Marcus Freeman Details Notre Dame Offseason Changes Aimed at Fixing September Woes

Marcus Freeman was asked directly at his fall camp opening press conference what he has done to fix Notre Dame’s September problem, and he answered by naming the parts of the calendar the staff changed between January and now. Practice structure, which days the team practices, how much meeting time players get, the format of spring ball, and the approach to OTAs were all reworked ahead of the Sept. 6 opener against Wisconsin.

“Again, it’s a January through August issue, right? And it’s how do you evaluate everything you’re doing from the minute the last game ends to the minute the first game begins?” Freeman said.

He was careful to frame the work as adjustment rather than revamp. Freeman talked more about making some improvements on the margins, not wholesale changes.

“We’re not changing everything we’ve done, but we’re evaluating everything we’ve done and we’re enhancing little things we’ve done in terms of how we practice, in terms of which days we practice, in terms of how much meeting time,” Freeman said. “There’s a lot of different things that we’ve done from January, how we do spring ball, how we do our OTAs.”

The urgency came from him, and he said so. “I do feel very confident in the enhancements that we’ve made. But again, you’re always trying to find ways to do that. And I know this has been a sense of urgency for me because of especially last year and the previous years before that.”

Freeman also declined to render a verdict on any of it until the season is finished, which puts the evidence squarely in the first month of the schedule.

September has set the tone

Freeman’s September record is the reason the question got asked with cameras in the room. Notre Dame opened 2025 with a road loss at Miami. The next week brought a home loss to Texas A&M. Both of those teams reached the playoff. The Irish never fully shook the 0-2 start and finished as the last team out. Freeman reiterated his off-season message on Notre Dame’s slow start.

“We didn’t earn it. We didn’t earn the opportunity. We didn’t earn the right to play more than 12 games last year,” he said.

In 2024, the home loss to Northern Illinois could have ended the season and would have if it hadn’t been the first year of the expanded playoffs. Notre Dame recovered all the way to the national championship game, which makes it the exception rather than the template. In 2023, the Irish lost at Ohio State with 10 men on the field for the deciding play. An earlier September under Freeman produced a tough road loss at Ohio State, followed by an upset at the hands of Marshall.

Four different Septembers, four different flavors of the same problem. The 2024 team was good enough and lucky enough to overcome it. The others were not. An unblemished September has still evaded Freeman.

The standard in camp stays high

He said he would deliver that message to the team the day before camp opened.

“But the other thing, I think we have to be a team that practices hard, extremely hard, but smart,” Freeman said. “And that’s going to be my message to the team tomorrow, is the standard of the way we practice, it can’t be lowered.”

The same demand runs through the offseason changes: hold the standard in practice, then interrogate the process that sets it, including the way the staff itself works.

“But everything we do, we have to challenge everything,” Freeman said. “You know, when you continue to just rinse and recycle and repeat, I think you’ll get passed by. You have to continue to adapt to the changing times and to the different ideas that are out there.”

What Notre Dame thinks it built

Freeman has said before that this roster starts from a better place than last year’s did. All three coordinators are back. CJ Carr returns as the starting quarterback, and the testing numbers out of the summer came back bigger, stronger, and more explosive than in previous years. He was clear that none of that is the finished product.

“The foundation is higher, but we got a tremendous amount of work and not a lot of time to get that foundation to where we need it for September 6th.”

The changes to the practice week, the meeting schedule, spring ball, and the OTA plan are only worth what the first month produces. Notre Dame has spent four years proving it can play well enough in October and November to win games; the seasons that truly got away were decided before the leaves turned. September is lighter for the Irish this season, but that has not always mattered in the past.