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.”