For Notre Dame, The Bye Week Was About Staying Sharp, Getting Rest, Focusing On BYU
NOTRE DAME, Ind. - The challenge Marcus Freeman laid out for his Notre Dame football team during its one off week of the regular season was simple: Get better without distractions. Freeman and the Fighting Irish went about attacking that goal with three practices mixed throughout the off week, on Monday, Thursday and Friday.
"The bye week went really well,” Freeman said during his BYU preview press conference. "I think it was a chance for us as a football team to improve. That was my challenge as a head coach to these guys and to our staff was we have to find a way to improve in our three days of practice, but also to physically and mentally recover.”
The recovery aspect was important, with key players like safeties Ramon Henderson (ankle) and DJ Brown (hamstring) nursing injuries. Freeman said Michael Mayer was a bit banged-up going into the bye as well. Practice for players like them was not as important as resting and recovering, per Freeman.
"For Michael Mayer, physically recovering is going to help him get better,” Notre Dame’s first year head coach said. “But for the majority of the group, we had to go out there and we had to bang. We had to practice with pads on and really get after it.
"It was a chance for us at the end of practice to practice some live reps and really, really develop the core nucleus of our team," continued Freeman. "We had some really physically challenging practices, but I believe, today on Monday, they’re recovered and we’re going to have a great Monday of practice.”
Even with “physical” practices on Thursday and Friday at the end of last week, the team still has more time to recover for BYU this week than if it had played a game last Saturday.
Freeman and his staff were also able to get longer looks at younger players in live settings than they do in a regular week when a much larger amount of time is spent on preparing for a specific opponent.
"The part of practicing those young guys and those scrimmage type reps at the end of practice was to see, ok, can this guy help us when we’re going full team, good on good,” Freeman stated. "We were able to see a lot of good things.”
The other aspect of having a full week with no opponent to prepare for is spending more time with an introspective eye. The ability of Freeman and his coaching staff to look at Notre Dame to self-scout allows them to look closer at their own game film to determine what they do well, what they need to work on and how they can use that over the season’s final eight games.
"It’s only a four week span of what you can self-scout,” Freeman explained. "It’s not (an) extremely large body to really evaluate, but we did. We spent time looking at the things we’ve done well, things we have to improve on and really, really attack and with that, prepare for BYU. We still had to have some periods in practice that were predicated towards preparing for BYU, so it was a little bit of both.”
It’s not BYU at Notre Dame Stadium, it’s not BYU in Provo, and it’s not even BYU in Illinois or Texas. It’s Notre Dame versus BYU in the 11th installment of the Shamrock Series ... in Las Vegas.
The preeminent Catholic college football program in the nation is taking its traveling road show to Sin City itself. A location rife with notorious distractions, but the Irish staff is well prepared for that. They have one job, and that is to focus on the Cougars.
"We’re not going to get out there in time to experience any of the distractions that I think Las Vegas can present.” Freeman said.
The team will go see the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium when they get to town Friday, but then there will be no time for casinos or any other Vegas night life. They’ll have a team dinner and team meeting back at the hotel afterwards, but bed check comes at 8:30 PM Pacific time, which is 11:30 PM back home in South Bend.
"We have to remember that our bodies are used to Eastern Standard Time, so we’re going to get them to bed at a decent hour and wake ‘em up at a decent hour to get us ready for the game on Saturday,” noted the Irish head coach.
Being away from home is something Freeman and the Irish program seem to enjoy in 2022. Notre Dame took No. 3 Ohio State to the wire in the season's road opener, and the most recent game was a convincing 45-32 over now 4-1 North Carolina.
"The thing I like about away games is that there’s, a lot of times, less distractions,” Freeman said. "You don’t have to really deal with pregame festivities, recruiting. You really just kind of can focus on playing the game.”
Its Freeman’s first Shamrock Series experience as a head coach, but he was able to draw off last year’s Shamrock experience against Wisconsin last year when he was Notre Dames defensive coordinator.
"That’s what makes Notre Dame unique,” Freeman said of the Shamrock Series. "It’s a distinction that we have a home game in Las Vegas versus a great opponent. But don’t distract from what it takes to get the desired outcome. I’ll say it again, it’s just your preparation and the execution.”
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