Notre Dame Football: Freeman and Parker’s remarks fail to breed confidence
The Notre Dame Football team has struggled at times on offense, and comments made by Marcus Freeman and Gerad Parker aren’t uplifting.
The offense has been blamed for quite a few of the Fighting Irish’s struggles in the second half of the season. It was especially bad in games against Duke, Louisville, and Clemson.
Of course, the offense didn’t look that great in its win over USC either. Sam Hartman and company were helped quite a bit by the total domination by the defense of Caleb Williams.
If Notre Dame Football fans thought that head coach Marcus Freeman and Gerad Parker were looking high and low for answers to fix things, they might have been a bit disappointed by what the coaches said this week. It doesn’t feel like either man is willing to admit there are real problems with the Golden Domers’ offensive production.
On Tuesday, Parker talked a bit about plays he called or gameplans he came up with.
"“I hope you guys look at it and say, ‘Oh, if we just execute that the way I know we can, the way I believe as a coordinator we can, we’d feel really good about the result.’ And unfortunately, there was too many of those in that game that we didn’t.”"
That bit of word salad seems to say, “I called the right plays, they just didn’t work.” Which is certainly not an unusual defense. Both with Notre Dame Football and around the country.
However, the comments don’t instill much confidence that things would have changed if Parker had the Clemson game to do over.
Notre Dame Football coaches don’t install confidence
Freeman’s comments earlier in the week weren’t much better. Two comments in particular seem to be coming awful close to missing the point.
The first is that Freeman said it’s not as simple as “playing Madden.” He, like Parker seemed to indicate that the players just need to do better.
The most galling comment though, came when the Notre Dame Football head coach was asked why the Irish don’t run more play action. Especially with a running back like Audric Estime at their disposal.
His reply was that if play action plays could guarantee first downs, they would call it more often. It raises the question if he believes that the other plays they call “guarantee” first downs.
Because the Irish don’t get first downs as much as one would think if that were a fact.
It’s possible of course, that the Notre Dame Football coaches are just feeling a bit defensive as the season winds down. But it would still be easier to feel good about a young and relatively inexperience offensive staff without comments like these.