Notre Dame Needs To Win The Big One, Georgia Provides That Chance
There comes a point in every team’s path to a championship where they need to learn how to win. Every team needs to face some form of adversity and learn how to win because of it. Notre Dame’s certainly faced its fair share of adversity — now it needs to learn how to win...the big one.
“They’ve made the journey we’re trying to make,” defensive coordinator Al Golden said. “We have to learn how to do this, how to go into these kinds of environments and execute at a really high level, regardless of the circumstance and regardless of this case, of who we're playing.”
Now, of course Notre Dame knows how to win, it has done it 12 times this season to give themselves this opportunity — to take yet another step towards that national championship it has been chasing for 36 years. But this next game is a whole lot different than Virginia in November.
It’s often said, ‘To be the best, you have to beat the best.‘ Well, the best is right in front of you.
In the nine years that Kirby Smart has been at the helm of Georgia, the Bulldogs rank fourth in the nation with 105 wins — including two straight national championships in which they went on a 29-1 run over the course of those two seasons. When it comes down to the handful of plays that will decide a football game, Smart knows how to win them.
On the other hand, a case can be made that Marcus Freeman’s squad has faltered when presented with the opportunity to become winners. Home losses to the likes of Marshall, Stanford and Northern Illinois have shone a light on the Irish’s inability to become a dominant team.
Teams like Georgia rarely, if at all, lose those types of games, but Notre Dame did. Maybe a win Wednesday night would put all those bad memories to bed. Maybe the pain of those losses reached a boiling point, shaping the Irish into winners.
It sure seems like they have.
“You can’t wait until you lose to have the urgency to fix the issues that you have,” Freeman said. “Every week we are chasing elevation…how do we get better this week? Georgia is the opponent, the challenge during the week is to still get better as a football program. It’s a never-satisfied mindset.”
It took Smart until his sixth season to win his first national championship — Freeman is only in his third. But the winning culture in Georgia was established long before that January night in 2021.
Look back at Smart’s second season when the Bulldogs took down Baker Mayfield’s Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl in a double-overtime classic — it was the moment his squad arrived, learning how to win on one of the biggest stages college football has to offer. Because once you do it once it becomes second nature — your identity becomes winning.
“Everybody is coming after you every year,” Smart said. “People have been coming after us after the two national championships for a while. It didn’t make this year any more difficult.”
Maybe the two are on a similar trajectory, Smart, now the savvy veteran, and Freeman the up-and-coming coach who has his team rallied around his message — win today. He isn’t as concerned about how his team will play come kickoff but more so how they can be the best possible versions of themselves.
“Trying to fight being normal every day,” Freeman said. “I want our guys to embrace that. I want our guys to be misfits and to find a way to push yourself outside your comfort zone every single day to look for hard.
“We don’t want people to look at us and go, ‘Yeah you’re just a normal coach, you’re just a normal football player.’ We want to be a little bit of a misfit and embrace that, and do the things that misfits do. If everybody is doing something, you probably want to do something harder, do something different.”
This ‘misfit mindset’ that Freeman has the Irish adopting is the key in Notre Dame finally becoming winners again. Because a fact of life, whether in college football or elsewhere, is that people who rise above and dominate their own personal life aren’t normal.
The Nick Sabans, Bill Belichicks or Tom Bradys of the world aren’t normal people — they’re misfits. They’re obsessed with winning to the point that nothing else matters. That’s what separates them from the rest. That’s what allows them to remain at the top no matter who tries to tear them down. They wake up every morning and choose hard — just like Freeman does.
For Freeman and the Irish to truly become winners, they need to not be normal, they need to be obsessed with the thought of being the best — just like Smart and Georgia are.
“Everybody has an obsession with winning a national championship,” Freeman said. “My obsession is to get this program to reach our full potential. If our potential is winning a national championship, great. We don’t walk into the office and say, ‘What do we have to do today to elevate and reach our full potential,’ because at the end of the day that’s all we can control. We control how close this program can get to reaching its full potential.”
Georgia is a different kind of beast than the Irish have seen this year, and it’s the type of beast it has failed to conquer in prior seasons, like Ohio State.
Wednesday night can change all of that.
No, they won’t be crowned national champions if they knock off Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, they’ll just be another step closer, with more college football behemoths waiting to take them out in the coming weeks. But the magnitude of the win will mean so much more than moving on to the Semifinals.
It’ll mean Freeman’s group of misfits have arrived, and a new era of Notre Dame football will be born. One where expecting wins of this magnitude will be the norm, and the echoes of national championships past no longer haunt the halls of South Bend.
All they have to do is win.
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