The 10th-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish handled business tonight under the lights in South Bend taking down the Navy Midshipmen 49-10. This was an extremely clean game for the Irish who ended the game with zero penalties called, going 70% on third down and 2 for 2 on fourth down. Despite the conditions, quarterback CJ Carr finished with the same amount of incompletions as touchdown passes. The defense held the Midshipmen offense to 228 total yards on the night and scoreless in three of the four quarters. Head coach Marcus Freeman preached aggressiveness on defense throughout the week and execution and finishing on offense; both sides of the ball took care of business tonight.
You can watch the pull press conference here:
Here are some of Freeman's main quotes from tonight's post-game press conference:
Freeman On The Offense's Performance
"I give you all similar answers for a lot of these questions," Freeman said. "How do you get that outcome? You're focused and locked in on play one. I try not it to give you guys the same answer, but it's true. I don't want to make up some different formula. You practice really hard on Tuesday, you prepare, put the work in, you do that all throughout the week and then you really lock in and focus on play one. You try to win that play, then you do it again on play two. Sometimes the outcome is going to be no penalties. But we have to continue to just evaluate the mistakes, evaluate the penalties from the previous week, make sure we don't tolerate below standard performances in practice or in a game and then you get pretty good results."
Freeman On The Defensive Mindset Against Navy
"I've seen defenses play fit ball and you know that's not my philosophy," Freeman explained. "I want to play football. I want to make sure our guys are being aggressive. But we have to be sound, right? I think that was just a philosophy that I've come to from my years at Cincinnati to my years here, that just playing one defense versus the triple option, I wasn't a huge fan of. That's me. That's my opinion. I want to still be aggressive and play football. I don't want our guys parallel and just playing football. Again, I think keeping them off balance offensively is something I believe in."
Freeman On The Kicking Operation
"I think desperation probably causes you to seek even harder to find answers," Freeman stated. "We all look for answers. I'm going to go watch the film and ask how do we get better? That's what we do. When you're at a point where it's the performance we had last week, I think it creates a little bit of desperation; let's exhaust every avenue that we can. If that means filming a guy in pre-game warmups, it means that. If it means meeting with our sports psychologist, it means that. But the best thing is buy-in from our kickers, especially Eric [Schmidt], as much as it's been from the coaches. If you have coaches that want this and are desperate, but you got a player that says, I'm not invested in that, then you won't see the elevation we need. I mean, you truly see buy-in from all parts."
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