SOUTH BEND — Marcus Freeman walked into training camp with a short list of topics he was not willing to discuss, and the College Football Playoff was at the top of it.
That might seem like an unusual stance for a coach whose team finished 10-2 last season, won ten consecutive games by double digits, and still watched the playoff bracket close without them. But Freeman’s position at Notre Dame’s preseason sessions this week was deliberately narrow: the only thing he wanted to talk about was Wisconsin.
“We didn’t earn the opportunity,” Freeman said, when the 2025 playoff exclusion came up. “We didn’t earn the right to play more than 12 games last year.” He has not contested the selection committee’s verdict. He has accepted it as causality — the two early losses, both by single digits, turned a potential playoff season into a lesson about what eight months of dominance still cannot overcome. What it can be, he says, is fuel for one game at a time.
The Irish open September at Lambeau Field, their sixth straight season-opening trip away from South Bend. Safety Adon Shuler’s assessment of why that context matters is the sharpest thing said in the program’s offseason. “We left it to the judges,” Shuler told reporters. “That’s on us.” His summation of 2025 became, in a few weeks, something close to the founding text for what Freeman is trying to build in 2026.
Linebacker Drayk Bowen gave the sentiment a motto. “We have the motto of leave no doubt,” he said at training camp. “You can’t leave your future in the hands of others.” The phrase has migrated from locker room shorthand to something more structural: a principle Freeman has organized an entire preseason around, one drill, one period at a time.
What is coming to Lambeau in September is a roster with a serious case. Notre Dame returns 12 of its top 13 defensive tacklers from a unit that ranked ninth nationally in yards allowed per play (4.62) and tenth in points per game (17.6), according to Sports Illustrated. Coordinator Chris Ash’s defense enters its third year in the same system. Quarterback CJ Carr, entering his full season as starter, carries the school’s single-season pass efficiency record at 168.1. All three coordinators are back.
The one variable that resists easy comfort is the backfield. Jeremiyah Love entered the NFL Draft after 2025 and is now competing for the starting spot with the Arizona Cardinals after an injury opened the backfield. Junior Aneyas Williams averaged 8.6 yards per carry in spot duty last season and enters camp as the presumptive lead back, but he has not carried an offense for four consecutive months. That is what September will answer before anything else does.
Indiana, led by quarterback Fernando Mendoza before he went No. 1 overall in the NFL Draft, won the national championship. Freeman is now competing in a landscape where the defending champion came from the Big Ten — a conference that built recent dominance on the kind of September consistency Notre Dame has not yet sustained.
The 2026 schedule is otherwise manageable. Three opponents rank in the current top 25: Miami, BYU, and SMU. The USC rivalry is off the calendar for this cycle. If Notre Dame can get through Wisconsin — and then through Miami and Texas A&M again — with only victories logged, the playoff conversation Freeman is refusing to have now will become unavoidable by mid-October.
That is the bet Freeman is making. Not that his team is talented enough to recover from an early loss, as it proved in 2025 it is not. But that refusing to discuss what comes after September will keep his players thinking about what comes first.
