The untold story of CFB’s ultimate party crasher: Meet the fan who led the Vols onto the field for the 1998 title game
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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It has been nearly 25 years, but J.R. Greene still has the faded orange top hat sitting in his office, the same one he frantically clutched on his head as he led Tennessee’s football team onto the field for the national championship Fiesta Bowl game against Florida State, a magical night for the Volunteers and their fans.
The top hat was just part of his attire. A 24-year-old student working on his MBA at the time, Greene was also sporting an orange-and-white tuxedo with matching orange gloves and a Power T cummerbund.
The ultimate party crasher in the ultimate moment for his beloved Vols, Greene was the “Big Orange Tux Guy,” a phrase he repeated over and over to finagle his way onto the stage to sing “Rocky Top” with a band playing before the game, onto the ESPN “College GameDay” set — and most improbably — onto the field in one of those Ferris Bueller-like odysseys that almost sounds like a fairy tale.
Yet there he was, praying every few minutes that he “wasn’t going to end up in jail and miss the biggest game of my life,” as he raced from the Sun Devil Stadium tunnel with coach Phillip Fulmer, Tee Martin, Al Wilson, Peerless Price and the entire Tennessee contingent in tow.
“It’s no fairy tale. He was there. Wasn’t supposed to be, but he was there,” Fulmer joked. “I’m still not sure how he pulled it off.”
Nobody is — not even Greene, who figured the timing was right to tell his mind-boggling story publicly for the first time. This is the 25th anniversary of Tennessee’s 1998 national championship season, and the team will be honored Saturday at Neyland Stadium during the game against South Carolina.
And, yes, Greene — a donor and lifelong fan — plans to be in attendance. He has had season tickets in his family going back to his great-grandfather, John T. O’Connor, who was the mayor of Knoxville in the 1930s. Greene sold programs at Tennessee sporting events as a middle school student in the 1980s.
Recently, Greene dug out his old tux from the closet, but he wouldn’t dare break it back out to wear this weekend.
“Oh no, I’m 1-0, unbeaten,” Greene said. “I only wear the tux for championship games.”
GREENE HAD HIS tux on bright and early 25 years ago, starting that Jan. 4, 1999, morning in the lobby of his hotel. He was ready to show it off, have some fun and send a message. But never in his wildest dreams did Greene envision that several hours later, he would be leading the Tennessee team out onto the field.
“Everything sort of perfectly fell into place, and every time somebody asked me who I was or what I was doing, I would just say, ‘I’m J.R. Greene, the Big Orange Tux Guy. I’m here to show Tennessee has class,'” Greene recounted. “That’s all it was about.”
At least, that’s the way it started.
Like many Tennessee fans, Greene was ruffled over comments made by ESPN’s Chris Fowler a year earlier. In referencing the nasty backlash and threats directed at him by some Tennessee fans over Peyton Manning not winning the Heisman Trophy, Fowler used the term “trailer park frenzy,” something he has apologized for several times. Fowler actually voted for Manning in the Heisman balloting that year.
Ironically, Greene said, Fowler played a crucial role in his getting onto the field that evening in Tempe, Arizona. Greene managed to maneuver his way onto the “GameDay” set by climbing up the back stairs from the field. He had bumped into ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit the night before in Scottsdale and told Herbstreit he was going to wear an orange-and-white tux to the game.
“He told me if I showed up in an orange-and-white tux that he’d get me on ‘GameDay,'” Greene recalled.
Crawford Wagner, one of Greene’s friends who made the trip to the Fiesta Bowl, remembers that conversation. Now, Wagner had no idea Greene would be successful in making his way to the ESPN set, but looking back, he’s not surprised.
“J.R. has always been a guy that could sell things and would usually end up in places you didn’t necessarily expect to see him,” Wagner said.
Greene’s penchant for showing up in such places went to another level after his Fiesta Bowl escapades. Later in 1999, he told his story to screeners for “The Price is Right” and made it on stage as a contestant on the Bob Barker-hosted game show. In 2001, after taking a job in Los Angeles, he introduced himself to actor Hugh Grant while at the Beverly Hilton and followed him into the green room at the Golden Globe Awards, where he rubbed elbows with Dick Clark, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.
“Let’s just say the confidence I gained from being the Big Orange Tux Guy that night changed my future,” Greene said.
Herbstreit was in only his third year of doing “GameDay” during the 1998 season, and now, after visiting so many venues and encountering so many exuberant fans over the years, he doesn’t specifically remember the “Big Orange Tux Guy.” Nonetheless, he thinks Greene’s zeal is the kind of thing that makes college football unique.
“His story adds up because there were back steps to the field, and our set was right in the middle of the Tennessee section,” Herbstreit said. “The thing I remember most is that I picked Tennessee, and when Peerless caught that first deep pass, I almost came out of my seat because, especially back in those days, you were married to your picks.”
Fowler has what he called a vague recollection of Greene and the oddity of his showing up on the set with an orange-and-white tux, which had some custom “tailoring,” thanks to Greene’s creativity.
Greene’s first attempt to dye a tux orange ended up as more of a peach color. So he bought another tux and colored in the lapels and other areas with an orange magic marker.
“That’s not real. You’re not a real mascot,” Greene remembers Fowler telling him as the “GameDay” host moved in closer and realized the orange was colored in with a marker. “But if you’ve got the guts to do that and come up here, why don’t you walk down to the field with us?”
Greene, nervously looking around to see whether any security guards might be zeroing in on him, went bopping along behind the ESPN duo down the steps.
“I remember we had a big net around us, and there were thousands of whiskey bottles on top when we were done with the show,” Fowler said. “The Tennessee fans were so hyped to be in that game. But [Greene] looked the part, so I can see why nobody would stop him.
“Hey, if I helped him get down on the field in some way, I’m pleased, especially if he was going to make that kind of commitment. Somewhere, that fits into a chaotic cap to what was a chaotic season.
“Why not have a guy who’s not supposed to be there running around on the field?”
GREENE HAD ALREADY morphed into a celebrity of sorts earlier in the day as a sea of charged-up Tennessee fans tailgated outside the stadium. It had been nearly 50 years since the Vols had last won a national championship, going all the way back to the days of legendary coach Gen. Robert Neyland.
“You could feel the energy and the anticipation. It was like the whole state of Tennessee was there,” Greene said.
Greene flew to the game with buddies Robbie Pope and Mark Sykes. He was initially going to wear the tux on the plane, but Pope convinced him that would be bad luck. Instead, Pope talked Greene into getting up onto a stage during pregame festivities and singing with the band.
“J.R. said something about getting up there and singing ‘Rocky Top’ and was going to chicken out,” Pope said.
The next thing Pope knew, ever-persistent Greene was at the corner of the stage trying to get the drummer’s attention. A hulking security guard wearing all black asked Greene who he was, and Greene told him he was there to sing “Rocky Top.” The guard told Greene he needed to talk to the drummer, who was right in the middle of a song. Finally, the drummer angrily motioned for Greene to wait, and after the song, the drummer gathered the band together and put a headset on Greene.
Looking out into the crowd and seeing all the orange, Greene bellowed, “Who’s going to win the national championship?”
And right on cue, the band broke into a rendition of “Rocky Top.” The only problem was Greene froze and forgot the words.
“All I knew was the chorus,” he said bashfully. “Thankfully, the band bailed me out and started singing. One of the guys started playing the fiddle.”
Just as Greene started to belt out “Rocky Top, you’ll always be home sweet home to me,” he pointed to two girls from the audience to join him on stage, and they linked arms for a little country dancing twirl.
Out in the crowd, his friends could only wonder what might happen next.
“We were probably 100 feet away from the stage, and vintage J.R., when he forgot the words, he ad-libbed and ran with it, which he’s good at,” Wagner said.
Pope said when Greene hopped off the stage, everybody thought he was a celebrity and swarmed him for pictures, and that’s when the legend of the “Big Orange Tux Guy” really ignited.
“I didn’t want it to end. The rush was incredible,” Greene said.
IN THOSE DAYS, there were no digital tickets, just paper tickets that were torn at the gate as you entered the stadium. Greene, who by now was separated from his friends, didn’t want his ticket to be torn and started looking around for another way to get into the game. (Greene still has the ticket intact and was able to get the Voice of the Vols, radio broadcaster John Ward, to sign it.)
Greene walked around the outside of the stadium, scouting out different entrances. He noticed bowl officials, media and other team personnel going through a special entrance lined with velvet ropes.
Surely, he thought to himself as his confidence was bubbling, somebody wearing an orange-and-white tuxedo and top hat would look official enough to enter there.
“I thought, ‘Why not?'” he said. “Even then, I wasn’t thinking about getting onto the field. I just wanted to get into the game without my ticket being torn.
“I had no pass, no credentials, no nothing.”
Keep in mind this was pre-9/11, and security measures weren’t nearly as stringent as they are today. Greene strolled right through the participants entrance smiling and nodding at the security personnel the whole way. Within minutes, he found himself in the bowels of Sun Devil Stadium, just off the field. One of the first people he saw was Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, who took a cursory glance at him and kept walking.
“I’m sort of shaking at this point, pinching myself. I mean, I’m walking out onto the field where Tennessee’s getting ready to play for the national championship,” Greene said.
Then he noticed the back stairway to the “GameDay” location. He thought about it (for about two seconds), then climbed up awkwardly and pushed open a little wooden door to the back of the set.
“Herbstreit sees me and buries his brow into his arm as if to say, ‘He really wore an orange-and-white tux,'” Greene said. “I kept waiting for somebody to come kick me out and they never did.”
Anything but bashful, Greene approached Herbstreit and Fowler. To this day, he is grateful they were his escorts back onto the field and eventually to the most exhilarating run of his life.
“I know Chris Fowler had become the enemy of Tennessee fans, but had he not invited me to go back down to the field with them, there wouldn’t be any ‘Big Orange Tux Guy’ story,” Greene said. “I’ve got nothing bad to say about him.”
Once they all got down to the field, kickoff was fast approaching, and Fowler and Herbstreit went about their business. Greene, his heart pounding, saw a member of the Tennessee dance team he knew and hugged her. By then, he was near the front of the Tennessee tunnel to the locker room, where the cheerleaders, mascots and other members of the Vols’ spirit squad were gathering.
Nobody knew who he was or what he was doing there.
Adam DeVault, who wore the Davy Crockett outfit and carried the giant orange “T” flag onto the field, remembers seeing Greene out of the corner of his eye.
“That’s the only reason I remember,” DeVault said. “It was such a big game with so much going on. Nothing is normal about a game like that, really. I guess I assumed he was a donor that had paid a lot of money to run out with the team. I do know I would have been mad had he run out in front of me.”
As the minutes counted down to the Tennessee players filling the tunnel, Greene felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Hey, we’re already at the NCAA limit for mascots,” Greene remembers someone from Tennessee telling him.
To this day, Greene doesn’t know who it was.
“I just know that I was sure then that it was over, that I was going to jail,” he said.
Barry Garner was in charge of the Tennessee spirit squad that day, filling in for regular coordinator Joy Postell-Gee, who missed the trip at the last minute because she was close to giving birth. (“I hate to say it, but it would have been a different outcome for [Greene] if I had been there,” Postell-Gee said. “He would have never made it onto the field.”)
The scene was chaotic, including the opposing players jawing at each other in the locker room area as they neared the tunnel. Garner said he might have alerted authorities if Greene had appeared any earlier.
“This is literally minutes before we ran out. We’re waiting on Coach Fulmer and watching for him, and then you look to your side and this guy with an orange tuxedo is just standing there,” Garner recalled.
“I said something like, “Who are you? What are you here for?”
Greene’s response was a familiar one: “I’m the Big Orange Tux Guy.”
Garner looked at him quizzically and asked, “Wait, are you supposed to lead us onto the field or something?”
Forgetting for a few seconds his Eagle Scout vow to always tell the truth, Greene nervously nodded his head yes, to which Garner responded, “Well, let’s go, lead us to a national championship.”
Greene, of course, was oblivious to the team’s routine for running onto the field, which included Fulmer pointing and saying “Go,” and then Smokey, the Vols’ bluetick coonhound mascot, being led out first, followed by Davy Crockett (DeVault) carrying the team flag, the costumed version of Smokey, the cheerleaders and then the team. But at least Greene knew to stay to the right.
One of Smokey’s handlers warned Greene right before they ran out that Smokey liked to zigzag and that if Greene got tripped up and fell, he would be trampled by the players because they wouldn’t stop.
Willis Jepson, who was the lead handler for Smokey that season, laughed when asked about the wild scene.
“I was so busy trying to keep Smokey calm because so much was going on that I can’t say I remember any of that, but it sure sounds like something we would say,” Jepson said. “That’s funny, though. We’re getting ready to play for a national championship, and we’ve got some guy running out there with us that nobody knows who he is.”
Greene didn’t just run. He kept running. As the team turned left toward the sideline, he sprinted out toward midfield by himself before realizing that he needed to make a left turn.
Meanwhile, nearly an hour had passed since Greene’s friends had last seen him. They were already in the stadium. Watching from his seat in the opposite end zone, Blaine Cloud’s eyes opened wide as he saw the Tennessee team come racing onto the field.
“Coming right toward us was J.R.,” said Cloud, who was in business school with Greene and whose seats for the game were near Greene’s. “I’d seen him in the tux earlier in the day, but he was moving around all over the place. I didn’t know where he was. Knowing J.R., he could have been anywhere, including jail.”
But running out with the team?
“We’re yelling and screaming. There he was, right next to Smokey,” Cloud said. “It’s still hard to believe how everything had to align just right for him to be out there.”
Pope never saw Greene on the field. And when Greene finally got to his seats sometime in the first quarter, Pope didn’t believe his buddy’s story.
“I just told him he was full of s—, but that’s what I usually told him about those things,” Pope said. “I wasn’t inclined to believe him at first blush because I wasn’t looking for him on the field. Nobody was. I needed some corroboration, and I guess I didn’t really believe it until I saw the video when we got back home.”
One of Greene’s friends, Meredith Christenberry, had a camcorder at the game and recorded the Vols’ entrance. The video clearly shows Greene making his run for the ages.
Greene remained on the sideline behind the players and cheerleaders for part of the first quarter. He figured he was living on borrowed time by then. Plus, he said, he couldn’t see the game, so he found his way to his seats.
Christi Meadows Dorsey was a Tennessee cheerleader that season. By the time the game started, word apparently started to spread among bowl officials that there was an unauthorized person on the Vols’ sideline.
“Somebody came over there, and we all got a little scolding that everybody had to have the right credentials to be on the field,” she said. “I didn’t notice [Greene] at the time, but it started getting around. It was bizarre. Even all these years later, it’s bizarre.”
After the game, the cheerleaders and spirit squad members were on a bus celebrating Tennessee’s 23-16 victory over Florida State when the Big Orange Tux Guy came up in conversation.
“We’d just won a national championship, and that’s what we were talking about,” Meadows Dorsey recalled. “At the same time, we were all trying to figure out who this guy was and where he came from.”
That guy was the Big Orange Tux Guy, the guy with “class” and the guy who dared to live on the wild side that historic night for Tennessee football a quarter century ago.
Some stories grow to the point of becoming myths over time. But not this one.
“This isn’t a Bigfoot or Sasquatch thing or just a wild rumor,” DeVault said. “He was there. I saw him, and there are pictures to prove it.”
The only thing missing is a Big Orange Footprint.
The Toronto Blue Jays and free agent outfielder Anthony Santander have agreed to a five-year deal that is worth more than $90 million, sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Monday.
The switch-hitting Santander, 30, hit .235 for the Baltimore Orioles in 2024 but set career-highs with 44 home runs, 102 RBIs and 91 runs scored.
He spent his first eight MLB seasons with the Orioles, hitting 155 home runs with a .246 batting average.
MLB Network first reported Santander had reached an agreement with the Blue Jays.
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Paolo Uggetti, ESPN
ATLANTA — Rocco Spindler still remembers the feeling that permeated the air in South Bend, Indiana, during late November in 2021.
The Notre Dame offensive lineman — then a freshman — and his teammates had just finished an 11-1 season only to be hit with the news that their head coach, Brian Kelly, was leaving for LSU while they still had an outside shot at making the College Football Playoff.
“There was a lot of uncertainty that whole week,” Spindler said. “We didn’t know who else was leaving, who else was staying.”
As November turned into December, Spindler and the rest of the team found themselves grasping for any semblance of familiarity or comfort. In Marcus Freeman, they found it.
“He was the one guy we all gravitated toward,” Spindler said of the Irish’s then-first-year defensive coordinator.
Naturally, the players who had seen what Freeman could do, who had been coached by him and felt his impact on their game, viewed the idea of Freeman succeeding Kelly as a no-brainer and campaigned for it.
“It was hectic,” said defensive lineman Howard Cross III. “But immediately everybody was like, ‘Why doesn’t Coach Freeman just be the head coach?’ Everybody agreed.”
“Seeing his ability to lead and how he handles certain situations was all we needed,” said defensive lineman Rylie Mills. “I think we all kind of knew what he was capable of.”
The players’ preference was no secret. Spindler remembers upperclassmen who would not be there the following season expressing their desire for Freeman to take over. It didn’t take long for them to get their wish.
a player’s coach@Marcus_Freeman1 | #GoIrish pic.twitter.com/pf9E1OygA8
— Notre Dame Football (@NDFootball) December 3, 2021
The video of the team’s reaction to Freeman’s hiring immediately became a touchpoint for the program’s decision. It wasn’t about hiring anyone connected to Notre Dame. As the caption “player’s coach” alongside the footage of Freeman being mobbed by his players showed, the decision had the potential to start a new era for the program.
“It was absolutely risky to hire somebody at a place like Notre Dame who doesn’t have a track record as a head coach, but he won the job,” former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who hired Freeman, told ESPN. “We had plenty of really attractive candidates, but based on my experience with him, based on what the players told me, and based on a really excellent interview, he distinguished himself.”
In the three years since that moment, Freeman has built on that foundation, showing himself not only to be the right person for the job, but also being able to channel his approach into leading Notre Dame here, one game away from its first national championship since 1988.
“We were so excited [in 2021], but it was trust beyond knowing,” Mills said. “Now, he’s taken it to a whole other level.”
Here is a glimpse into some of the moments that make Freeman, the coach.
‘He would be the guy to always bring the juice’
Freeman’s first shot at a Division I coordinator job came at Cincinnati, where then-head coach Luke Fickell hired Freeman to be his defensive coordinator. Freeman was only 30 years old, but it didn’t take long for him to find his footing with a group that had won just four games the year prior.
“He came in and immediately made a first impression on us,” said former Cincinnati defensive lineman Kimoni Fitz. “We were trying to find ourselves and restart the culture with the new staff, and he made it easy.”
It helped that the results materialized quickly. Freeman’s defense led the AAC in rushing defense, scoring defense and total defense, and it ranked among the top 15 in FBS in all three categories.
According to Fitz, as the defense improved over the season, Freeman would get with the Bearcats’ video team and cut up a highlight reel of their best plays from the previous game and show it to the defense as a way of motivation.
“We would already envision ourselves making the plays,” Fitz said.
Then, as Miami’s turnover belt became an object of fascination in the sport, Freeman instituted the “turnover dunk,” where players who created the turnover would dunk the ball on a small rim.
Cincinnati Turnover Dunk pic.twitter.com/Is4rhN8Brq
— NCAAF Nation (@NCAAFNation247) September 26, 2020
“He was such a high-energy guy,” Fitz said. “If we came to practice without any juice that day, he would be the guy to always bring the juice, and we would live off that and play off that.”
Freeman was also able to draw from his playing experience — Freeman had been a linebacker drafted by the Chicago Bears in the fifth round in 2009 — to get the most out of his players, a trait that kept resurfacing as Freeman was rising.
“He wasn’t ever too big for anybody,” Fitz said. “Because he was a former player, he knew what it takes and he knew what we actually went through every day and respected that. You wanted to play hard for him.”
‘The head coach is telling me he believes in me’
Irish running back Jadarian Price won’t soon forget getting called into Freeman’s office. After a fall camp practice, Freeman pulled the junior aside and flipped on some film from practice. Freeman was neither interested in praising Price nor scolding him. He instead wanted to challenge him.
“He was like, ‘I really believe, and we all believe, that you can make plays like this,'” Price recalled Freeman saying. “We know that you can break away and run, but I want to see you strap up and break through the line.”
Price first took the challenge as a negative criticism, but when he thought about it more, he was able to see what Freeman was doing, not just for him but for all the other players on the team he was challenging.
“The head coach is telling me he believes in me, and he thinks I could do this better,” Price said. “It was a great thing to have. If the coaches are quiet, it’s not such a good thing, but if they’re telling you something, it’s a good thing.”
As Freeman has attempted to get the most out of this particular team, players have become accustomed to his coaching style.
“A lot of people say he’s a great coach. No one really truly understands and experiences that [like us],” Price said. “How he is behind the scenes at his meetings, the way he speaks, his attentiveness, his involvement with every player. I think that’s really rare, him not just being the CEO of the program, but the coach who steps in and figures out a way to make every player better and get to know every player.”
Talk to any Notre Dame player, and they’ll harp on a similar thing: how easy it is to play for Freeman because of who he is and what he does, not just on the field, but off of it.
“He has a relationship with every single person on his team of how that person needs to be interacted with and motivated,” said kicker Mitch Jeter.
Linebacker Jack Kiser perhaps knows this as well as anyone on Notre Dame’s roster. Kiser has been at the program since 2019 and was coached by Freeman as a defensive coordinator in 2021. The list of challenges and motivation, constructive criticism and praise that Kiser has received from Freeman is long, but what sticks out to Kiser the most is how Freeman has been consistent through it all.
“You don’t talk to him and walk away feeling like he just lied to you or he was someone different,” Kiser said. “He’s just a very authentic, genuine person, and I think you see that on the sideline, too. You see his raw emotion come out. You see the way he processes things. He’s not able to hide some of his emotions, and that just goes to show that he really cares about us players and he cares about this place, this program.”
‘The right guy at the right time for Notre Dame’
“What was a place-kicker who had spent most of his time in the Carolinas doing here?”
That’s what Jeter, covered in as many layers as possible, thought to himself as he walked across the Notre Dame campus on a day when the temperature dipped well below freezing. The South Carolina transfer had recently arrived on campus and was experiencing a bit of culture shock. Freeman didn’t exactly coddle him.
“He really instilled in me that you come to Notre Dame to choose hard,” Jeter said with a smile. “Even if that is the weather or the class schedule or the football.”
Although Freeman said he didn’t follow Notre Dame football much before he was hired in 2021, the way that he has embraced the program’s history has stood out to players. Offensive lineman Aamil Wagner recalled a meeting earlier this season where they discussed the 1988 Notre Dame team, the last Irish team to win a national title, and tried to gather inspiration from it.
“All season he has gotten us so invested in the concept of going after team glory,” Wagner said. “Everyone remembers that 1988 team and how they got the crown jewel of the sport. We know what came before us, but we want to chart our own path.”
“He tells us all the time to be misfits,” Price said. “That seems like an unusual word for Notre Dame, but people like me, I’m not Catholic myself, I’m from Texas. I didn’t grow up thinking I would be at Notre Dame, and look, we have a minority head coach at Notre Dame. So it makes you feel a lot more comfortable as a player and just being led by someone who doesn’t care what the world thinks and stands by themselves.”
Whether it’s bringing transfers into the fold seamlessly or reinstituting pregame mass for the program, Freeman — who is the first Black and Asian coach to be in the title game — has struck a deft touch between utilizing Notre Dame’s tradition and history to bring the Irish together.
“He has completely embraced the University of Notre Dame and the University of Notre Dame has fully embraced him,” said offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock.
Said defensive coordinator Al Golden: “Marcus is the right guy at the right time for Notre Dame.”
‘Every week is now a playoff game’
The game that kept Notre Dame from heading into the title game with an undefeated record is also the one that likely allowed them to reach the championship. That particular thesis about the Irish’s shocking loss to Northern Illinois in September has now become folklore for this year’s players and coaches, in large part due to the way they say Freeman handled the defeat.
“After the NIU loss, a lot of coaches may scream and yell, and I’ve been in the building before where that’s happened,” Mills said. “But he wasn’t doing that.”
“The mood of the team and the feeling around the team always comes from the top down,” Denbrock said. “His ability to compartmentalize it a little bit, to analyze it, to kind of be willing to be vulnerable, us as a coaching staff, him as the leader of the program, and look at the things that we felt like we really needed to fix.”
Freeman, like he had done at Cincinnati, turned to a video, this time not of anything related to football, but of a high school hurdler who was tripped up by the second hurdle in a 100-meter race. The hurdler got back up and made a comeback, qualifying for the final heat where she won and set a personal record.
“He was like, ‘This is us and this is what we can do. Every week is now a playoff game,'” Mills said. “He just brought that intensity that we knew we didn’t have with NIU, and we kept that with us the rest of the season.”
Instead of burying the loss, Freeman utilized it, and it fueled the team’s dominance the rest of the season.
“He’s big about remembering the scars in the past. He’s always mentioning the scars and the troubles and the adversity, how to handle success,” Price said. “Even when we have success, even when we beat big teams like Penn State, Georgia, he always refers back to the past. Remember how you felt at this moment. That’s going to give us motivation.”
When the Irish faced off against USC in the last week of the regular season and headed into halftime tied with the Trojans — the first time since NIU they hadn’t had a halftime lead — they were able to remember their shortcomings, come out of the locker room and not let it happen again, outscoring the Trojans 35-21 in the second half. After the game, no one was shy about remembering exactly how many days it had been since that fateful NIU loss.
“To see where we were 84 days ago to where we’re at now, it’s a testament to trust and the decisions of those guys in that locker room,” Freeman said then. “This is what it’s all about, man. It’s the journey.”
‘One of us’
As the clock struck midnight in Miami on Friday Jan.10, Notre Dame players were celebrating their Orange Bowl victory over Penn State in the locker room when suddenly, Kiser made an announcement: It was Freeman’s birthday.
After congratulating him and singing happy birthday, the Irish players took the opportunity to poke fun at their head coach.
“Someone said he was turning 39,” defensive lineman Junior Tuihalamaka said. “We were all like ‘S—, Coach, you’re old’.”
Tuihalamaka laughs now thinking of the moment, while acknowledging the reality that underscores the barb: Freeman is one of the five youngest coaches in FBS.
“When he recruited me as a defensive coach, I felt the vibe and the chemistry I had with him right off the bat,” Tuihalamaka said. “He felt like an older brother and still feels kind of like an older brother.”
And while age does nothing to determine a win-loss record, to hear Notre Dame players talk about it, Freeman’s youth and the way he carries himself is a monumental part of his magnetism.
“Freeman is very personal and player-focused,” Cross said. “Kelly was a strategist. Coach Freeman is a players’ coach.”
Whether it’s letting players decide on the practice playlists and, as Prince put it, “vibing with us,” or making an effort to be invested in players’ lives outside of the sport, Freeman has struck the ideal balance between coach, mentor and friend.
“Everywhere he goes, he’s one of us,” said quarterback Riley Leonard. “You’ll see him [in Atlanta], he’s just wearing a jumpsuit, chilling with the boys, hanging out for media day. Then he knows how to flip the switch.”
“He understands us on a level that other coaches probably wouldn’t understand us on,” running back Jeremiyah Love said. “We love him. We respect him. We want to make him look good. He wants to make us look good.”
Notre Dame looks better than it has in a long time, and at the crux of it all is this symbiotic relationship between Freeman and the players. What started back in 2021 as a decision that had an entire team jumping up and down with Freeman as he was promoted to be their head coach has turned into one of the best runs the Irish have had in recent memory.
“I think the special thing about that video is he’s the defensive coordinator, and yet if you look, the whole offense was ecstatic when he walked through that door,” Kiser said. “Everyone believed in him then, and everyone believes in him now.”
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Heather Dinich, Senior College Football Insider
ATLANTA — No major decisions were made regarding the future format of the 12-team College Football Playoff on Sunday, but “tweaks” to the 2025 season haven’t been ruled out, CFP executive director Rich Clark said.
Sunday’s annual meeting of the FBS commissioners and the presidents and chancellors who control the playoff wasn’t expected to produce any immediate course of action, but it was the first time that people with the power to change the playoff met in person to begin a review of the historic expanded bracket.
Clark said the group talked about “a lot of really important issues,” but the meeting at the Signia by Hilton set the stage for bigger decisions that need to be made “very soon.”
Commissioners would have to unanimously agree upon any changes to the 12-team format to implement them for the 2025 season.
“I would say it’s possible, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen or not,” Clark said on the eve of the College Football Playoff National Championship game between Ohio State and Notre Dame. “There’s probably some things that could happen in short order that might be tweaks to the 2025 season, but we haven’t determined that yet.”
A source with knowledge of the conversations said nobody at this time was pushing hard for a 14-team bracket, and there wasn’t an in-depth discussion of the seeding process, but talks were held about the value of having the four highest-ranked conference champions earn first-round byes.
Ultimately, the 11 presidents and chancellors who comprise the CFP’s board of managers will vote on any changes, and some university leaders said they liked rewarding those conference champions with byes because of the emphasis it placed on conference title games.
Mississippi State president Mark Keenum, the chair of the board of managers, said they didn’t talk about “what-ifs,” but they have tasked the commissioners to produce a plan for future governance and the format for 2026 and beyond.
Starting in 2026, any changes will no longer require unanimous approval, and the Big Ten and the SEC will have the bulk of control over the format — a power that was granted during the past CFP contract negotiation. The commissioners will again meet in person at their annual April meeting in Las Colinas, Texas, and the presidents and chancellors will have a videoconference or phone call on May 6.
“We’re extremely happy with where we are now,” Keenum said. “We’re looking towards the new contract, which is already in place with ESPN, our media provider, for the next six years through 2032. We’ve got to make that transition from the current structure that we’re in to the new structure we’ll have.”
Following Sunday’s meeting, sources continued to express skepticism that there will be unanimous agreement to make any significant changes for the 2025 season, but a more thorough review will continue in the following months.
“The commissioners and our athletic director from Notre Dame will look at everything across the board,” Clark said. “We’re going to tee them up so that they could really have a thorough look at the playoff looking back after this championship game is done … and then look back and figure out what is it that we need.”
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