By John Brice
Special Contributor
It was one of those moments, the ones that linger, a time when a text message from a friend stays on-screen a bit longer.
Tugs a string within, doubt inevitable and unavoidable as Notre Dame – THE NOTRE DAME – opens its season with consecutive losses for the first time since 2011, when Tommy Rees was executing plays and not calling them.
Stretches a mini-losing streak to three games dating back to the Fiesta Bowl last New Year’s Day and represents the first three games of a new era.
Marcus Freeman remembers such a message; knows it was received after what only could have been one of three Notre Dame games this fall.
Had to be a loss; not any of the eight games through which the Fighting Irish have evolved, persevered and, quite regularly, been forced to hold things together like a wet paper towel.
“It was a sermon somebody sent me,” Freeman says. “It was after a loss. It kind of just hit me and I said, ‘OK, the pastor was talking about the bumpy road to better.’ And, really, what it was — was for us to look at ourselves as a program. I say, ‘OK, we’re on this bumpy road, but this bumpy road is life. The bumpy road to better is life.’
“And it’s also a reflection of this season. It’s also a reflection of a game.”
Renowned pastor T.D. Jakes first delivered the “Bumpy Road To Better” sermon inside his Dallas, Texas, church, where membership rolls swell beyond 30,000, in early-March of this year, and since it was posted March 10, 2022, on YouTube, it has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
“I’m going to talk about the bumpy road to better,” Jakes tells his congregation. “A lot of people teach about better as if it were magic, as if it would happen simply or easily. Like you could come up for prayer and somebody could anoint you with oil or lands on you and convey their spirit upon you without going through the process they went through.
“In reality, it’s not that simple.”
Jakes, his Potter’s House messages stretching around the globe and carrying with them not an insignificant amount of notoriety, is ready when folks plea for his blessings.
“I want a double-portion of your spirit,” the pastor says he is asked. “Do you want a double-portion of my trouble? Because you can’t get a double-portion of my spirit until you get a double-portion of my trouble.”
Freeman likely delivered the “bumpy road” metaphor to his team in mid-September, after the loss at Ohio State to open things and the stunner at home to Marshall to potentially unravel things.
“So obviously that didn’t go as expected,” Blake Fisher, stalwart right tackle with all of 13 career games to his credit, says. “But you just get back to the process and the bumpy road is better, like Coach Freeman puts it.
“You just grind and that comes back to where I wanted to be, playing at a high level.”
If Fisher, Freshman All-America candidate, future NFL offensive lineman, is microcosm of Jakes’s message, the Irish are big-picture metaphor.
They are winners in five consecutive games, a modest marker not done in the first seasons of either Brian Kelly or Lou Holtz, among others in the program’s heralded annals.
By winning eight of nine after that difficult opening punch-counterpunch, the Irish are back with consensus ranking in the top 15 of the national polls and still alive for a potential New Year’s Six berth heading into this weekend’s clash at intersectional rival and fifth-ranked USC.
Through Freeman’s leadership, the players’ unyielding buy-in and a coaching staff continually growing their roles – and chemistry, Notre Dame is finding Freeman’s GPS works along this twisting path.
“The ability to handle the ups and downs is, to me, what makes a person, what makes a team, what makes a life,” Freeman says, and he’s perhaps conjuring his own version of Jakes as he’s building to a crescendo. “And so I use it over and over. Just in academics you can be on a bumpy road. In the course of a game, you can be on a bumpy road. But it’s how you respond, to me, that really dictates the future.
“That’s the challenge I always have for these guys is, you know what, it’s never as you foresee it on the front end. That’s what I said last week. But it’s how you respond to the different events that happen to you, no matter how hard you try.”
Irish roads are about as smooth as the snow-covered, ice-packed surface streets around South Bend these days in the wake of last week’s early snowstorm, which is to say not at all.
The Irish’s easiest win, this past weekend’s 44-0 dismantling of Boston College, carries with it history as one of the program’s coldest, snowiest games of the past 30 years.
This path, too, includes plenty of lane changes; the Tyler Buchner season-ending injury against Marshall ushering in the unexpected season-long pluck of Drew Pyne as orchestrator of the Irish offense.
Perhaps, then, Freeman’s first win as head coach, all the way back on Sept. 17 in a come-from-behind affair against Cal, is more avoiding a washed out bridge than dodging another pothole, in retrospect.
Close calls against BYU, Navy and even a mini-gasp against Syracuse are reminders of these journeys fraught with ebbs and flows.
There will be bumps again.
The path, Notre Dame’s path with Freeman at the helm, has smoothened itself out as this season has unfolded.
Rewarding and ratifying the faith Jack Swarbrick emplaced in Freeman 50 weeks ago to the day, as well as Swarbrick’s in Matt Balis and Tommy Rees and the program’s student-athletes who embody this culture, the Irish have goals on their current path and hope for their future ones.
And that bumpy road? Inevitably, it will return.
Football, life, somewhere.
“This university attracts resilient people,” Freeman says. “If you’re not a resilient person, you’re not going to make it here. And that’s something that I’ve learned in my short time here. This place weeds non-resilient people out, this university. And it even happens in the football program. If you’re not a resilient, tough-minded person, this probably won’t — at some point, won’t be the place for you. And you’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go somewhere else.’
“But that’s what this place, this university attracts resilient people. And we’re fortunate we get to coach great football players that are resilient people. I think that’s a reflection of this university.”
More than that, it’s a roadmap into the future.