Notre Dame Football is like life — sometimes we don’t know what we need until it’s right in our faces

Ferraris, Speeches, Smiles, and the Vegas Desert

Over the past few months, we have seen all of that from the Notre Dame Fighting Irish program with Marcus Freeman at the head. The recruiting rankings and results have been the best they have been in an insanely long time. Freeman is also a really engaging man within the Notre Dame community at large. He has been getting everyone excited for this football season and the seasons he will have in his tenure.

And just this week, he solidified himself as probably the coolest coach in the country by unveiling the Shamrock Series uniforms with Michael Mayer and Isaiah Foskey IN VEGAS while doing a parody of The Hangover. It was, in a word, perfect.

We have talked ad nauseam about how we welcome such a vibrant and new era of Notre Dame Football with Freeman’a leadership, and we will continue to do so. However, I found myself thinking that we probably never really saw this coming. Maybe with the success the program had with BK at the helm and for so long that we got used to the “business-esque” mantra of the program. Those cobwebs have been shaken off, and what we are left with now is a program and team that want to get down to serious business to win championships, but that will not be at the expense of having fun.

Freeman has talked about Notre Dame and the football program being a “both-and” with winning championships and succeeding in the classroom/career fields. The program can work really hard and have fun. And I never really realized this is exactly what the program needed until this started happening. It makes too much sense for Freeman to come in here and do all he has done. The proof is in the pudding with the team chemistry, the more fervent connection to Notre Dame, and the recruiting rankings. I can speak for myself when I probably got too complacent and was happy with the winning. That was all well and good, but we now have pieces in place that want to take winning into another whole era and level. I’m here for it, and almost all of us are here for it, too. It just took it being right in our faces before we completely realized it is what Notre Dame Football needed.

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