Sam Hartman Remains Highly Efficient in Notre Dame’s Two-Minute Offense

Marcus Freeman is supremely confident in the ability of his offense to score in two-minute situations. It’s to the point that he’s more than willing to stop the clock when the opposing team still has the ball. 

“If it’s more than 30 seconds, I’m going to call timeout,” Freeman said, “so we can get the ball in our offense’s hands and let them get a chance to run a two-minute operation.”

That’s for good reason. In Notre Dame’s first three games, the offense has taken the field with less than two minutes left in the first half.

On each occasion, Sam Hartman has led the Fighting Irish to a momentum-boosting score. 

“The guys up front are giving me a lot of time,” Hartman said. “We get in a rhythm; we get in a good situation. Usually, it’s after our defense makes a stop, so we have a lot of momentum going there.”

Despite Hartman’s false modesty, he’s been excellent near the end of the first half, even after N.C State had just scored a touchdown. 

“We all understand what’s going on and why,” offensive coordinator Gerad Parker said. “We’ve got a smart football team, our offense knows our deal, and we’ve got a guy that’s playing confidently at the quarterback position.”

In two-minute situations, Hartman has completed 14 of 17 (82.6%) for 221 yards and three touchdowns. A combined total of 2:50 has ticked off the game clock. The Irish have run the ball once for two yards and picked up 14 yards on a defensive pass interference penalty drawn by wide receiver Chris Tyree on a crossing route. 

To Freeman’s point, Notre Dame only needed 38 and 30 seconds to score against Tennessee State and North Carolina State. 

Such positive early results should pay dividends down the road. 

“Our guys having early success in those moments has certainly bred some confidence from it,” Parker said, “so there’s an expectation more than, ‘What’s the situation?’ They already know the situation is, and then I think they have an expectation to play well in those moments.”

Of course, the Irish also do well in these situations because they work on it frequently. 

“We started every practice off like that in the summer, trying to start fast and pursue execution all across the ball,” Hartman said. “Everyone graded out really high in really high tempo situations because we knew it was going to pay off. It’s helped us a lot in the first three games.”

The offense doesn’t always win against the defense in practice, but there’s also not the same level of game planning involved in those instances, either. 

Notre Dame also comes into each game with a two-minute plan.

“(Chansi Stuckey) does our two-minute study. I trust his eyes,” Parker said. “We watch through it, do film study, kind of see what we believe is going to be the best hits for what they’re going to give us in those scenarios, put ‘em on the sheet and call ‘em and let our guys make them work.”

Still, the offense’s success in two-minute situations begs the question: Why doesn’t the offense frequently play with a sense of urgency?

”We definitely have tempo in our offensive system,” Freeman said. “We haven’t used it much. It’s a varying way of using tempo. I don’t want to be a team that goes at Mach speed and runs 100 plays a game. I believe in the complimentary football, and the ability to establish the run game and different things like that.”

Perhaps, an up-tempo offense could be employed to throw off the better defenses on Notre Dame’s schedule.

Either way, the Irish should feel extra confident if the game is tied in the final two minutes against Ohio State or USC and the ball is in Hartman’s hands. 

“I've seen it over and over, him go out and execute,” Freeman said. “He did it last week; he did it again this week.”