‘Somebody has to take blame’: Notre Dame looking inwards to address defensive woes

Notre Dame isn’t pointing fingers — at least not yet. 

After another subpar effort from the defense on Saturday against Purdue, Marcus Freeman believes there are two paths the Irish can go down. 

Either they’ll come together, trusting in the process. Or they’ll start pointing fingers, whether it’s at the playcaller, the players or even Freeman himself. 

He knows the outcome of both. 

“We got one or two options as I told them, we're gonna do this and get our guys better and believe in what we're doing or we'll separate,” Freeman said. “And if we separate, it's not going to be good for anybody. It's not. That has got to trickle down to our players because outside of the football facility, you know what it is.

“Somebody's gotta take blame, that's our world. Somebody's taking blame.”

It’s Freeman, and his staff’s, job to make sure that inside the football facility, there is no finger pointing. People on the outside can pass all the blame around they want, it’s human instinct. But the minute that happens, behind closed doors or not, within the Notre Dame facility — there will be no hope for a resurrection. 

The defense may improve, but if the players don’t believe in the guy’s on the sideline, and vice versa, they’ll never get to the level needed to turn this season around. 

“We got to make sure the minute they walk in there, hold on now, we ain't pointing the finger at no one person, no one player, no one coach,” Freeman said. “We're pointing the finger at ourselves. 

“We're gonna do whatever it takes to get this thing fixed, because we believe in it, we believe in each other and we believe in this coaching staff.” 

But even with plenty of blame being doled out at defensive coordinator Chris Ash, Freeman firmly believes it’s not the call, or the scheme, that is leading to three overall poor performances. 

It’s the execution of the call. If it wasn’t, he might’ve already made a switch. 

“If I thought it was a call, if I thought we weren't calling the game the right way, trust me, I know the definition of insanity and if that was the case, you got to do what's best for your program,” Freeman said.  But to me, the issue when I'm evaluating our defensive play. It's not what we're calling at this time or why we're calling it. It's okay, why aren't we executing? 

“If I'm going to call the defense, and it's based on a call, we're not calling the right calls. I don't believe that's true, or I would say, ‘Hey, Chris Ash, call this.’ We called this for this reason, and it didn't work. They executed an explosive play. OK, what's the reason behind it? That's what we spent a lot of time evaluating and discussing. How do you get them to execute it at a better level or play with the right fundamentals?”

That’s what the Notre Dame coaching staff spent their Saturday discussing — and it wasn’t a good time for anyone involved. Nor should it be. 

“We have to do that and that's what we spent a lot of time doing yesterday as a defensive staff,” Freeman said. “It's not a comfortable meeting and I didn't want it to be comfortable.” 

During Monday’s press conference, Freeman boiled down a lot of the Irish’s major issues to fundamentals. Whether it was fundamentals in the secondary leading to sloppy man coverage, or poor fundamentals leading to a bad pass rush. Not the call of man coverage or bringing pressure, but the execution of it. 

“It's our job as coaches to make sure that we attack those issues, those areas and get them to play with faster velocity, get them to execute at a higher level because that's what matters,” Freeman said. “It doesn't matter what the issues are. We have to continue to find ways to get them to perform at a higher level.”

So how do they fix it? The answer probably isn’t simple. While the run defense was improved, the pass defense still had glaring holes. The defense recorded a pair of sacks and six tackles for loss, but 30 points against Purdue — 23 in the first half — is still too much. 

The first step in fixing it, according to Freeman, is buying in — on every level. 

“But in order to do that, everybody's got to be bought in,” Freeman said. “Everybody's got to believe that we have the answers. It's not a person. It's not Marcus Freeman should be calling the defense. We have the answers. We got to all buy in and execute this the right way.” 

Freeman is confident that the strong culture his program has instilled within Notre Dame will lead to that collective buy in. 

If not, well then it may be time to start pointing some fingers. 

“You have to create the buy-in to what we're doing and the ownership of it,” Freeman said. “If we get that, we'll get it corrected with urgency. If we don't - it's your fault, you shouldn't have called that. You're a bad coach. Then it's going to be bad. I know our culture ain't going to let that happen.”