Marcus Freeman sees depth of Notre Dame roster improving in Year Two

Entering his second season as the head coach at Notre Dame, Marcus Freeman knows that expectations are high for the Irish. There’s a lot that’s going into trying to reach those expectations, including working on improving the roster depth.

Freeman explained that improving depth has been a goal of his at Notre Dame, and he has challenged coaches to make sure the second string and younger players are getting the development they need.

“You have to have depth,” Marcus Freeman said. “And so we’ve made sure to truly work on developing our 2s and our 3s. Our 2’s don’t have a lot of game experience, and so that was something that I kind of challenged the coaches with. It’s easy to always rely on those guys that have played a lot of ball. They know what they’re doing, but what we need to do is develop the depth of our team.”

For Marcus Freeman, the time to develop is now. After all, as the season gets closer, there is going to be less opportunity to develop those players because they’ll need to fill in on the scout team instead.

“And so, I’m challenging coaches. I want 2s in there with 1s. Let’s see what they can do against the best players we have. The same thing with the 3s. We stay after practice every day and we have our own session of what we call basics with the 3s and it’s all for development,” Freeman said.

“As we get ready to get closer to Navy, we’re gonna have to have some scout teams, but we’re gonna need the 2s. We’re gonna need depth throughout this season, and so we have to develop that now in camp.”

Marcus Freeman on developing backup quarterbacks

Notre Dame is confident in starting quarterback Sam Hartman. However, as the 2022 season proved, developing a backup quarterback can be vital. So, Marcus Freeman has a plan for the development of those backups.

“When you have a quarterback in certain positions, especially the threes that need the valuable reps, you have to script threes in there. And that’s something in the past that I’ve said, ‘Alright, we’re good on the threes. Hey, we’ll get them later. We’ll get them after practice. We’ve had a lot of reps with our threes because we have not just at the corner position, we have guys at the D-line, the O-line that have to be able to show us what they can do and we got to give him a chance to develop,” Freeman said.

“So I’ve seen a lot of good out of Steve [Angeli] and Kenny [Minchey], you know? I think coach Gino Guidugli and Gerad Parker have done a great job of getting those guys to understand what the scheme is really how to perform. Both of them performed really well today. Really, really well.”