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Hobbs playing 15 yards off...every single down he's in (wasn't there a Frosh CB that was having a great Spring/Summer camp?).

2 games is enough of a sample for me on Stroman. Much rather see Tae or Talich.....wish we had kept Urlacher

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Both are coaching issues. I am also worried this defense got drunk on it's own success. I am especially disappointed in the secondary. Xavier Watts may be the most underrated ND defender of the past 25 years. Losing him has hurt more than expected. I doubt Miami makes that catch for the penultimate TD with Watts back there.

he lack of a pass rush hasn't helped, but the long TD pass was an embarrassing whiffed tackle. Missed tackles on defense are like dropped passes on offense - the #1 indicator of poor fundamentals. All three levels have done poorly with tackling.

All that being said, ND has played 2 quality teams - Miami might finish the season undefeated with Clemson down. TAMU has a very expensive roster and Elko is a very good coach. This could be a great year for them. I gave Ash a mulligan for Game 1 on the road at night vs. an elite team and experienced QB. ND didn't play lights out, but was able to stiffen on defense in the 2nd half until the last drive. Game 2 was an unmitigated disaster. At this point I am leaning towards the "Dump Ash Now" camp. I will be banging the table if the Purdue game isn't a massive improvement.

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Freeman (from his intro): "And then defensively, what we can't do is let a bad play turn into an explosive play, right? And that's what you see on Saturday, what typically is sometimes a bad play were explosive plays. I think they had over 200 yards on six plays, which is a result of explosive plays that that can't happen. And we've had to figure out why those those explosive plays occurred. All right.

"And that's … I could get up here and say it's execution. And it is. But like, what does of a lack of execution come down to? And it can be a lack of focus. It can be a lack of proper technique, a lack of understanding what's expected. A personnel issue where you're asking someone to do something that they can't do consistently. And so all those things are the responsibility of us as coaches.

"It falls on us as coaches to make sure that our guys can execute what we're asking them to execute on a consistent basis."

And, again, in answer to a question:

Question: "After the game, you harped on execution a lot, not necessarily the calls or the scheme. Going back, watching the film, did you see it the same way or where are you guys at with the calls in this game?"

Freeman: "Yeah, I mean, it's the execution of what we're asking them to do. And if we're asking them to do things they can't execute, then we got to evaluate what we're asking them to do. And so, like I said, it's not a call. It's not a scheme. There's no perfect call, no perfect scheme. It's the ability to execute. And that … but that, as I said, like we've spent time figuring out the lack of, why the lack of execution, right? It's … if the answer was just call something different, we would do that. But it's like, okay, this is what we called, this is why we called it, why did it fail? And that's where you got to really eval what is the core of the failure in the execution. And that's what we've been doing."


Link: Purdue | Marcus Freeman Weekly Press Conference (9.15.25)

...spurred this post.

Apparently not.

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