Marcus Freeman’s weekly press conference reviewed the Florida State win and announced the Players of the Game: Jadarian Price on offense, Rylie Mills on defense and Adon Shuler for special teams. Injury updates indicated that Howard Cross will miss this week with an ankle injury. Also, Max Hurleman, Devyn Ford and Loghan Thomas are questionable, with Thomas possibly elevated to probable later in the week.
Chris Tyree‘s return this week was discussed, with Freeman showing no concern about the former Irish player’s knowledge of the Notre Dame playbook:
“We’ve got a new offensive coordinator obviously. New signals, new terminology, so I’m not concerned about that. He’s (Tyree) a talented football player that we’ll have to account for in the special teams battle and also the offensive phase.”
Regarding the changing atmosphere between day and night home games, Freeman noted one negative in his praise of the excitement generated.
“The atmosphere environment is different in night games, we know that … but there’s also a cost on the back end of that. The back end of that is the lack of rest. You lose the valuable sleep and recovery that you need postgame on Saturdays, especially a night away game but even at home. Our players, they have their day off on Sunday, so they can try and recover a little bit but coaches were up and we’re at it.”
The success in balancing the use of running backs has not caused any friction over playing time according to Freeman:
“It’s been huge, it’s been great. Coach (Deland) McCullough does a great job of getting those guys in that room to buy into, ‘There is not just one guy.’ We need the entire unit. He does a great job of establishing plays or series for certain guys, but also keeping them all involved.”
That led to a question for Freeman about freshman running back Aneyas Williams’s quality play.
“He (Williams) is improving … He’s built a lot of trust from the coaches. They trust him in there in all situations and he’s making some things happen now with the ball in his hands. He was doing a good job early in the season as a freshman, getting his job done without the ball in his hands. Now he’s doing some things with the ball in his hands that are impacting the offense. It takes time and he’s expedited the process by the work he’s put in and he’s really helping us tremendously.”
The planning involved regarding use of reserves in blowouts is something that Freeman says evolves over the course of a season:
“Early in the season, it’s not mapped out much. It depends on the flow of the game but I think as you get later in the season, you do have to have discussions on guys that have played three games. The young guys that have played three games and if we have an opportunity to put some backups in, would we put this guy in the game? That’s kind of the only discussion we have in the game. You just never know how the game’s gonna go.”
Maintaining momentum during blowouts was considered by Freeman to be a test of being able to handle success:
“I think it’s a sign of handling success and it’s something that we talked about at halftime of the Purdue game. I told them the greatest lesson we learned from the NIU (Northern Illinois) game was we weren’t ready to handle success. How can you show during the game that you’re ready to handle success is that you can be up at halftime and go out there with the same mindset that you did to start the game.”
Freeman believes that reserve nose tackle Donovan Hinish’s lack of height is not a concern.
“You say, Donnie (Hinish) might not be 6-3, 6-4, but we know what we’re getting out of him. Part of it is the way he was raised. He’s just a tough dude who has worked his way to be a really good player.”
In the regular season’s final month, Freeman discussed the team’s confidence:
“There’s a lot of confidence. I’m confident, this team is confident but I also know that with success can creep in complacency. That’s what keeps me up at night, like where’s the fine line from being confident and complacency being able to creep in? … I want them to enjoy success. I don’t want our football program to be a place that’s miserable after you have a great win like we did. But there’s a part of me, I want to be greedy, ‘This isn’t good enough, this is the standard, we gotta tackle better. Great job. You guys played well on Saturday, great job, but here’s what we gotta focus on to improve.”
