14 practices spanning 35 days,

Nordame's Spring of 2025 is in the books.

I'm Tim Preister with Tim O'Malley and Drew Mentock from IRIS Illustrated,

and this is Ivers Illustrated's instant analysis.

We just spent some time with Marcus Freeman.

Spring has wrapped up, as you can imagine.

I mean, a lot of positive things to say about this team.

Individually, collectively, this is a really good football team.

Before we jump into the specifics of what Marcus Freeman said, although I should say starting with some of the specifics, he said there were three

main goals, and that was to chase their full potential. He always has catchphrases for everything.

I thought that during the press conference. That was, yeah. The opposition is yourself. That was the

phrase he used. And second thing is elevate the trust within the team. He says, great teams have that.

And we saw that this past season with Nordame and then work every day with the understanding that there's going to be a delayed gratification.

And that gratification hopefully comes this fall.

I thought the elevate the trust part was telling because, you know, last year, as we said about the defense, it was they hit the ground running at the 500 level.

Some of those guys, obviously, they're bringing in Chris Ash makes it a little bit different.

He's going to add some tweaks to the scheme.

And I think the trust Mike Dembrock now can have in a new era of Notre Dame quarterbacking.

When Mike Denbrock comes to us in the spring and said, we didn't trust our passing game last year ever. That's not a good sign. He volunteered that. It's not like we asked for it.

So I think that was probably telling for Marcus Freeman to say that. And I'm sure that's what part of

the spring was about was trying to foster also camaraderie and everything on the defensive staff.

And he actually ended the press conference talking about how that was kind of what

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