Notre Dame Moving On After Heartbreaking Ohio State Loss

After a heartbreaking loss to Ohio State Saturday night, Notre Dame is in the moving on phase. That’s the way college football works. The Buckeyes were game five of a stretch of eight consecutive games to open the season. After all the hype and hoopla with College Game Day and the prime time spotlight of their top-10 matchup, Marcus Freeman’s team has to put it behind them to prepare for another opponent.

Obviously, the outcome wasn’t what we wanted and great teams find a way to execute when it matters the most,” Freeman commented this week. “That’s what great teams do and we didn’t. We needed to execute at the end of the game and we didn’t, Ohio State did. We have to learn from the critical mistakes we made in that game as a football program and use it to help us improve as we move forward. We made too many mistakes that ended up costing us a victory versus a great opponent.”

The most obvious mistake was Notre Dame’s defense having only 10 players on the field for Ohio State’s last two plays. Freeman says fell on the sword for that one "It falls on me,” the second-year head coach said on Monday and he is fully aware of other situations his team can learn from.

He knows they can’t give up 61-yard touchdown runs like they did early in the third quarter. He knows they have to convert on 4th and 1, something they failed to do twice. He knows they need to tackle better in the open field and put an opposing offense away on crucial 4th and 7 and 3rd and 19 plays like the Buckeyes had during their game winning touchdown drive.

If all of that was a bitter pill for fans to swallow, it was even harder for the players to ingest.

"They've taken it personally in terms of as individuals and you want that,” Freeman said of his team’s reaction to the narrow loss. "I want every person on our team to take this loss personally. But everybody’s accountable but no one person is responsible for it.”

Freeman had met with his team captains by the time he spoke publicly early Monday afternoon for the first time since his postgame press conference. He had a team meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon, with the team’s first practice slated for Tuesday. How the Irish handle last Saturday’s disappointment will be determined this week.

"This game, it builds character, it builds resiliency,” Freeman remarked. "You can put everything you have into your preparation for a game and still lose and that’s what they did last week. They put everything they had, coaches, players, and we still lost and the pain of defeat, it’s tough. It hurts. Physically, you’re sick when you lose. But in the midst of that pain you’ve got to own it and you’ve got to face it and you’ve got to attack it and you’ve got to go back to work and you’ve got to pick your head up and you can’t feel sorry for yourself and you can’t hope that somebody pats you on the back and says it’s going to be okay.

"We have to face the mistakes that we made and truly own it and it is so hard to do,” he continued. "But we have to do it and resilient people and people of character do that. Especially during tough times. So, that’s what I’m going to do and that’s what we have to choose to do. We have to choose hard. I have a saying, we say ‘choose hard’. You’re going to have to choose hard, no matter how you feel right now and truly face the mistakes. Attack them and go to work.”

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