Yes, Notre Dame overcame all the problems it faced in the first half and managed to beat Navy 35-13 on Saturday. No, nothing the Fighting Irish did, even in a rather dominant second half, will make the program feel all that good about how the team performed on Saturday.
Head coach Marcus Freeman's post-game comments likely won't make people feel much better either. After a Monday press conference where he looked and sounded very uneasy about how his team was bouncing back from the loss at BYU, he seemed to have the word "panic" at the front of his mind a little too much.
The Notre Dame coach said "panic" more than a dozen times in his post-game press conference. Even discounting the times he was specifically asked how many times he said the word, Freeman brought up "panic" unbidden 10 or 11 times on Saturday evening. Saying your team can't panic a panic-inducing number of times won't make anyone feel great about next week's showdown with No. 1 Miami, even if the game is in South Bend.
The word was certainly the theme of the day. He also brought it up as he went into the locker room for halftime.
Marcus Freeman repeatedly warns Notre Dame football against panic before Miami showdown
"We got to get them off track. We're not getting them off track right now. They're doing a couple new things, but it's just the execution. We can't panic," Freeman said. "You can't start calling things that your guys don't know how to execute, so we gotta make sure we clean up what they have to do, and then they gotta play physical. We gotta play on their side of the line of scrimmage, but you can't be out of control."
After the game, even while hinting at what he believed the problem was with the defense in the first half, he tried to essentially walk back comments that certainly seemed to be aimed directly at defensive coordinator Chris Ash.
“But we have to be careful of creating, I keep using this word, panic, because all of a sudden, we’re gonna start saying, ‘We’re losing confidence in what we’ve done to get to this point.’ That’s the important part in the middle of this 13-to-14 struggle. It’s like, ‘Let’s focus on the things that really matter. What aren’t we doing, and what do you have to do better as coaches and players, and not saying some other reason, something else is (indiscernible) with ours."
What is clear is that Freeman needs to find a way to make sure that Notre Dame doesn't panic against Miami the way it seemingly did in the first half against Navy. If they do, the game could be over by the third quarter.
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