Notre Dame Notebook: Marcus Freeman Talks Sam Hartman, Steve Angeli, Playing Reserves

Two games into Notre Dame’s season, it is easy to see the difference Marcus Freeman has at quarterback. Notre Dame’s second-year head coach had two quarterbacks with zero starts to their credit heading into his first season but in Sam Hartman he has an ultra-experienced and poised leader both on and off the field at the helm this year.

Case in point, Hartman has been on the field for 12 offensive series through Notre Dame’s first two games. He has led the Irish to touchdowns in 11 of them. It took Notre Dame until its fourth game to score as many offensive points last year. Sure, having Tennessee State instead of Ohio State on the schedule helps, but Marshall and Cal should have provided ample offensive opportunities last year that didn’t materialize.

Freeman has so much confidence in Hartman that his biggest decision of the game might have been how much time to leave him at the end of the first half on Saturday as Tennessee State’s offense sat in the red zone with under three minutes on the game clock. Freeman had three timeouts to use, but he had to decide how to use them and how much time to leave for Hartman and the offense to try to score again.

"I saw it on the clock as we were going out there. I think it was between two and three minutes. I said 'Man, if we can get a stop here, I want to have a two-minute drive,” Freeman recalled. "I was really calculating when we were going to use those time-outs and the ability to hold them as long as we could after 1st down, we use them, after 1st down we used one and 2nd down, we used two of them there, and I wanted to keep one time-out for our offense to have a two-minute drive. Obviously, they didn't need it."

TSU missed a field goal attempt, giving Notre Dame the ball at its own 20 with :53 seconds left before halftime. Hartman went to work with surgical precision, completing six straight passes in as many plays, culminating in a four-yard touchdown to tight end Holden Staes, to put the Irish up 35-3 with still :15 seconds to go in the half.

Six plays, six completions, 80 yards, :38 seconds.

"Yeah, he's pretty good,” Freeman laughed as he recalled Hartman’s efforts. "I don't want to tell him that too often, but man, he is - again, it's a level of comfort knowing that, hey, you can put that guy. Sometimes when you don't have that confidence in your quarterback, you're not going to call timeout, you're going to say, let the clock run out, let's get out of this half and go to the locker room. I wanted to get the ball in Sam Hartman's hands to run our offense in that two-minute situation because I've seen it over and over, him go out and execute. He did it last week; he did it again this week. I have the utmost confidence if we have probably at least 20 to 30 seconds on the clock before half, I'm going to call a time-out and try to get the offense the ball.”

Enter Angeli

That touchdown drive was the final action Hartman would see against Tennessee State. The veteran watched from the sideline the entire second half as QB2 Steve Angeli got his shot to run the offense in the third and fourth quarters.

Angeli’s first drive of the second half ended with Notre Dame’s first punt of the day, but he threw his first two career touchdown passes on his next two drives to Jadarian Price and Gi’Bran Payne. Angeli went 8 for 11 for 130 yards and the two scores.

“I was proud of Steve,” Freeman said. “Made some good decisions. It wasn't perfect, which it's never perfect, but I thought he did a good job of keeping drives going, making big plays on I think some 3rd downs, and obviously putting the ball in the end zone.

“I wanted Angeli to get some meaningful reps,” Freeman continued. “I didn't want to put him in on mop-up duty when the game is already out of hand. I said, I want a little bit of pressure on Angeli but our offensive staff to say, okay, we have to score. We have to be efficient on offense here. We can't go three-and-out. I thought they did a really good job of really going out there, having a plan for Angeli, being able to adapt for some of the mistakes that were happening on our offense, and I'm glad we protected him for the most part. He got hit once or twice, but I think we did a good job protecting him, too.”

More Reserves

There were plenty more reserves who saw the field in the lopsided 56-3 victory. A total of 79 Irish players saw action Saturday afternoon with Sullivan Absher, Sam Assaf, Micah Bell, Henry Cook, Chase Dixon, Isaiah Dunn, Justin Fisher, Tyson Ford, Braylon James, Bryce McFerson, Kenny Minchey, Rino Monteforte, Quinn Murphy, Kobi Onyiuke,Tre Reader, Leo Scheidler, Adon Shuler, Luke Talich, Brenan Vernon and Preston Zinter all making their career debuts.

Freeman said afterwards that he and his staff didn’t necessarily have a plan set in place for when they wanted to get reserves on the field against the first FCS opponent the program has ever faced.

"I think my coaching point to the staff was our job on Saturday is to reach our full potential,” Freeman remarked. "Whatever the score is going to be if we do that is going to be what the score is. If we have the opportunity to get some guys that don't play in the game a chance to play, I want to make sure we give them a chance to succeed. So, my only communication was let's make sure if we get a chance to get twos and threes in the game, here's the game plan because what I don't want to see is us looking foolish because of coaching. I was just hard on the coaches, like I want you to have a plan for guys that are going in there that haven't been in the game. I thought they did a good job of doing that.”