Why Notre Dame’s loss to Miami felt different from Marcus Freeman’s other setbacks
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — In a sport where every loss can feel like a crisis, this one didn’t. And during a season-opening week when every reaction feels overdone, nothing about how Notre Dame left Hard Rock Stadium felt uncalibrated.
There was no postgame slamming of fists from head coach Marcus Freeman, no diatribe directed at his roster or his staff. The head coach grabbed the postgame stat sheet and processed it, already understanding why Notre Dame lost 27-24 on opening night in Miami.
The Irish lost a football game they could have won, but probably not one they should have won. Point spreads aside, that’s how it works when you play a first-time starting quarterback and post a negative turnover margin against a top-10 team on the road.
Good teams lose games, too. And Notre Dame showed enough to believe it’s a good team.
“Obviously disappointed with the outcome,” Freeman said. “It was a top-10 fight. Come down to a three-point game versus a hell of a football team. Our guys have a lot to build confidence off of.”
In other words, losing on a 47-yard field goal with 64 seconds left after rallying from a two-touchdown deficit will not trigger a referendum on the Notre Dame football program and its place among the sport’s genuine contenders. Nothing that happened at Hard Rock Stadium traces back to Notre Dame’s commitment to football or Freeman’s credentials for the job.
Notre Dame just lost a road game against a veteran quarterback. It lost to a Miami program that had been building toward a night like this since Mario Cristobal was hired the same offseason that Notre Dame promoted Freeman. Freeman has already won this kind of game many times. For Cristobal, this felt more like a first, which is why Miami celebrated into the night. Notre Dame looked more like an NFL team that had just lost an out-of-division road game in October.
Did Notre Dame want to win? Of course. However, there’s a difference between that sentiment and the idea that losing at Miami makes Notre Dame look like a program taking on water. The Irish entered this season with the benefit of the doubt after playing for a national title last January. That sentiment still exists, even if this team won’t notch its first win until mid-September.
“Never quit. They believe. They trust. We were never out of the fight,” Freeman said. “We’ll be in that (fourth quarter) situation again. We’ll learn from it.”
The biggest lesson learned is at quarterback, where CJ Carr backed up Freeman’s decision to start him in the first place, while also giving offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock a challenge for the season ahead.
A year ago in the opener at Texas A&M, Denbrock called the game he needed to with transfer quarterback Riley Leonard, more than calling the game he wanted to script. In College Station, Notre Dame leaned on Leonard’s legs, then called on Jeremiyah Love to win it late. On Sunday night, Denbrock opened by smartly giving Carr some short stuff to let the sophomore get his bearings.
Then the Irish got stuck there. They did not take downfield shots until they had to. Love or Jadarian Price didn’t get enough touches: One of the nation’s top running back tandems combined for 16 carries and 78 yards. Price didn’t see a carry outside of the second quarter. Love finished with 14 touches (10 carries for 33 yards, four catches for 26 yards), a number that could have doubled.
By giving Carr freedom on run-pass options, Notre Dame also gave him license to bypass its best offensive player. In the fourth quarter, that turned into his only interception. Carr saw Jordan Faison with a numbers edge on the perimeter. The lateral pass turned into a freak pick, batted and bobbled until Rueben Bain Jr. grabbed it. Turning around and handing the ball to Love would have solved that problem before Miami created it.
“We started to say later in the game, stop reading it, hand the ball to J-Love,” Freeman said. “(Carr) was doing what he was coached to do on a lot of those (RPO) pulls.”
However, if this is the level of play Carr showed Notre Dame to earn him the starting job after a tight preseason quarterback competition, it’s easy to understand the seduction of giving the sophomore too much, too soon. Because it looks like he can almost handle it all, including that 20-yard spinning dropback in the second quarter when he fooled the entire defense with a no-look touchdown pass to Micah Gilbert.
That touchdown had nothing to do with the call and everything to do with the guy throwing it. It’s the kind of pass most quarterbacks never see, yet Carr saw it in his first start on the road in a monster moment.
“He’s gonna be a really good quarterback. Everything that I’ve thought you’re going to be,” Freeman said. “His ceiling is so high, he’s gonna have to learn to take his loss and not let it eat him up too much because he’s an ultra competitor. But he’s a gamer, man.”
On a weekend of big-name quarterback debuts, Carr outshone both guys who played in the Texas-Ohio State Saturday showcase.
Notre Dame has issues it needs to solve beyond getting the ball to Love more. The offensive line lost left tackle Anthonie Knapp late to cramps, and the consequences were disastrous. It rotated right guards Guerby Lambert and Sullivan Absher throughout. A group seen as a challenger for the Joe Moore Award was the second-best offensive line on the field.
Notre Dame’s defensive line, supposedly stocked with pass rushers off the edge, barely got to Miami quarterback Carson Beck. One of the few times it did, Beck found CJ Daniels for an acrobatic touchdown. New defensive coordinator Chris Ash didn’t want to blitz, probably because the Irish were having a hard enough time with the Hurricanes’ receivers as it was. However, that plan only works if the defensive front does its job.
“My expectation for that unit is to dominate the game in the run and in the pass. Put pressure on the quarterback and stop the run,” Freeman said. “And credit to Miami, we weren’t able to do that, but that’s my expectation.
“The effort was there. I guess you’ve gotta give credit to their team. We’ve gotta play harder longer. We played hard. But they played hard, too.”
Compared to Freeman’s 10 other losses as Notre Dame’s head coach, Sunday night stands alone, primarily for what it wasn’t. The Irish have less margin for error this season, but not none; their odds of making the Playoff dropped from 72 percent to 63 percent, according to CFP projections from The Athletic’s Austin Mock, still the seventh best in the country and better than Miami’s (which rose from 36 percent to 50 percent).
Nothing about Sunday night felt like an omen. It was just two College Football Playoff contenders trading punches, and the home team won. Further introspection not required.
“Tonight wasn’t good enough out of me, specifically,” Carr said. “We’ve got to get better.”
For most of Freeman’s prior losses, that improvement hardly felt assured. Those games had the potential to shake foundations. This one doesn’t need to be much more than a tremor.
Notre Dame has a long season ahead of it. That’s not a burden. It’s an opportunity. Winning at Miami wouldn’t have changed that. Losing here doesn’t need to, either.
(Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
