Hartman and Freeman communication at a mid-season level

SOUTH BEND — You always look for an angle to stories where you aren’t going to be writing “Breaking News.”

I came into this weekend’s Notre Dame home opener hoping to get some quotes to support a feature on what I consider the biggest story of this year: New/Old quarterback Sam Hartman and his relationship with his head coach. It appears it is a good one.

They both need each other for the same reason.

Despite what could be called an incredible rookie season as a head coach under the microscope with the enormous pressure of being the coach at Notre Dame Freeman still has a lot of criticism about his ability to run the program.

Despite setting almost every possible passing record in NCAA Div. I history Hartman still has critics as to whether he can run an NFL offense.

It appears the match is a good one and it shows in the way Freeman coaches his veteran.

“Six years, man. That experience is so important. He’s a heck of a football player,” Freeman said in Saturday’s post-game press conference. “But the ability to handle the elements, maybe not playing perfect, big games, maybe a game where you’re highly favored, he is a very experienced player, and I’m sure glad we have him.”

Five of five on scoring drives on the day is pretty good but it’s another thing the coach sees that makes him feel better.

“He was good,” said Freeman. “He was really good. Not perfect. But the thing about Sam is the ability for him to come over to me and say, I’m good. He made some, maybe, an error or two, a bad read, and he looked at me and was like, I’m good.”

That confidence in “I’m good” led to Freeman’s confidence to call time out before half to give his QB a chance to engineer a TD drive in well under a minute.

“Yeah, he’s pretty good,” said Freeman. “I don’t want to tell him that too often, but man, he is, again, it’s a level of comfort knowing that,” said Freeman. “Sometimes when you don’t have that confidence in your quarterback, you’re not going to call time-out, 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,” said Freeman. “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.”

For Freeman, Hartman has made a difference but there is plenty of credit to go around for his offense.

“Yeah, Sam is a big part,” he said. “But I think we have some talented individuals. I would like to go
through, and Jeremiyah Love scored the first touchdown running the ball, so credit to our offensive line. Hartman, TD run; Tyree scored a touchdown from Hartman; Audric, TD run. Yeah, having Sam Hartman helps, but I think the depth on our offense and those skill positions show up when you see eight guys score a touchdown.”

The tumbling flip that Hartman made for his score gave the coach a couple of concerns and gave more evidence of the communication that appears to exist between the two.

“You know, you kind of don’t want to see him do that, but more than that,” said Freeman. “I said, ‘Was this planned?’ because you kind of did some gesture to the fans. I said, have you done that before? He’s like, no, I was just thanking the people for coming or something like that. I’m like, all right, you might have had that one planned. But keep your feet on the ground.”

Coach speak translation: “This is Notre Dame son. We don’t do things that way.”