Welcome to a somewhat emergency episode of the shamrock, but in a good way, which is not the kind of podcast we

record in Notre Dame world very often. I'm Pete Sampson, joined by, as always, by Matt Fortuna.

And on the Cincinnati beat, Justin Williams from The Athletic, who knows Notre Dame's new

defensive coordinator, Marcus Freeman, very well. So Justin, thanks for making some time for us on Friday

night to talk a little college football.

And I guess just, you know, what was your reaction when we found out the news that Marcus was headed to South Bend?

Maybe less so that it was surprised that Notre Dame was interested. We all knew that was coming.

But the fact that it wrapped up today when it did and how it did, I thought was pretty interesting.

Yeah, no, first of all, thanks for having me. Emotions are still a little raw. You know, you guys are very

fortunate. You're getting a good one in Marcus. But I'm not surprised that this was the end result. I think how we got here was really interesting.

And I'm curious, hopefully at some point in the future, we'll get all the details.

But Notre Dame just makes so much sense for kind of like the landing spot for Marcus.

And it's been pretty public that he was interviewing there this week, along with LSU, and I know he had

interest from other places. And I know he was not, it wasn't a situation where he was like definitely gone.

You know, early in the week, sources were saying that he was still like leaning towards coming back to

Cincinnati. Obviously, he's really close with Luke Fickle. So I know for people

outside of, you know, following UC that that seems like ridiculous that you would turn down LSU or

Notre Dame to go back to Cincinnati. And obviously he didn't, but he turned down Michigan State

last year after Mel Tucker got hired and turned down a big raise to stay at Cincinnati after

Luke fickle had turned down the head coaching job. And he's taken a lot of cues from Luke in

terms of, you know, Luke learned a lot from that year. He was at Ohio State where he was the

interim coach and for a long time, you know, was looking for the right head coaching job.

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