Football

The 2023 journey begins for Notre Dame Football as fall camp gets underway

And away we go

By Joshua Vowles@TheSubwayDomer Jul 27, 2023, 12:30am EDT

The Notre Dame Football team and coaching staff kicked off fall camp on Wednesday with a return to the practice fields. Afterward, Marcus Freeman got in front of the media for his first press conference since the spring.

I was a little disappointed that so much of the time and so many of the questions for Freeman had to do with the sudden departure of Matt Balis — but that’s how the news cycle works. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already ancient history and time to move on.

Someone needs to tell Freeman the correct version

“It’s a bumpy road to Dublin, Ireland. I want the coaches to understand that, the players to understand it. But when we look at this in a micro view, we have to look at this thing as one day, one life, and we have to have an urgency to fix the mistakes.“I want our players and our coaches to have such urgency in fixing and correcting mistakes. But I want them to understand after practice that mistakes happen and we’re going to improve from them. And don’t let what happened in the last practice affect the next practice because it is a bumpy road to Dublin, Ireland.”

LETS GOOO!

There was a LOT of trash-talking going on, and you love to see it (or hear it). While jabbing and even a little fighting are perfectly normal for football practice, it’s still the coach’s job to reign it in and focus the energy on the task at hand. Freeman addressed this with the team and the media.

“Yeah. Usually, I don’t have them take a knee, but I wanted to for the first day. I know their emotions were high, so take a knee, catch your breath. It was pretty warm. And basically, I told him two things is that I want him to really focus on learning today, really focus on listening and intent to learn.”

“We have to understand, we have to correct mistakes, maybe without getting physical reps, like mentally, we have to listen, take coaching from our coaches. And then the second point was, there’s going to be mistakes, I’ll tell you right now, I get it. But I want to see guys that play with the effort and attitude that we only accept here at Notre Dame.”

LET’S GET TO THE PLAYERS

I don’t normally go all in campaigning for players after day one practice — and I won’t do that today. This update is late as hell anyways, so most of you have already heard or seen the things that happened on Wednesday.

But I will say these quick things because I’ve been hammering a lot of these points on the Earned 5-Star Podcast for months:

Believe the Jeremiyah Love hype. I compared him to Ricky Watters long before he got his #12 jersey, but I’m happy to welcome others to the party. The speed and athleticism are ridiculous.
Sam Hartman is more than enough man to be the QB at Notre Dame — which means that his 6th year of college football provides him with more poise at the position than we’ve seen in a very long time.
Clarence Lewis at Nickel is something that makes me happy and hopeful.
There was a lot of Jaden Mickey chatter which increases my confidence in what the secondary can accomplish this season as an overall unit.
Freshman WR Kaleb Smith the Younger was in an arm sling and will be out for a couple of months.