Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1539887
BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM OCT. 4, 2025 13 UNDER THE DOME "A body language expert would have had a field day with Notre Dame's head coach as he spoke. As if what Freeman said wasn't damning enough, how he said it may make the next staff meeting nearly unten- able for a defense under siege, both from opposing quarterbacks and maybe from its own head coach. "Both exasperated and desperate, Freeman sounded and looked like a coach tired of looking for answers and fed up with the search party. What Notre Dame is putting on tape defensively under Ash looks like a personal affront to the head coach, which is not a healthy place for any coordinator to be." — Pete Sampson of The Athletic "If you do trust anybody to get them out of the hole, it's Marcus Freeman, because they literally just did it last year. But I think that this idea that they're just gonna run through the rest of their schedule and never have to sweat now is com- pletely not true." — On3's Ari Wasserman "I thought that [Freeman's] postgame press con- ference was adequately unhappy with the perfor- mance by the defense. As fans, you never want to see a coaching staff sort of brush it off and be like, 'Well, you know, Purdue had a touchdown in garbage time and it doesn't really matter because Notre Dame won by 26 points, and they covered the spread, who cares?' "They were adequately freaked out about what I think is the worst drive of the season for Notre Dame's defense, which is the 75-yard drive that Purdue went on right before halftime." — "The Echoes" podcast host Jessica Smetana "Jadarian Price has next-level cuts. This guy is a master manipulator. Let's talk about it. So, he's running outside zone here. The problem is that his tight end play-side gets dented, so this is contained and he cannot get outside. The next problem is this safety fills the C gap. Gilbert misses his block here. Price says, 'All right, I'm gonna attack this head-on. I'm gonna try to get them to freeze their feet, and then I'm gonna go one-cut, let's get vertical on this right here.' This is what Price does best." — Former Penn State offensive lineman and college football analyst Landon Tengwall "You look at this Notre Dame coverage, and last year, they were one of the two or three best cov- erage teams in the country. And this year, they're 114th in coverage grade so far. And I know they've had some tough opponents, but man, oh, man. Man coverage grade, they're playing it a bit less last year. They were up over 60 percent man cover- age rate, this year, about 45. But [they're] 98th in man coverage grade, 112th in yards per attempt allowed, 113th in explosive pass rate allowed. "We're not used to seeing Notre Dame's sec- ondary struggle like this. And even when Leon- ard Moore was on the field, giving up too many points." — PFF college football and NFL contributor Dalton Wasserman PHOTO BY MICHAEL MILLER Irish On Social Media THEY SAID IT THEY SAID IT "Notre Dame busted off some of the fine china from last year, where they ran one of those all- out, six-man pressures. They had a bunch of movement. It gave BRYCE YOUNG his first sack of the year, because they had isolated a one- on-one matchup for him. And I thought, 'Okay, that is still what we can be. There is still some of that heartbeat in there.' " Three games in, we gotta ac- knowledge, four-man pass-rush, I don't know if it's gonna get there this season. I was wrong on that. I thought we had the personnel for it. It does not appear that we do at this point." — Former Notre Dame offensive lineman and "The Echoes" podcast host Mike Golic Jr.