Marcus Freeman on Notre Dame’s Lou Holtz Helmet Sticker: ‘He Gave His All to This Place’

Notre Dame will wear a Lou Holtz sticker on the back of its helmets Sunday against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field and for the rest of the season. The university proposed the tribute, and Marcus Freeman said he backed it without hesitation.

“Yeah, number one, honoring Lou Holtz is something that I was passionate about,” Freeman said Friday. “And it has nothing to do with the impact on me as much as it does the impact that he had on Notre Dame. You know, he was magnificent. He gave his all to this place. He loved this place. And so it was just something that the university kind of brought up, and I strongly supported it.”

Freeman had every reason to make that answer personal. He took the Notre Dame job as a first-time head coach and has never hidden that he leaned on Holtz for advice along the way – a relationship NBC put on camera in a 2024 episode of Here Come the Irish, when Freeman visited him. Asked about honoring Holtz, though, he pushed all of that aside and pointed at the program instead.

Freeman Kept the Focus on Notre Dame

The question also asked how much Freeman had studied the way Holtz built his era. What he reached for were the same things he has spent the last nine months describing about his own roster.

“But the demands that he put on his players, the standards that they had, and the trust that’s built, the love that you have for brother, I think there’s a lot of parallels,” Freeman said.

The Coaching Line Freeman Drew

Freeman never played or coached for Holtz. Rather than lean on the friendship he does have, he built the connection through the coaching tree.

“You know, I think as you learn more about his coaching style and who he was, I think there’s a little bit of him in me in terms of not just because of, you know, he coached when Urban Meyer was here, right?” Freeman said. “Urban Meyer, head coach, Ohio State. Luke Fickell probably took a little bit of Urban Meyer, right? Now I got a chance to be the defensive coordinator for Luke Fickell. And so you take a little bit of that. It’s passed on down.”

It is a four-step chain, and every link in it is real. Meyer was a Notre Dame assistant under Holtz. Meyer later hired and coached Fickell at Ohio State. Fickell hired Freeman as his defensive coordinator at Cincinnati, where Freeman ran the defense before Notre Dame hired him.

That Connection Carries Into Sunday

Freeman traced his own coaching lineage through Fickell two days before the two of them open the season against each other. Chris Ash has a version of the same tie – Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator was Ohio State’s co-coordinator alongside Fickell on the 2014 national championship staff, and he ran Wisconsin’s defense before that.

Notre Dame gets its first look at the standard Freeman described when it kicks off Sunday night in Green Bay.