How Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has seen college football change since he played at Ohio State
Marcus Freeman’s hair, or lack thereof, isn’t the only thing that has changed since he suited up as a linebacker for the Ohio State Buckeyes a decade and a half ago.
Freeman joked with the Inside the Garage podcast hosts about why if you look up a picture from his playing days, you’ll see a beefier, more intimidating version of the guy who could now pass for a GQ model. The fresh fade Freeman currently rocks — the one that looks like it was cut an hour prior at all times — wasn’t there 13 years ago. None of it was.
Freeman was bald. On purpose.
“Y’all remember that Under Armour commercial, ‘We must protect this house!’?” Freeman asked podcast hosts Cam Hart, KJ Wallace and Conor Ratigan. “One of those dudes on there was either bald or had a real low cut. So we thought, ‘That’s the move. It makes you tough.’ That’s what we did. All of us. For some reason, someone said it looked good. So we just kept it.”
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Like Freeman’s hairstyle, some things are meant to be adjusted. Take the way college football is played in this era. Freeman’s college career coincided with a changing of the guard. He has one of his former teammates to thank for that; Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Troy Smith was quite a dual-threat. Signal-callers who could run and/or operate a spread offense were the new names of the game.
“The spread offenses and the ‘check with me system,’ the look to the sidelines, that was never a part of our game,” Freeman said. “There was very little tempo. Defensively, we were pretty bland. The game has become so complex in terms of pre-snap alignments, disguises, pressure packages, offensive RPOs. We didn’t have that stuff when I played.”
Freeman spent his playing and coaching career on the defensive side of the ball until he was named Notre Dame’s head coach in December. He’s seen the game get more difficult to manage from that perspective each year.
“On defense, you’ve got to be able to cover 53 and a third,” he said. “Whereas, a lot of our game was inside the hashes. Running the ball up the middle. The element of the quarterback run has changed offenses. You have to account for the quarterback being able to pull the ball down and run it. That has changed the game.”
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If sophomore Tyler Buchner wins the starting job at Notre Dame, the Irish will have that element this fall. Just don’t look for Notre Dame offensive coordinator Tommy Rees to call an overload of designed quarterback runs; Freeman said the most dangerous thing a quarterback can do is pull the ball down and take off when he wasn’t supposed to. If Buchner couples that ability with pinpoint passing, Notre Dame could have one of those high-powered offenses Freeman wasn’t accustomed to back in the day.
You know, when he didn’t have hair.
“It starts with the athletes,” Freeman said. “The players who are at quarterback now. But then the ability to use those athletes in a system is what creates a completely different challenge for a defense. Not only do you have the best athletes on the field, but now they’re doing different things. Shifting, motion, tempo.
“On a defense, at times, you were just trying to get lined up. But that makes it so easy for the offense. So now you’re seeing defenses trying to catch up and do pre-snap disguises to show one thing and do another. With these athletes and systems, it’s a challenge to try to stop good offense.”
