Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM NOV. 30, 2024 29 W hether or not Marcus Fre e m a n k n ew eve ry particular connected to the context of the first question of his postgame press confer- ence following Notre Dame's 49-14 victory over Army is un- certain. Odds are, he didn't. He was mere minutes removed from leaving the field at Yankee Sta- dium. What he did know was he went to New York and got ex- actly what he was after. Coach Freeman, what kind of message did your Fighting Irish send on a day when three teams in the top nine of the College Football Playoff rankings suf- fered losses? "I've always said that's for you all and everybody else to inter- pret, the message that's sent," Freeman said. "There is one goal on Saturdays, and that's to achieve team glory." No. 6 Notre Dame did that. More than No. 5 Indiana, No. 7 Alabama and No. 9 Ole Miss could say. Heck, No. 4 Penn State only beat unranked Minnesota by a single point. No. 12 Boise State beat two-win Wyoming by four. No. 14 BYU lost to No. 21 Arizona State by five. No. 15 Texas A&M was de- feated by unranked Auburn by two. The Tigers still have a losing record even af- ter the overtime stunner on The Plains. No. 16 Colorado lost to a team with a losing record, too, in going down by 16 to Kansas. And then there's Notre Dame, the team with the best point differential in all of college football, a 35-point win- ner over a No. 19 Army team that hadn't lost to anybody all year before running into the buzzsaw that the Fighting Irish, winners of nine games in a row, have become under Freeman. "We continue to find ways to elevate and improve," Freeman said. Boy, do they ever. Nobody's crying about Riley Leonard anymore. The Notre Dame senior quar- terback has only thrown 1 interception during the Irish's winning streak to go along with 14 touchdown passes. He's protecting the football and pushing it downfield much better than he was two months ago, and he's still as dangerous as any signal-caller in America in the running game. The injuries that ravaged the Notre Dame defense throughout the season still have not caught up to the Irish. That side of the ball is getting better and better each week, to the point in which we need to seriously ask if Al Golden is coaching the best defense in all of college football. Who's got one that's better? And then there's Freeman's own el- evation and improvement. He's a totally different guy than the one who faced the media after the Week 2 loss to North- ern Illinois and said it was okay because his Irish had been there before, having to come back from being defeated by a team it had no business losing to in the first place. When he said that in early September, Notre Dame fans were totally within their right to roll their eyes and question whether this season would be any different than Freeman's first two when the Irish failed to notch double-digits in the win column in the regular sea- son. Well, Freeman has turned doubters into believers. Notre Dame got to that mark at Yankee Stadium with a chance to add to it in the regular-season finale at the Los Angeles Coliseum. That's the thing, all of this good will would go up in flames if Notre Dame lost a game it should absolutely win against Southern Cal. But we said the same thing every week after the loss to NIU — one more defeat, to anybody, would basically sig- nify failure for this Fighting Irish football season. Freeman and Co. avoided that in nine consec- utive games, and suddenly the Trojans are the only ones who can cause the stir Irish fans have been either outwardly or inwardly fear- ing, or both, since September. The chaos that occurred in college football would make a Notre Dame loss to USC more tolerable in the grand scheme, and maybe there is even a sce- nario in which the Irish lose and still qualify for the CFP at 10-2, but that wouldn't make it any more palatable for Notre Dame itself — or its fans. This Irish team, ever since losing to NIU, has demonstrated that it is actu- ally one of the best teams in the country. It's demonstrated that it is a road favor- ite at USC for just the third time since 1998 for a reason. For many reasons. This is a good — great, perhaps — Notre Dame team. It should win in a place that's been tough to win at for this program, just like it won in Week 13 on a day when it was tough for other teams in the sport to do so. ✦ Following its 35-point victory over Army, head coach Marcus Freeman's team had the best point differential in all of college football. PHOTO BY LARRY BLANKENSHIP Irish Winning Big On A Day Of Carnage Means A Lot Tyler Horka has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since July 2021. He can be reached at thorka@blueandgold.com GOLDEN GAMUT TYLER HORKA