It’s the entire package…. Hiring Stuckey Parker and brown is on freeman and impacting us, no doubt. He learns from his mistakes (getting Denbrock) but he’s made some major mistakes that have set nd back from having a chance at a 5ish class.
Best way to right the ship is have a monster 2024 season and win a game or more in the playoffs
Agree and those issues you noted above came about due to his lack of experience
I mean it's great to have an alleged whiz bang ace recruiter as a HC but not if it comes at the cost of other significant things
Inevitably a HC will have too much on his plate to get down into the recruiting nitty gritty at the same level he would have as a position coach or coordinator
And Freeman hasn't actually really prioritized recruiting ability/prowess in all his most recent hires. It's kinda been the exact opposite--especially at the coordinator level
Problem being that his deficient experience/x&o's needs to be propped up by very experienced (read old) coordinators that either don't recruit or probably past their prime recruiting
I can't fault him too much for the Stuckey hire. The guy could objectively recruit very very well and it'd be hard to really know too much that the other stuff would occur eventually down the line
But the Brown and Parker hires are essentially the same small timey, crony, hire that Kelly used to make all the time that would kill us
I'm not sure how good Freeman is at coaching his coaches either. Stuckey obviously. Then all Deland and Washington have been doing the past year is coasting. Especially with Deland it's pretty evident the dude has packed it on the recruiting trail. Brown is doing terrible.
This is not even to mention other significant deficiencies in seeing weaknesses on the roster and addressing thru the portal which have basically killed the seasons before they started the past two years (qb in 2022 and wr last year)
Then the absolute dud performances by the team such as Marshall, Stanford, and USC in 2022 and Duke (should have been a L but got extremely lucky), Ville, and Clemson last year
I agree he does seem to learn from his mistakes and improve much better than a guy like Davie, works harder than a guy like Willingham, and is better rounded than a guy like Weis--but all things being equal, he is a step down from Kelly
I didn't mind Kelly moving on because you could clearly see he had reached his ceiling and I was excited to see what Freeman could do--especially with recruiting
Unfortunately I think it may be becoming evident that ND as a program may just have a certain ceiling and they're likely never going to be raking in 5 stars
However, I think classes like last year's are more than realistic and should be the norm and bar minimum acceptable for Freeman given the other tradeoffs that he comes with
That's why what's going on with RB, WR, and DL recruiting right now is unacceptable in my opinion. Especially with RB and WR
Freeman is on the precipice, and his failure with this class has pretty much eliminated his margin for error. They're the type of classes that create huge future holes on the roster and kill seasons like the two I mentioned above. Then it was oline in 2021, WR in 2020, QB in 2018/2019
What separates the top top five or so teams from the maybe the top 15 is they just don't have glaring holes/weaknesses and they do that by stacking class after class after class at each position
It was Kelly's Achilles Heel. Do good at a position for a cycle or two and then take a break, make a wrong asst coach hire, etc and BOOM--recruiting falls off and got problems
