Marcus Freeman leaving Notre Dame for the Giants? No longer an option New York fans for on Monday, Freeman made it clear what his next move is.
That’s right Irish fans. Your head coach, the one who led your team to the CFP Championship in January, is staying in South Bend.
Freeman was hired as the team’s defensive coordinator in 2021 before being promoted to the top spot in 2022. Since then, he’s led the team to three straight bowl games, both wins, and then last year’s run to the CFP title game, where the Irish fell to Ohio State, 23-34.
In his three seasons as Notre Dame’s full time head coach (he was the interim head coach for one game in 2021 after Brian Kelly left for LSU), Freeman has compiled a 43-11 record, and has only lost two games in each of his last two seasons, including this season where the Irish were excluded from the CFP Playoffs.
While their exclusion was a hotly debated topic, re-signing Freeman to a new deal wasn’t.
Freeman, already one of the highest paid coaches in college football with estimated annual earnings in 2025 of $7.4 million, has agreed to a new restructured contract that extends his deal an additional year through 2031. It’s now reported that he could earn almost $71 million in total compensation (salary plus incentive bonuses) over the life of his new contract.
But the deal was necessary to keep him at the university.
“He’s the absolute best coach in the country for Notre Dame, full stop,” said Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua earlier this month. ‘One of the greatest college coaches in the country. People forget how young he is. So I get it, I get it and that’s a compliment to him and his success and the way he represents himself and the way he prepares and who he is and how he talks.”
Freeman is only 39 and has a long career in the sport ahead of him, so to lose him after such success would have been a major loss for Notre Dame.
Freeman was a four-year player for Ohio State who went on to the NFL for one season before returning to his alma mater in 2010 to begin his career in coaching.
He made stops at Kent State, Purdue and Cincinnati, where he helped turn the Bearcats into a national powerhouse. That attracted the eyes of Notre Dame, which hired him as its defensive coordinator in 2021. A year after transforming the Irish’s defense into one of the best in the nation, he became the second Black head coach in program history (Tyrone Willingham was the first) and he’s been successful ever since.
“We feel blessed that he’s our coach,” said Bevacqua. “I make sure that he knows that he will be where he deserves to be. That is at the top, top, top tier of college football coaches when it comes to compensation every year. I view his contract, although a multi-year contract is a living, breathing document that we will revise every year as need be to make sure he’s where he deserves to be. He knows he has that commitment from me and, more importantly, from the university.”
Now that he’s locked in for an extra year with even more money, Freeman can focus on winning a title and making history as the first Black/Asian/Blasian head coach in FBS history to win a national championship.
