Freeman-led playoff run brings respect back to Notre Dame

On the surface, it shouldn't surprise people that a school with 13 national championships and the fourth-most wins in college football history finds itself in Monday's title game.

But when you pull back the curtain and reveal that school to be Notre Dame, anybody under the age of 45 will likely be shocked. The program's history is virtually unmatched, but the last 35 years of Fighting Irish football has been a struggle. Head coach Marcus Freeman is on the cusp of doing something that, for a long time, didn't seem possible.

Notre Dame has only won one of its 13 national championships in the last 47 years - and it was in 1988. Over that span, the Irish's competitiveness plummeted. From 1997-2009, the trio of Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis posted a 91-68 record. That's an average of just seven wins per season.

When Brian Kelly entered the fray, he immediately turned the ship around, charting a course toward national relevance. The work he did in South Bend was nothing short of brilliant, but even he was eventually forced to tap out. Kelly's teams were often criticized for how overmatched they seemed when facing top competition.

It seemed Kelly was well aware of that: He bolted to LSU to chase a title despite reeling off five straight 10-win campaigns with Notre Dame.

"I want to be in an environment where I have the resources to win a national championship," Kelly said in explaining the move, according to Ralph Russo and Bruce Feldman of The Athletic. "And I came down here because I want to be in the American League East."

MLB reference aside, Kelly has virtually no other ties to the South. Still, his decision wasn't widely panned at the time. Picking LSU should have made things easier for him to win the biggest prize. The previous three Tigers coaches - Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron - all won a national championship with the program.

Four days after Kelly was announced as LSU's head coach, Notre Dame promoted Freeman, who'd been its defensive director. To say the move was well-received in the locker room would be an understatement.

The enthusiasm was palpable, but Freeman's start fell flat: The Irish suffered embarrassing home losses to Marshall and Stanford in his first campaign as head coach. However, a bowl win over South Carolina offered some hope for the fanbase tired of coming up short in postseason play.

After a solid but unspectacular 10-3 mark in 2023, Freeman scored one of the biggest wins of his career with a road victory at Texas A&M to start the 2024 campaign. Another win over an SEC program offered more evidence that things might be different in South Bend.

And then Northern Illinois came to town.

The Irish's most stunning defeat of the 2024 season was undoubtedly the loss to the Huskies in Week 2 when they were 27.5-point favorites. After the Marshall and Stanford setbacks later that same campaign, it seemed like a pattern was developing at home against interior competition.

Some previous Notre Dame coaches might have blamed others for the loss. Freeman took a different approach.

"We've got to own this," he said at the time, according to Kyle Kelly of On3 Sports. "Every person in here, every coach, has to own it first and not blame somebody else. That's the only way to fix it."

He added: "I'm sure everybody outside of here will try to point the finger at some coach, some player, some person. It should be at the head coach. It's my job."

Thirteen straight wins - 12 by double digits - and victories in both the Sugar and Orange Bowl offer fairly strong evidence that Freeman knew exactly how to get his roster to respond.

The Irish are heavy underdogs to an explosive Ohio State team that's looked unstoppable during the playoff.

However, Freeman and Co. have shown over the past few months that this Notre Dame team is different from its predecessors.

Should the Irish complete the job Monday, they'd be just one title behind Princeton for third all-time in NCAA football history. More importantly, a victory would prove that Notre Dame is back among the nation's best and has more than enough resources to win a national championship.