Notre Dame Fighting Irish Preview 2022: Previewing, predicting, and looking ahead to the Notre Dame season with what you need to know and keys to the season.
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Notre Dame Fighting Irish Preview
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Notre Dame Fighting Irish Preview 2022
Find anyone who can say anything bad about Marcus Freeman.
The players were jacked when he was announced as the new head coach.
The fans were jacked, the school was jacked, and apparently, recruits are jacked. And that’s all sort of the crazy part about all of this.
Brian Kelly was really, really good at winning and restoring the national prominence of the place, and yet Notre Dame couldn’t be more ecstatic about the refresh – maybe bailing for LSU when the team was still in the mix for the College Football Playoff had something to do with that. And now …
Everyone around the Notre Dame program appears to be having … fun?
It’s buying early on the stock – Notre Dame isn’t supposed to be a place for a first time head coach to cut his teeth – but that’s a testament to just how much of a rock star Freeman has the potential to be.
And now comes the hard part. 1) Patience. 2) Kelly really was successful, and good luck with replicating what he did on the field.
You think it’s easy to come up with five double-digit win seasons in a row? Lou Holtz didn’t do that. No Notre Dame coach ever did – partly because they didn’t play double-digit games back in the day.
The program got really, really close to massive things under Kelly, but it kept hitting a hard ceiling – there’s no shame in having an Alabama and Clemson problem over the last few years.
Now it’s up to Freeman to go from being the hot head coaching prospect everyone likes, to the one who can take Notre Dame that one extra step and turn a College Football Playoff-caliber team to a true national title contender.
He’s young – just 36 – appears to have the right mix of personality and talent to be the exact fit for the new era of college football and all its changes, and the guy can recruit, recruit, recruit.
But again, patience – to a point.
All the Freemania was tempered a wee bit after Oklahoma State roared back from down 21 to take the Fiesta Bowl in the new guy’s first shot to show what he could do, and the Welcome To The Job present is a trip to his alma mater, Ohio State, to kick things off in 2022. So after all the light grumbling settles about how he started his era 0-2, then it’s on.
There are a whole lot of tough games on the schedule, but the Irish might be favored in each of the last 11 – with the possible exceptions of the home game against Clemson and road date at USC – and he’s supposed to win all of them.
It’s going to take a little bit for all of the recruits to make an impact, and it’s going to take a little bit for the first time head coach to settle into the job, but he’ll have until ten minutes after the Ohio State game and then it had better be onward to victory the rest of the way.
This team is too good, this program is too great, and this head coach is too promising to expect anything less than for everything to keep on humming.