Despite the College Football Playoff selection show being more than six months ago, many analysts still discuss Notre Dame’s exclusion. To his credit, head coach Marcus Freeman has addressed the issue with composure. This week, when asked again by Josh Pate, Freeman delivered a response that firmly dispels notions of immaturity in the Irish’s reaction to their playoff omission.
Continuing that conversation, Pate took a special trip to South Bend to meet with Freeman. It's no surprise at all that the analyst brought up the Irish missing the playoffs and how they dealt with it. Pate opened the comments by saying he was always told not to blame the referees. Freeman agreed, but also said there was plenty of pain immediately after the snub happened.
“I think at first, my default was the same as many other people's. You blame somebody else,” the Notre Dame football coach said. “That's what default is, is you're just going to blame, it's not my fault, it's it's the committee's fault, it's somebody else's fault.”
Freeman then explained one of the reasons why he eventually let go of the desire to blame the CFP committee for leaving out his Irish team despite winning 10 games in a row to close out 2025.
"You have to own the failures"
— Josh Pate (@JoshPateCFB) May 22, 2026
Spoke with Marcus Freeman about his response to missing the CFP last season pic.twitter.com/vKHabn2mlR
Marcus Freeman’s CFP snub response proves Notre Dame football is built differently
“If you continue to have that mindset, you can't use that negative experience. In order to learn from those inside lessons and improve and be better, you have to own it. You have to own the failures. You have to own the situations. You have to own that you sleep in the bed you make. And that's how you learn from that. If you blame somebody else, you lose it.”
Freeman then went on to talk about how he feels as though it’s his job not just to get over the CFP snub, but also to help his players get over it. The Notre Dame coach knows that the Irish have to turn the page as the 2026 season moves ever closer.
“My job every day is to remind everybody and myself that everything that happens to you in life, you have to own it. So we can use it to improve from it. I always often say like the pain of a loss it's tough. It's hard, but it's there to help you grow. It's no different than the pain from a physical wound.”
He finished by saying that he actually doesn’t want to lose the pain of the CFP snub because he knows both he and Notre Dame can grow from it and become better.
“You want to make it go away. The only way to make it go away is to continue to learn from it, grow from it, and use it. And so, um, I don't want to lose some of those negative experiences. Yes, not making the playoffs is one, but there's plenty of them in our past. There's ones that we all have as individuals and some of these that we have as a team in a program, but I want to use them to make us better.”
In the end, Marcus Freeman laid out exactly why he’s the right man to lead Notre Dame to its first national title since 2008. What’s more, he seems the man most likely to do it.
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