Ibi Nation, welcome back to another edition of the Irish Breakdown podcast. It brought to you by

our friends of Fandle. It is Tuesday, February 17th. We are a little over a month away from

Notre Dame kicking off spring practice. That is Sean Davis from Lucky Lefty podcast.

And Sean, you and I, shocker, were talking about something that we thought, man, this

should be a great topic to talk about on the show.

So we're going to talk about today.

Today's topic's going to be about, has Marcus Freeman lived up to expectations at

Notre Dame?

We'll talk kind of big picture, and then we'll go through different aspects of

being a head coach. Talk about has, where has he exceeded expectations, met expectations,

or maybe not lived up to expectations. And then in the second part of the show, we're going to

dive into sort of expectations for 2026. What Freeman, coach Freeman needs to do in 2026 for us to be able to say, okay, now he has met expectations in all these areas. He's lived up to these expectations and kind of get into it from there. And this isn't going to be like a Homer show where we're just going to be like, oh, it's everything is awesome. It's amazing. We're going to talk about the things that we think Coach Freeman's done very well.

And the areas where I think he still needs to be better

because at the end of the day,

you can't say he's necessarily exceeded expectations

because when you really look at Notre Dame,

the expectation of Notre Dame is won a championship.

And to me, no coach can ever exceed expectations entirely without winning a championship.

But at what stage does that happen? Those are kind of the things that we're going to discuss.

And it's such an important topic, Sean, because we are going into year five of Marcus Freeman.

And it is that period where it's like, okay, the learning curve is over now.

Now it's time to say, okay, let's figure some things out because he's experienced so many

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