head coach, and boy oh boy, did the other happenings fire me up. It fired me up when Tyler Buchner and Drew Pyne tweeted out to #PayTommyRees. It fired me up when Rees told the team he was staying. It fired me all the way up when he said he believed Notre Dame could win a national championship, something we pretty much know with certainty Brian Kelly did not believe was true.
That national championship—that elusive national championship—is the goal of the Freeman Era, as it’s being called (complete with an officially branded one-hundred-dollar t-shirt, according to an email I received earlier from the Rockne Athletic Funds Team). The shortest summary of his predecessors is that Charlie Weis couldn’t win a national championship because Charlie Weis couldn’t coach, and Brian Kelly couldn’t win a national championship because Brian Kelly couldn’t recruit. This might sound unfair to Kelly, whose recruiting classes were eleventh-best in the country by 247’s rankings over his full seasons at the helm. But it’s not unfair when every BCS and CFP national champion over those eleven seasons outrecruited Notre Dame. Alabama ranks first over the stretch. Ohio State’s second. LSU’s fourth. Florida State’s fifth. Clemson’s seventh, but managed to develop disproportional speed and strength in those seventh-best-in-the-country recruits, making Clemson not exactly a replicable model. To win a national championship, you need to be able to both recruit and coach.
The word with Freeman is that he can recruit. Notre Dame’s currently pulling in its second top-five class since 2008 (the other was in ’13, surrounding the national championship appearance), and credit, duly or not, is going to Freeman, who certainly seems to be better at fostering relationships with human beings than his predecessor is (the videos of Freeman’s welcome by the team and Kelly’s fake southern accent at the LSU basketball game felt like a ham-handed scene from a Disney movie). The question, then, is whether Freeman can coach. Come New Year’s Day in Arizona, we’re going to start finding out.
